His First Drink After the Promotion: He Started Sorting Out the Whole Business of Men's Supplements

The day Chen Guanyu was promoted to sales manager, the department group chat flooded with congratulations, but he sat in the parking lot for a long time by himself. Not because he was happy—because it suddenly hit him that the numbers he'd have to carry every month from now on were not on the same scale as the past three years. He was forty-two, had two kids, and seventeen years left on his mortgage.

What really put him on alert wasn't the sales targets—it was a Wednesday afternoon. He'd been taking clients out to eat for the third week straight. That day he'd had a round at lunch, and when he got back to the office to open his computer and reply to an English email, the cursor sat in the recipient field and he stared at the screen for a full two minutes, unable to remember the other person's name. Not forgotten—it was like the name was covered by something, clearly right there underneath, but he couldn't fish it out. He ended up digging through his contacts to recall it. In that moment he didn't feel old. He felt like a phone with eight percent battery left: the interface was still there, but every action had slowed down.

His health check report arrived two weeks later. He sat at the dining table and opened it. There weren't as many red flags as he'd imagined, but one column had been circled in highlighter, with a nurse's handwriting beside it: "Please return for a follow-up and discuss with your doctor." He took a photo and sent it to his wife. She replied, "Have you not been getting less than six hours of sleep lately?" He didn't answer. What was on his mind was something else: should he be taking something?

The first time he typed "men's supplements" into the search bar was on a morning after a business dinner. His head was heavy that day, and as he scrolled through his phone he saw a headline—something about someone taking zinc until their copper went out of balance, and someone else whose supplements bought overseas tested positive for hormones. He clicked in and read a few paragraphs, and the more he read, the more he felt this was not what he'd thought it was. He'd assumed these things were just "take them and you're covered," but the article was talking about ingredients, dosages, sources, and a bunch of interactions he'd never even heard of. He put his phone down, went to the fridge for a bottle of water, and stood there until he finished it.

The following week he invited Lao Wang from the same department to lunch. Lao Wang was fifty-five, the kind of person who stayed completely sober at any business dinner. Chen Guanyu had meant to ask "which brand do you take," but at the last moment changed it to "how do you handle these dinners." Lao Wang laughed and said he'd asked the same question ten years ago—except back then no one told him the problem wasn't what to take, it was that he didn't treat himself as someone who needed maintenance. Lao Wang said his current approach was pretty dumb: eat something before the dinner, drink more slowly, and make sure to walk for thirty minutes the next morning. Chen Guanyu felt a little disappointed hearing this, because it wasn't the answer he wanted.

Disappointed or not, he still put that health check report in his briefcase. On the day of the follow-up, the doctor looked at the data and asked about his recent daily routine. He went through it item by item, and when he got to supplements he paused, then said, "I've been thinking about whether to take some." The doctor neither approved nor disapproved—just said one thing: "If you really want to buy them, bring the packaging, and we'll look at the ingredient list together. I also need to know whether you're taking anything else." Chen Guanyu was caught off guard. He'd expected to get a list; instead he got a sentence.

He did eventually start sorting things out. Not brands—questions. He wrote down what he wanted to ask in a notebook: Is this considered food or medicine in Taiwan? Who is the suggested dose on the package meant for? If you take two kinds at once, will they overlap? What's the difference between what you bring back from overseas and what you buy domestically? Does the label clearly state the source? He found himself writing more and more, until the last page said, "Ask the pharmacist first, don't guess on your own." He didn't buy anything, but he kept that notebook in his car, and on the way home after every business dinner he'd flip through it.

One night his wife saw him sitting in the living room scrolling on his phone and asked what he was looking at. He said he was reading about how other people choose. She said, "Didn't you say you were going to ask a professional?" He said yes, but he still wanted to understand what other people were asking first—otherwise when he went to ask, he wouldn't know what to ask. She didn't say anything more, just went to the kitchen, cut some fruit, and brought it out. He suddenly felt that this matter wasn't as urgent as he'd thought, but also not as unimportant as he'd thought.

By the third month after his promotion, he was still tired, still going to business dinners, still occasionally not getting enough sleep. But he did something he'd never done before: he started recording what time he went to bed each day, how much he drank, and how he felt the next day. There were no product names in that notebook—just some very trivial numbers. He told himself, get these straight first, then talk about whether to take anything. He put the health check report, the notebook, and that slip of paper that said "ask the pharmacist first" together into the same drawer. When the drawer closed, he felt he'd finally done something like an adult.