Posts Tagged ‘culture’

More Literal & Metaphorical #WeightTraining Please

Posted: March 26, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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I love weight training. It is one of three things I recommend to every human being. It is one of the things I love that is actually good for me.

Weight training has positively impacted my life as much or more than any other external concept I’ve encountered while I’ve been alive. I’ve been regularly weight training for two thirds of my life now.

I don’t plan on stopping. All physical exercise is a marathon, not a sprint. Weight training is not something one does for a season, it is something one does for life.

Every year that goes by more and more scientific studies come out showing greater and greater benefits of weight training. Broader benefits and deeper benefits. Physical benefits, mental benefits and social/emotional benefits. Benefits for children and benefits for the elderly. Benefits for living longer and benefits for living a higher quality of life.

There has been and will continue to be resistance to weight training because of it being intertwined with bodybuilding. Male bodybuilders are to weight training as female instagram influencers are to yoga pants. They go hand in hand but only represent the egomaniacal extremes of the user base.

Most people want to exercise and benefit from weight training for practical health benefits. Not because they are seeking external validation from strangers via their smartphone to compensate for an internal lack.

For every fitness influencer covered in athleisure shape ware from head to toe while they photoshop their selfies, there are 10,000 people who would benefit from going to their local gym, a few times per week, to see and feel tangible physical benefits of exercise, surprisingly quickly.

Warm up, lift some weights that challenge their effort and comfort level, do some cardio, stretch, cool down, go home, shower, and eat. Anything beyond that moves into intermediate and beyond which one can find infinite information on in the growing podcast and youtube fitness video sphere.

Weight training helped me in the deepest, darkest times in my life. From depression, to burn out, to grieving the deaths of both of my parents. It helped me to feel good, feel challenged, feel accomplished, feel pride, feel growth. I wish that for every person I meet which is why I recommend it to everyone regardless of demographic or type.

Weight training also makes for great analogies and metaphors. Meditation, another thing I universally recommend, has been called doing bicep curls for the brain. Seeking general challenges and discomfort has been called weight training for life.

More weight training for all and more weight training metaphors please.

Notice how I am yet to bring up aesthetics. Except to poke at the social media narcissists who use perceived visual fitness achievement as a fix for their addiction to attention. Aesthetics is a by product of weight training and exercise in general.

Exercising for aesthetics can be a path the dark side of the fitness world. See fit fluencers and steroid abusers. People who are chemically and surgically enhanced, making a living, by living and lie. Lying to anyone and everyone, including themselves, that their aesthetics can be achieved with discipline, consistency, and whatever products they are selling.

I’ve had multiple IFBB pros tell me when it comes to who is on gear/has had cosmetic surgery vs naturals; muscle mass volume to body fat percentage never lies, ever.

So use common sense, although I’m not so sure how common that is anymore.

But common sense would dictate all humans engage in some form of physical exercise unless they spend their days engaging in physical labor for the job/career.

Use it or lose it. That applies to your body and your mind. Physical and mental ailments and deterioration are often brought about by physical and mental inactivity. The happiest and most spry elderly are the most active. The saddest and slowest youths are the most sedentary. Use it or lost it.

More weight training for all and more weight training metaphors please.

Surviving Comes First Always

Posted: February 5, 2024 in Excess and Algorithms, Stimulus Space Response
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Modern culture, built on a foundation of a capitalist paradigm, is about, more…always. Infinite growth on a planet of finite resources.

Media and entertainment as we know it in any form, was built by, in the service of advertising. What is the purpose of advertising? To inform, persuade, and remind. Information and reminders have long since exited the chat.

Persuasion. Advertising’s purpose is persuasion in the modern world. For each small business, non profit, and NGO one can point to that use advertising for the greater good, there are literally thousands of examples of advertising persuading people that they need more, more, more…always.

More things, more experiences, more goods, more services, more products, more placements, more, more, more…always.

If our eyes or our ears are open there is some entity using some form of media to persuade us that what we have and/or who we are isn’t enough, we need more, more, more…always.

We are expected to do more, be more, buy more, say more. Keeping up with the Jones’ is a full time job that like many real jobs, doesn’t pay enough to stay out of debt.

Being human can be hard enough. Modern life seems to get more and more complex year to year. Sometimes we’re not going to be our best self. That’s not only okay, it’s normal.

Optimal isn’t always optimal regardless of what the caucasian male with a podcast universe would have us believe. Hustle culture creates a thousand burn out victims for every one that achieves a measurable external success by trading away a minimum of two thirds of their life.

We can’t thrive if we don’t survive. Some days just doing enough to survive isn’t just fine or good enough…it’s literally all there is. A dead entity can’t optimize, it can only decay.

Enough is greater than more. Enough is optimal.

Those who always want more will never have enough and will always try to convince those with enough that they need more.

There’s nothing wrong with goals. There’s nothing wrong with growing, evolving, striving or achieving. There is value and maybe even necessity in metaphorically always moving forward and towards.

It is also becoming more and more of a necessity in an optimal obsessed world to remember that we can’t strive if we don’t survive.

Surviving comes first, always.

Engines of #Manipulation

Posted: January 25, 2024 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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Manufacture of Consent

That term has fascinated me from the moment I heard the term.

Same goes for Social Conditioning.

I used to think people were willfully ignorant to these concepts. As I got older, I come to think it’s more of a combination of naïveté and fear.

We’re hard wired to conserve our energy and effort. This has been, is, and will be exploited by those with power and influence against those without them to keep it that way.

Control.

It’s all about control. Influence. Manipulation.

To do what?

Benefit those in power.

That those with the most have such a scarcity mindset is sad.

The fact that their scarcity mindset causes so much undue suffering to the masses is something worse than sad.

#Sitting is the New Smoking is Just Fear Mongering with Good Intention

Posted: October 15, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll
10/14/2014

Breathing in fire, smoke, and chemical additives is certainly different from sitting down. Sitting is the new smoking is a term that has caught on recently, with the good intention of attempting to curb the obesity epidemic.

It has come to the surface that excessive sitting whether for work or to binge watch television shows is like pouring gasoline on the fire that is the chances of getting cancer in America.

There are many good groups, charities, drives, purposes, and quests to try to stand up to cancer. Equating sitting down to smoking a cigarette is not one of them. More exercise is good. Clean eating is good. Regular medical check ups are good. Preventive medicine is good. Telling people sitting down too much will kill them, is bad. Using fear as a tool for a good cause is nothing more than a pipe dream, it is an oxymoron. Fear is a tool for bad, and evil. A good cause, in the end cannot benefit from using fear as a tool.

Scaring people to exercise? Most people are already scared to exercise. Are we counting on a double negative? The threat of diabetes and aesthetic exile aren’t already enough, we’re going to go the; being fat will give you cancer route?

I am a person who exercises regularly. I am a person who believes in physical fitness, clean eating, mental sharpening, and emotional well-being. I have also been a fast food eating, knowledge hating, couch potato. People who live a life, in which their hopes and dreams, of the life they want to live, are vastly beyond out of reach; seek solace in the relaxation and escapism that a comfortable seat and a high-definition screen to stare at, provides them.

The physical activity is just more work; is a paradigm of work being associated with pain. What are we as a society doing to make people associate physical activity with pleasure? Besides fat shaming and feeding into the narcissism of the physically fit in the name of inspiration.

Epidemic is not a term to be used or confused lightly. An epidemic is not solved by telling people to drink more water and/or take more vitamins. The obesity epidemic in America is as much a psychological one as it is a physical one. Until we as a society, culture, and race are willing to address the tough, deep, and complicated questions about why people are willing to cause massive suffering to their bodies in the name of temporary pleasure for the mind and spirit; then anything and everything done to curb such behaviors and habits are nothing more than lip service. The only thing worse than lip service is fear mongering, which is exactly what the sitting is the new smoking movement is; even if it is a road paved with good intentions.