Remember the Bad Days
"Some people feel the rain, others just get wet." ~ Bob Marley
What you see below is an ‘09 GMC truck with a light dusting of ice and snow, circa 2017. What you don’t see is that I was sleeping in the 5-foot bed the night before, and the night before that, and a few hundred nights before that one.
I’m not going to write a sob story or ask for sympathy. I want to illustrate an important point that we owe it to ourselves to never forget the struggles we’ve overcome.
Recently, it seems people have taken a liking to my critical commentary on modern fitness culture. However, I want to, as evidence that people can and do change, offer something more optimistic.
Two of the most powerful emotions humans experience are nostalgia and regret. Both are seemingly without a direct, reducible, behavioral function (e.g. the erroneous reduction of love to reproduction for example).
From my perspective, it seems that these experiences offer great spiritual insight into what we actively value, desire, and pursue. Of course, we don’t have time machines to “go back” and either fix the bad days or relive the glory days.
What we are left with are choices and opportunities.
We are currently living through a period of information and content industrial complexes. Our every thought, millisecond of attention, dopamine spurred fear and impulse, has been commoditized by the tech overlords.
Further, information and “intelligence” are increasingly artificial. We don’t need cheap AI slop training templates or “experts” selling generic lifestyle plans as paths to “elite and optimal” any more than we need cheap TVs and plastic junk from the department store.
What’s more is that the bar for fitness has been set so low, that people now clamor for attention by feigning poverty and simulating grit. Your cold plunge in a $10,000 tub is a privilege. Getting some dirt on your bare toes is cool, but I don’t want to see it in the grocery story.
Any number of peptides, PEDs, or dietary practices can have a significant impact on your physique, so you’ll need to do a lot better than a 6-pack and a tan to impress me. As I’ve said before, proof of work is the only consensus mechanism that matters — it’s just not the one that sells.
On the other hand there is a forged sincerity that can never be falsified. You want to know where a wo/man has been? Tune out their words. Count the wrinkles on their face and the scars on their knuckles. Watch the weight and the tears in the corners of their eyes. Watch how they treat the janitor, the wait staff, and people they disagree with.
These days I’m blessed with comfort — relatively speaking. When I bought my house a few years ago I had the idea that running water was such an indulgent blessing, I never wanted to cut weight again.
The real definition of “privilege” is “believing that because something is not a problem for you, it isn’t or shouldn’t be a problem for anyone else.” How naive. How foolish. How short your memory has become.
The antidote, as far as I can tell, however, isn’t the “liberal shame” most pundits insist on — arguing over who has / had it worse and is most aggrieved and deserving of compensation. The answer is to wash your privilege down with gratitude.
Don’t turn away from the things “you’d rather not remember.” Greet them with a smile, soft eyes, and maybe even a hug. The more you have to scream to be heard, the more you belie your own insecurity and woundedness.
Many fit-fluencers love to use the expression “no one is coming to save you.” However, they seem to forget that includes “from yourself” and all the things you’re overcompensating for with pretentious bravado, sponsorships, and role playing certainty.
You better start caring for yourself, because it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility.
“No shot of sobriety will bury your demons
that demand obedience in pure self destruction…
Yeah, I’ve flown on wings of madness,
Sure, I’ve had a fall from grace,
Yeah, it’s all part of the process…
No spiritual group think, or slacker dejection
or 12-step Jesus, or career opportunities, or natural medicine…
There ain’t no simple solution.
There ain’t no miracle cure.
There ain’t no easy way out of this.”
~ Wayne Kramer, No Easy Way Out