Tag Archives: self-improvement

October 9, 2017

It’s Okay To Be Lost

By wise sloth

There are religions which teach that you were born lost, impure, unworthy, unchosen and in need of salvation. The cure to your fatal disease is to accept and follow the set of beliefs and behaviors outlined in whichever book informed you of your inadequacy. In return for your loyalty, you’re promised that after you die you’ll be spared from a torturous eternal fate you supposedly deserve and get to spend eternity in a vaguely defined paradise.

If you accept this explanation of life, then the path before you will be simple. You just have to keep believing in what you were told and keep following the rules. You can pretty much just relax and wind down the clock on autopilot, and you’ll never have to worry about figuring out the answers to any of life’s big questions yourself. This makes religion sound appealing, but the benefits don’t actually outweigh the cost, because all of the religions humans have invented are simply human inventions. They’re all mythology.

 

 

Facing the fact that religion is mythology is terrifying for believers for several profound reasons. First, it means you’ve been lied to and used by the person you thought was your savior, which is too emotionally traumatic for many believers to even consider. Worse than that though, when you lose your religion, you lose your purpose in life and your moral compass. Life is existentially depressing and hopeless if you’re not living with purpose, and it’s confusing if you don’t have a compass. Since you still need answers to life’s questions, if you don’t have a religious book to look them up in, that means you’re responsible for figuring them all out for yourself.

We all know we’re not prophets or Einsteins. We know we don’t have the intelligence or authority to figure out the ultimate meaning of life. This means after you figure out that religion is wrong, you can’t just trade in all your wrong answers for all the right answers. You just lose you’re moral compass and spend the rest of your life lost.

A lot of theists would rather live a comfortable lie than face a lifetime of being lost, not just because it’s scary, but because they view being lost as a sign of weakness, a character flaw that needs to be stamped out. The cold, hard reality of the world we live in, is that we’re born lost, and we’re destined to wander the universe lost until we die. We’ll all face death not knowing what happens afterward or if our actions mattered. Once you accept that, you can cope with the situation sanely. But denying the reality of the situation only cripples your ability to cope with it, and that’s the definition of insanity.

Believing in mythology is like trying to hike across America using a maritime chart of the Indian Ocean for directions. Plus, you’re stuck with a traveling companion who forces you to act the way Indian fishermen acted 2000 years ago, and he constantly tells you that you’re not good enough. Accepting you’re lost and looking at the universe from an honest, scientific perspective, is like hiking around America with a wilderness survival guide with Sherlock Holmes as your traveling companion.

If you’re losing faith in mythology, and you’re worried about what to do with your life after you throw away your map of the Indian Ocean, just climb to the top of a mountain, and look down at the forests and fields below. Not one single tree, flower, or blade of grass is stressing about what to do with their life. They’re just drinking in the universe and reaching for the skies. If you were to look at yourself, standing on top of a mountain, eye-level with the clouds, you’d realize you’re already doing the exact same thing, and it’ll make you feel so alive, the last thing on your mind will be death.

 

 

Of course, you can’t spend their whole life meditating on a mountaintop, but why would you want to when there are so many other experiences to be had, problems to be solved and wonderful people to be met? Frankly, you were going to spend your whole life chasing experiences anyway, whether you claim to believe in religion or not. You can just do it more effectively when you’re not blinded, gagged and crippled by fictional, mythological beliefs.

You can look at the mystery of life as an eternal curse, or you can look at it as an endless opportunity. The universe might not look as scary if you focused on how amazing it is. Maybe we’re not even really lost. Maybe we’re already home, or maybe this is what it’s like to leave the nest. Maybe what we’re supposed to be doing is using the tools we were given to fulfill our potential and not just sit around on our knees talking to ourselves and beating ourselves up for failing to live up to the moral standards of primitive cultures.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Meaning of Life
How to Think Like a Genius
Knowledge and Learning
Biker Philosophy
My Tweets About Philosophy 

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in meaning of life

October 9, 2017

Reality Is Amazing

By wise sloth

https://youtu.be/Im6gfxoiHeU

 

If you’re searching for perspective in life, go camping on a mountain on a clear summer night. At midnight, put on a warm coat and look at the sky. Everything you can see from a mountaintop, in fact, everything in the universe you can see, feel, smell, touch and hear is made from combining 118 different atoms in different combinations. The reason you can make such a diverse universe out of so few building blocks is because they’re so ingeniously designed. Atoms behave so logically that you can arrange them in a chart and predict how they’ll interact with other elements based on where they are on the chart. The inventor of the Periodic Table of Elements was even able to predict the existence and nature of yet unknown elements because nature is so mathematically logical.

 

 

Not only are the building blocks of reality logical, they’re resilient. Every atom everywhere obeys the rules of the universe all the time; so far the universe has operated like clockwork flawlessly for about 13.8 billion years. It’s also grown so huge there’s not even a number for how big it is. But no matter how old or spread thin the universe becomes, atoms still follow the same inherent, unwritten rules everywhere, all the time.

If you take any atom in the universe and break it apart you’ll find it’s made up of smaller pieces that behave according to their own set of rules, and the product of their actions becomes the behavior of the atom at large. Those subatomic particles are made up of even smaller pieces that follow their own set of unwritten rules. The rules of subatomic physics are too complex for most humans to understand, and even our brightest scientific minds still don’t completely understand what’s happening at the bottom of reality. At this point, scientists have broken atoms down so far that the pieces just look like invisible forces and mathematics. Until they can find more concrete answers, we’re left to wonder how and why we live in a universe made of math.

Even if we don’t understand the grand design, we can still marvel at it. And its most breathtakingly genius feature is the existence of life. It’s odd enough that such an elegant universe would exist in the first place, let alone possess the capacity to convert inorganic matter into self-replicating DNA automatically.

What makes the existence of life even more surprising is how complex its design is. Consider that your body is made up of countless atoms joined together to form molecules, which behave according to their own set of logical, purpose-driven, unwritten rules. Molecules are designed to combine and form living cells. There are about a trillion cells in your body that consume food, produce energy and poop while performing some function your body needs to live.

The precision and speed at which the cells of the human body operate at is cosmic. To simply lift your arm over your head, your body has to send an electrical impulse down a conductive fiber to your arm muscles, which are made of millions of fibers the size of hairs. The electrical signal tells the muscle fibers to inject themselves with calcium, which causes billions of smaller components within each strand to contract. They stay contracted until the brain sends a signal to the muscle to flood its cells with potassium, which blocks the muscle’s ability to hold its grip. All those billions of events happen in a fraction of a second.

As impressive as it is that the human body can move so efficiently using such an involved process, that doesn’t scratch the surface of our anatomy’s complexity. The cells in our bodies follow unique rules to form tissues, which follow their own set of rules and combine to form organs, which interact elegantly with other organs. Together, they create a self-replicating, self-healing, self-aware, problem-solving, bi-pedal, autonomous supercomputer with a stable skeletal structure and strong muscles that lives on a giant rock spinning around a giant fireball in an endless vacuum.

If you’re impressed by the design of the human body, you should be equally weirded out by it, because the programming instructions that run all of the body’s functions are stored in your DNA, which is made out of atoms, which arranged themselves to form DNA by themselves. The universe arranged itself into DNA and is running programming instructions in your brain. That means the universe is literally your copilot.

 

"What if we're just the universe experiencing itself?"

 

Your body is more than just a machine. It’s a mother, father, son, daughter, employee, citizen, lover, believer, dreamer, worrier, champion, loser, etc. This is how we tend to think of ourselves, but on the grand scale of things, our bodies are ultimately tiny globs of atoms jostling in a sea of atoms. If doctors dissected you, all they would find are atoms. They wouldn’t be able to find you.

Your memory, identity, skills, emotional scars, motivations and everything else that defines you as a person is the product of chemicals and electricity churning away in your brain, a glob of inanimate matter behaving animatedly. Somehow it all comes together to form something that exists between the lines. Somehow the brain produces a ghost in the machine that can will your body to speak the words, “I think. Therefore, I am.”

Not only do you know you exist, but you can distinguish yourself from other piles of atoms. You can interact with other atoms, and they’ll respond to your existence. Other people can also acknowledge, remember and interact with you, further reaffirming the reality of your existence.

So here you are, built on math and grown from stardust, living for a short time with the ability to comprehend your own existence, knowing you’re going to die someday relatively soon. At that time, all the atoms in your body that held your consciousness together will unravel themselves from each other and spill back into general circulation. The brevity of life might make existence seem futile, but the amount of power and work that went into creating the universe and the life within it suggests there may be value to it. You may be an underpaid employee, a rejected lover, an overworked parent, or unappreciated artist, but first, you’re a cosmic miracle/mystery.

The big question is, what do we do with this surreal life we’ve got? If nothing else, we should all be standing around looking at our hands saying, “Whoa,” because reality is amazing.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Meaning of Life
How to Think Like a Genius
Knowledge and Learning
Biker Philosophy
My Tweets About Philosophy 

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in meaning of life

October 9, 2017

The Value Of Life

By wise sloth

In order to explain the value of life, we need to start from the very beginning, which was about 14.7 billion years ago when all the matter and energy in the universe was compacted into an infinitely dense point in space called a singularity.

There’s a lot we don’t yet know about the singularity. We don’t know why it was there or how it got there. We don’t know whether it had existed forever or if it appeared out of nothing in a specific instant in time. For that matter, we don’t know if time or space existed back then in the same way we experience it today. There are theories that it probably didn’t. All we’ve been able to reasonably deduce is that the singularity was there, and in an instant an unknown catalyst caused it, and possibly time and space, to expand to cosmic proportions. This event is commonly known as “The Big Bang,” but “The Big Expansion” is more accurate.

During the early phase of the expansion, all the matter in the universe was too hot and energized for atoms to hold themselves together, much less bond with other atoms to form the 118 elements that makeup all the matter we’ve found in the universe today. After 150 million years of expanding and thinning, the explosion thinned and dispersed enough energy for the atoms were stable enough to bond together into elements.

The first celestial bodies to form were massive clouds of hydrogen gas, and within those clouds arose the conditions necessary to give birth to stars. Within those stars arose the conditions necessary to give birth to planets and black holes. As the universe became more diverse in composition it, created more diverse conditions to produce more diverse elements. The continued expansion, cooling, and pooling of matter and energy in the universe resulted in a never-ending redesigning of the physical universe that eventually created the conditions necessary for life to exist.

About 9.6 billion years after the Big Expansion, which would be 5.1 billion years ago, the Milky Way galaxy formed. About 5 billion years ago some of the remnants of a supernova within the Milky Way began to cool off and form into the planet, Earth. About 3.5 billion years ago life appeared on Earth. After that, life evolved in complexity for about 2 billion, eight hundred fifty million years before simple, multi-celled organisms appeared.

After that, evolution sped up rapidly. In about the same amount of time it took for life to evolve into multi-celled organisms, their descendants evolve into millions of elaborate species of plants, animals, fungus, bacteria, etc. including dinosaurs that towered up to 43 feet tall.

About six hundred forty-nine million nine-hundred thousand years after the dinosaurs went extinct, a small, furry mammal evolved into the first homo sapien. After that, humans evolved for about 90,000 years before our cultural history began. From there, it took us about 10,000 years to go from writing on clay tablets to surfing the internet.

 

 

Now, with all of that information in mind, go outside the city on a cloudless night and take some time to stare up at the night sky. Think about everything that’s happened in the past 14.7 billion years that led to you standing there staring back up towards your cosmic birthplace.

If one particle had been missing during the first second of the Big Expansion, it could have shifted galaxies, and you wouldn’t be here today. If one more or one less star between the big bang and where Earth is today had or hadn’t exploded or imploded you wouldn’t be here today. If the earth was only a few miles closer or farther away from the sun you wouldn’t be here today. If one more or one less asteroid had hit the earth you wouldn’t be here today. If one more or one less extinction level event hadn’t occurred you wouldn’t be here today. If there had been one more or one less rainfall you wouldn’t be here today. If one animal had or hadn’t eaten one of your countless ancestors you wouldn’t be here today. If one animal hadn’t eaten one of the predators trying to eat one of your countless ancestors you wouldn’t be here today. If any two of your ancestors hadn’t met and copulated on the day they did you wouldn’t be here today. Each of your female ancestors was born with between 200,000 and 400,000 potential eggs in her uterus though only several hundred of them matured into eggs. Each of your male ancestors produced about 5 billion sperm in their lives. When you were conceived, there was between 40 to 600 million other sperm that could have gestated the egg your mother provided instead of the one that created you. Only one combination of sperm and eggs in each generation could have led to your creation.

 

 

What are the odds that you’d be here today? For all practical purposes, there’s a 1 in infinity chance. Imagine all the potential beings who would have gotten the chance to exist had things turned out differently. Imagine how they would scream in the darkness with jealousy that you received this coveted chance and they didn’t. Some people might call that destiny.

Even if it was a matter of pure chance that you, specifically, should be alive, it’s no accident that the universe or life exists. There was a reason The Big Expansion happened and life emerged on earth. We don’t know what that reason is, but everything happens as a result of cause and effect. If there was a cause there was a reason, even if that reason was purely scientific. If there was a reason, then there was a purpose. If there was a purpose, then there is value in the life of any creature capable of fulfilling that purpose.

Unfortunately, you weren’t born with a price tag on your toe. So you can only deduce how valuable your life is, but there’s evidence of your value in how much work went into creating you. Remember, it didn’t take 9 months to create you. It took 14.7 billion years. The matter in your body today was present at The Big Expansion. It has traveled the length of the universe. Galaxies rose and fell around you in the great cosmic tidal wave that brought about the conditions necessary for you to be born. The matter in your body used to be in a star. It might have been part of a dinosaur. You might have been in a glass of water drunk by your favorite historical figure.

Spending your entire life on this familiar planet, it’s easy to take yourself for granted while perceiving the beautiful nebulas and globular clusters in the sky as miraculous celestial bodies, but look at earth from their point of view. You’re a celestial body too. In fact, you’re even more amazing than the most beautiful astronomical phenomenon. The fact that you, a sentient being, aware of your own existence and capable of self-determination, arose from inanimate matter is as miraculous as The Big Expansion its self.

 

 

The contradictory nature of your existence raises some more penetrating questions. We don’t know why the universe exists at all, but we know that the physical universe is meticulously, mathematically, and consistently designed and behaves according to fixed, unwavering rules. Why and how is it that these rules exist? How is it that those rules allowed for the sublimation of living creatures whose bodies are meticulously, mathematically, and consistently designed? Why is heredity mathematically predictable? Chance isn’t predictable. So evolution must not be entirely the product of chance. If that’s true then what else could it be the product of?

It’s been theorized the universe could have been designed by some form of intelligence. There’s no conclusive evidence to back this theory up, but it’s not entirely without precedent. After all, we ourselves are intelligent beings who arose from inanimate matter. And in a universe where you can’t get something from nothing it would explain where our intelligence came from. Granted, that still leaves the issue of where the creator came from. Maybe the creator existed forever. Of course, if it did, then maybe the universe existed forever as well, but if that were the case then the universe wouldn’t have needed a creator to create it since it was always there.

If there was logical intent behind your creation then your life has an extra source of value. You’re valuable to the one who went through 14.7 billion years of deliberate, calculated work creating you. Regardless of whether or not your parents were the only intelligent beings responsible for bringing you to life, there still aren’t words to fully describe how cosmically epic in scale your existence is.

Yet for all the work and purpose that went into bringing you here, you’ll only have a handful of decades to be a witness to your self and all of creation. In a universe where time appears to be infinite, you’ll take a finite number of breaths. You’ll speak a finite number of words. You’ll see a finite number of blades of grass. You’ll meet a finite number of people. Every moment of your life that ticks by was the only chance in all of eternity for you to experience that moment. That makes every moment of your life (no matter how mundane it may seem) infinitely rare and thus infinitely valuable. That makes every moment of your life the most valuable moment of your life. Those moments are only infinitely valuable because you are.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Meaning of Life
How to Think Like a Genius
Knowledge and Learning
Biker Philosophy
My Tweets About Philosophy 

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in meaning of life

October 5, 2017

Self-Subjugation Is Not A Virtue

By wise sloth

Respect is for those who deserve it, not for those who demand it."

Every culture on earth teaches its young that it’s virtuous to place certain people above them. We’re supposed to call our parents, elders, the police, teachers and bosses “sir” and “ma’am.” We’re supposed to address judges and politicians as “your honorable” or “the honorable.” We’re supposed to address anyone with a doctorate degree as “doctor.” We’re even supposed to call priests “father.” Aside from using titles to distinguish these people as being superior to us, we were taught not to talk back to them and obey them without question. Some languages even have formal speech patterns lower ranking members of society are supposed to use when talking to higher ranking members.

We’re told we’re supposed to subjugate ourselves to our superiors out of respect, but that justification ignores several profound truths. Firstly, we were all created equal. We have equal value and deserve equal respect because the value of a human life isn’t determined by social status; it’s determined entirely by the fact that we’re alive. We can believe in equality, but that belief is meaningless if we’re not all treated equally.

Even if higher ranking members of society have accomplished something in their lives worth bragging about, that doesn’t mean that everyone else has done something wrong by being born later, poorer, or less academically inclined. One person’s success in life isn’t someone else’s failure and doesn’t indebt others to them.

The people who enjoy the privilege of titles will insist there’s nothing sinister about expecting others to treat them with respect, but that claim is proven false by what happens if you don’t subjugate yourself to them: you get punished.

The best example of this is the power dynamic between military officers and enlisted troops. Enlisted troops are told to salute officers out of respect, but if they don’t then they get punished. They’ll keep getting punished until they conform to the rules or get kicked out of the military with a bad conduct discharge that will keep them from getting a good job for the rest of their lives. So enlisted troops can salute officers out of respect if they want, but they have to salute them out of fear.

"We salute the rank, not the man." Richard Winters

Anyone who threatens to punish you for not massaging their ego is placing you beneath them, which is disrespectful to you and disregards your equal status to them in the eyes of God and the cosmic perspective.

Military and civilian leaders alike will defend their actions and expectations by asserting that forced respect is necessary to instill discipline, maturity and good order in society. Every cult leader and dictator in history will agree that it’s necessary to convince the lower ranking majority of society that blind respect for their superiors is necessary to ensure good order, but their idea of good order is being worshipped and served like gods forever by the toiling masses who will never have any real hope of upward mobility.

No honest psychologist would argue that wilful self-subjugation is a vital step towards self-actualization. It is a long-established fact that forced respect is a step towards battered person syndrome though.

Enthusiastically subjugating yourself to anyone isn’t a sign of maturity. It’s a sign of captivity. It doesn’t make you into a better person. It makes you into a servile person, and the more you practice it the more you normalize subservience in your mind until you take it for granted. Then, at the end of your life, you won’t be able to turn around and realize it was never preparing you for your turn at being a leader. It was just indoctrinating you into spending your life serving others. And an entire society that thinks this way isn’t progressing towards an enlightened utopia; it’s regressing into a stratified dystopian society where the powerful and privileged exploit everyone else.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Achieving a healthy work/life balance

October 5, 2017

Deep Thoughts By The Wise Janitor

By wise sloth

Cleaning up after other people day in and day out is an exercise in futility and patience. Every day you vacuum the floor, wipe down the tables, wash the windows, change the toilet paper and whatever else. You take a building that looks like it’s been through the apocalypse and you make it look brand new. Then, by the time the sun sets it looks exactly like it did before you sacrificed an infinitely valuable, irreplaceable day in your life cleaning it. So the next day you clean it again only to have your masterpiece reduced to kipple again. Then you clean it again, and again, and again, but no matter how many times you clean it you never get ahead. You never reach a plateau where you can sit back and relax and bask in the fruits of your labor. You just watch in constant horror as all the work you’ve done the previous day becomes undone.

Not that the janitor is complaining. Everyone else’s inability to clean up after themselves means the janitor has as good of job security as the undertaker. Like the undertaker, the janitor’s job places him at the fringe of society. He’s someone nobody notices until they have to. But unlike the undertaker, the janitor doesn’t have fancy credentials to impress people with and earn their respect. So the janitor stands on the fringe even when he’s in the middle of a crowd. He watches all the respectable, credentialized folk run past him on their way to important places where they’re going to do very important things…or so they believe.

Looking up the social ladder from the perspective of a janitor you see that the more credentials a person has the more important they believe they and their work are. And sure, they make wheels turn, but on a long enough timescale, there’s no difference between what they do and what their janitor does. No matter what job you have the end result is making someone else’s life better in exchange for money. The thing about that is, within 100 years everyone who benefited from your work will be dead. Even if you do something that affects people for generations, a day will come when the ripple effects of your labor come to an end. In a few trillion years the universe will cool and expand until there’s not enough heat left to keep any atoms vibrating. Then, when every atom in the universe has cooled to absolute zero the history of the universe as we know it will end. So everyone’s job is just as futile as the janitor’s. We’re all just rearranging kipple until our time runs out.

The janitor stands in the middle of a crowd obscured by his social status watching all the people around him swarm past him in fast forward with their faces glued to their phones and watches stressing over the tasks lined up in front of them. Compared to a janitor, their burdens are heavy….usually too heavy. The average worker is crushed under stress and anxiety, and no quality of suit or necktie or pantyhose or lipstick can hide stress lines on their faces. The janitor would have sympathy for those marathon workers…if they didn’t make messes everywhere they went and didn’t pay him less than a living wage to clean up after them.

But the point isn’t to get into a dick waving competition. In a trillion years it won’t matter who’s right about what or who is better than who. The point is that no matter what we do it’s all just dust in the wind. If you can do something better for humanity than sweeping up after it then…good. But no matter what you do, if you’re stressing out over it to the point of anxiety then you’re defeating the purpose. Life isn’t what happens tomorrow. Life isn’t a place you arrive at. Life is what happens today. Life is here and now. If you’re stressing yourself out in the name of work then you’re failing at life. You might be better off just emptying garbage cans and replacing toilet paper at a leisurely pace…except of course that being a janitor doesn’t pay a living wage because civilized, credentialized society doesn’t care about the human beings who clean up after them. Of course, on a long enough time scale that little oversight won’t matter, but if it’s important to do those big jobs that make life better for everyone then why undermine the virtue of your work by neglecting the needs of the people who clean up after you? If you won’t take care of the people who take care of you then how much do you really deserve to pat yourself on the back for the work you do?

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Achieving a healthy work/life balance

October 5, 2017

Is It Lazy To Not Want To Work?

By wise sloth

There’s a common attitude in American culture that anyone who doesn’t want to work at least forty hours per week is lazy, spoiled, entitled and weak. Baby Boomers are famous for vilifying the younger generations for not apathetically accepting a lifetime of toil.

To be fair, when our elders warn us of the importance of work, they speak from experience. Those who lived through the Great Depression had to adapt to a brutal environment. The beliefs and life-skills that helped them survive became staples of their culture, which they passed down to their children. Now, when Baby Boomers see young adults ignoring survival-based customs, they interpret that as being irresponsible. On the surface, these feelings are reasonable, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re disastrously short-sighted.

During the Great Depression, America had enough resources to feed and house every citizen. The only reason everyone didn’t have at least the bare minimum to survive already distributed to them, was because the premise of the economy was to pay the lowest pages and charge the highest prices possible so that the nation’s wealth flows upward, leaving the poorest workers stuck in perpetual wage slavery, and President Hoover’s solutions to these problems only made this worse.

America’s economy has evolved in a lot of ways, but the premise is still the same. Every business in America is still paying and treating its workers as close to slaves as they can get. The wealth still flows up, and the average worker still lives under constant control and fear.

For most Americans, life is pushing a boulder uphill. The situation has been hard and hopeless for Americans for so many generations, we teach our children it’s immature to follow your passion, and real adults suck it up and pick the smallest boulder within reach and get pushing. Coping with poverty has been a part of American culture for so long, we’re so used to it that most of us don’t even realize we’re doing it. We even celebrate it.

The Millennial generation realizes the game is rigged against them. They know even if they do everything right, they’ll still spend the best years of their lives working their asses off at jobs that pay and treat them like second-class citizens. No matter how much they save, even if they get to live like a first class citizen for a brief time, eventually one of the ever-circling bill collectors is going to rip the last dollar they have out of their hand.

Morbidly, the thing most likely to bankrupt them and take away all hope in their life is the hospital they’ll eventually have to go visit to stay alive. Life for the Millennials is so fucked, hospitals are an existential riddle, and the government’s latest solution to the unaffordability of healthcare was to force everyone to buy unaffordable health insurance that doesn’t cover the cost of health care. So there’s every reason for Millennials to assume life is only going to get more unfair. Parents, politicians, and employers shouldn’t be surprised when Millennials aren’t enthusiastic about their career because working isn’t an opportunity. It’s government-sanctioned slavery.

Millennials are working. They have to, because they can’t survive if they don’t, but if nothing they do matters, then why should they do more than the bare minimum? Why go the extra mile for an employer who treats them like profits are worth more than their lives? If Millennials should reciprocate the respect their bosses show them, then they shouldn’t show their bosses any respect. It’s insulting and unethical to ask Millennials to be excited about the company they work for, because if they’re excited to be in an abusive relationship, then they either have battered person or Stockholm syndrome.

Human beings weren’t put on this Earth to work, especially not at strip malls and office buildings. Spending your life working your ass off in a Polo shirt isn’t “just the way life is.” That’s the way life shouldn’t be. This isn’t the world our ancestors scraped their way out of the mud tooth and nail to create. Philosophically, our economy defeats the purpose of existence. It forces people to devote their lives to surviving, and just because survival is the most immediately important need in life, that doesn’t mean it’s the only need in life. There’s a whole hierarchy of them, leading up to self-actualization at the top.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Physiological, Safety, Love/belonging, Esteem, Self-Actualization

Our minds are compelled by our DNA to grow to our full potential. When we get stuck at a lower level, our brains act like a nicotine addict urging us to go seek out the thing it’s missing. If we ignore the craving, we get anxious and desperate. Capitalism keeps people stuck at the survival level almost their entire lives. It should be obvious that human aren’t lazy for not wanting to sit in a cubicle for 60 years worrying about bills. They’re monkeys trapped in a cage, raging to get out.

Since immigration laws are so strict, and every country has the same business model anyway, there’s no escaping jobs that pay too little and bills that cost too much. The most common way people cope with living in a Skinner Box is by accepting the apocalyptic nature of their existence and trying to find whatever happiness and motivation they can between shocks.

If you devote your life to surviving, you neglect the rest of your psychological needs. If you don’t fulfill the rest of your potential, then there was no point being here in the first place. Since we’re all going to die eventually anyway, the cost/benefit analysis of risking a slightly earlier death in order to fulfill higher needs in the immediate present adds up.

In America, it’s financially irresponsible to work less than forty hours per week, but it’s cosmically irresponsible to be financially responsible. Granted, if you don’t work so you can sit around all day smoking weed and playing video games, then yes, you’re lazy and irresponsible. But if you work part-time so you can live your dream, you’re efficient and wise.

If we didn’t live in a financially oppressive economy, we wouldn’t need to philosophize about how responsible it is to work 40 hours per week. If we were living in the kind of world our ancestors hoped humanity would build, everyone’s basic needs would be guaranteed. Everyone still needs to pull their weight, but the world could function if we all worked 10-20 hours per week. Whatever conveniences that cost us would be outweighed by the benefit of getting our lives back.

The debate the world should be having isn’t, is it lazy to not want to work? We should be debating why we still put up with a system that works us so long it deprives us of the meaning of life. And instead of bickering about the pros/cons of capitalism, socialism and communism, we need to look at the ground and ask ourselves what we really need, and what we’re willing to give for it.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

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October 5, 2017

Have A Healthy Balance Of Passion And Duty

By wise sloth

At some point in your childhood, someone probably told you that you can be whatever you want when you grow up and that you should believe in yourself and follow your dreams. If you grew up watching Nickelodeon and Disney movies, then this idea was pounded into your brain. You may have left high school full of great expectations only to discover that good jobs, let alone dream jobs, are hard to find. Not only that, but life is as expensive as possible, and employers pay as little as possible. So the reality of the world we live in is that most people don’t get to be too picky about what they do for a living.

If you ever complained to your elders about how hard it is to follow your passion, the same people who raised you on dreams, probably told you to suck it up and deal with it. That’s life. You’re not special. You’re not entitled to anything, and in order to be a mature, responsible adult you need to put your wants aside and perform your duties without complaint. They might have even gone on to say that self-sacrifice is a virtue that should be practiced daily.

Things being as they are, part of growing up is discovering that your elders lied to you, coming to terms with the real world and then deciding whether or not you should follow your passion or devote your life to being responsible. There’s no quick, easy answer to that question. Everyone is different, and the world isn’t black and white. No one can tell you what’s right for you, but common sense should tell you it’s probably a bad idea to take either option to their extreme.

It’s obvious that throwing caution completely to the wind to pursue a hobby that might never amount to anything is risky to the point of suicide. However, abandoning all your passion in the name of responsibility reduces you to a machine and arguably defeats the purpose of life. You’re here to be you. If you sacrifice everything you want and everything you are just so you can survive, there was no point in being here. In your obsession with survival, you committed existential suicide.

"for me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer." Arnold Schwarzenegger

There’s nothing morally wrong with being selfish enough to give your own life meaning and try to enjoy your brief, precious existence. Passion is important. Style is important. You’re not just entitled to know what you want out of life, you have a responsibility to fulfill your unique potential, which is greater than that of a self-subjugating automaton.

Sure, survival is vital, but if you think your only options in life are to either be a painter, singer, dancer or worker, then the problem is that your understanding of the world and your own soul are too narrow. In order to understand how you can fit into the world, the first thing you need to do is take a personality test, but understand that that test isn’t perfect. Take as many personality/aptitude tests as you can until you have a good idea of what your strengths, weaknesses, and dispositions are.

People aren’t born with one skill inside of them that they’re destined and obligated to find and nurture. Within your personality type, there are hundreds, if not thousands of occupations that would bring you deep personal satisfaction. Even if the oppressive nature of our economy prevents you from spending all day every day playing, you should still get as close to your goal as possible. Then, in your free time, you should work as relentlessly as possible to overcome the obstacles between you and your chosen destiny.

Cowards never start. The weak never finish. Winners never quit.

Giving up on your dreams isn’t mature. That’s quitting. It’s self-imposed failure. The fact that life is tough isn’t a good reason to give up your dignity and accept a life of meaningless toil. You’re going to have to make sacrifices in life. That’s a given. You’re going to have to make some kind of compromise between passion and duty, but the important thing is to only compromise as much as you absolutely have to and make your sacrifices/compromises count.

If there’s anyone out there who believes that’s too much for the younger generation to expect out of life, then the problem isn’t that the younger generation is spoiled. The problem is that we’re so used to living in a wage slave-based economy we can’t imagine any other way, and our definition of maturity is inextricably ingrained in that world view. The solution to the existential despair that comes from living in an economy that prioritizes money over people isn’t for young workers to hurry up and die inside. The solution is to build a more humanitarian economy.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

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October 4, 2017

10 Reasons To Stay Sober

By wise sloth

1. Sobriety is cheaper

Money makes the world go ’round. Money is power. It might not be able to buy happiness directly, but it buys comfort, security, and freedom, which yield happiness. Poverty buys stress, anxiety, hopelessness, poor quality food and slavery, which will make you so miserable it will shorten your life.

Mind-altering substances are expensive and addictive. The more you use the more you will want to consume and the more you’ll need to consume to achieve inebriation. If you become a full-blooded addict you’ll end up spending a very significant portion of your income on mind-altering substances, and that will severely reduce your options in life. If you have any hopes and dreams in life then stay sober, because addiction is a very heavy chain and ball around your finances.

2. No hangovers, withdrawals or cravings

Euphoric chemicals are called “euphoric” for a reason. They will cause you to feel levels of pleasure unattainable through sobriety.  Though you may begin your descent into addiction by chasing euphoria, your motivation to get inebriated will inevitably transition to fleeing hangovers, withdrawals and cravings (all of which are extremely painful). The benefit you get from temporary chemical-induced euphoria won’t be worth the cost of perpetual discomfort.

3. You’ll make more clear-headed decisions

Inebriation is effectively temporary retardedness. While under the influence you can’t speak, walk or think at normal, sane levels. The more time you’re inebriated the higher the chances you’ll make bad decisions like sleeping with the wrong people, breaking laws, ignoring responsibilities and treating other people poorly. If you want to make the most of out of life you need to make the best decisions possible every day. Addiction prevents that from happening.

4. You’ll be more able to overcome the problems that drive you to inebriation

Some of the most important issues you need to confront rationally are the problems that drive you to drink and use drugs in the first place. Inducing temporary retardedness won’t make those problems go away; it just sweeps them under the rug until you sober up again, and the longer they’re left unresolved the worse they’ll get.

5. Your life won’t be plagued by the problems that come with addiction

Addiction will make you poorer, more stressed and less able to deal with life’s challenges. These problems will cause even more unnecessary problems that you’ll need to deal with. If you’d never started down the path to addiction those problems would never have happened, and once they do start piling up you’ll be less capable of dealing with them if you’re broke, stressed and incoherent.

6. Your brain will work better, which will improve every aspect of your life

Euphoric chemicals don’t just hamper your ability to think coherently and logically. They damage your brain and take their toll on your subconscious thought processes as well causing mental deficiencies you’re not even aware of. Your identity and reality are defined by your brain. If you throw a monkey wrench into your brain then you’ll lower the quality of your life and your reality forever even if you can manage to hold down a high paying job and not run off everyone important in your life.

7. You won’t be a burden on the people you love (and who love you)

No man is an island. The things you do (and don’t do) affect the people in your life. Living with an alcoholic is like living with a special need’s child. In saying that I’m not trying to disparage addicts or special needs children. I’m just pointing out that they do add another level of responsibilities and burdens on the people closest to them. I’m also not implying we shouldn’t help the people in our lives who have special needs (such as managing addictions). I’m just saying, if you don’t have to inconvenience your loved ones then you shouldn’t.

8. You’ll have more meaningful relationships with the people you love (and who love you)

Living with someone who is too inebriated to walk, talk or think effectively is like living with a Neanderthal. It’s difficult to reach and relate to someone in that state. Likewise, when you’re inebriated you can’t connect with your loved ones on a lucid level. Inebriation puts up a wall between you and your loved ones that limits your ability to experience each other’s true selves, and that’s missing out on the best part of life.

9. With good health comes better feelings

Pain is your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong, and addiction is agonizing. Good health allows your body to function properly, and if you take care of yourself then your body will reward you with free euphoria.

10. The future will always look bleak when you’re killing yourself

Life is daunting, especially if you’ve had a traumatic past and/or a stressful present. Addiction is harming yourself to medicate yourself out of fear of feeling pain. The cure for fear is hope. If you have hope for the future then your anxieties will fade to your peripheral vision. As fun as euphoric chemicals may be, you know they’re killing you. That will always make the future bleaker even if you don’t fully articulate the fact to yourself. Sobriety isn’t always easy, but it opens doors that lead to greener pastures.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Drugs and addiction

October 4, 2017

The Drug Talk

By wise sloth

At some point in your life you’re going to have the opportunity to do mind-altering drugs like tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, heroin, meth, crack, etc., and you’re going to have to do the cost/benefit analysis to decide whether or not you should do drugs. Some people would tell you that you shouldn’t do drugs because drugs are bad, and if you do drugs then that makes you a bad person who deserves to be punished accordingly. That philosophy is vague to the point of being useless and doesn’t address any of the subtle realities of drug use.

People don’t do drugs because they’re bad, and doing drugs doesn’t make you a bad person. Doing drugs certainly doesn’t warrant punishment. So what does cause people to use drugs? The number one cause of drug use is the fact that life sucks. Life doesn’t suck because existence is an inherently pointless and painful experience. Life sucks because the world our elders designed for us is inhumane, and countless people suffer from poverty, abuse, and abandonment as a result of the faulty systems that control our lives. If you grew up in a loving, nurturing household where all of your needs were taken care of, then good for you. You’re less likely to get addicted to drugs because your life is full of experiences and opportunities that make life enjoyable and fulfilling. But if you grew up in a broken home and got stuck working as a disposable wage slave at the bottom of a heartless corporation with little to no options for career progression, then the cost/benefit analysis of doing drugs will look more tempting to you.

The harder your life is the more tempting and gratifying drugs will be, and if you live and work with broken people who are trapped under the glass ceiling, you’ll be more likely to make friends with people who have discovered that habitual drug use helps manage their own pain and anxiety. No matter what strata of society you come from, the people most likely to offer you drugs will be your friends. A creepy looking stranger in a black trench coat probably won’t walk up to you and ask you in a raspy whisper if you want to buy some dope. More likely you’ll see your friends having a good time using drugs and you’ll think to yourself, “I want to have that good of a time too.” And your friends will be more than happy to share their drugs with you because they care about you and want you to have a good time too.

An interesting thing about drugs is that they don’t affect all people the same way. While your friends may be having the best time of their lives while on drugs you might get a mild kick or even get sick from it because your body processes the drugs differently. If you experiment with drugs a few times and find that they make you feel absolutely amazing then you need to be extra cautious about using them again. If drugs don’t do much for you then you may be able to use them recreationally from time to time without ever becoming an addict. Just be careful about judging people who use drugs more often than you, because their situation is very different from yours.

Drugs are dangerous because they damage your health, and they’re addictive, but the most dangerous thing about drugs is that they’re fun. They’re more fun than reality. When you feel happiness or pleasure you’re feeling the effects of chemicals in your brain. Drugs affect your brain in ways that make you experience levels of happiness and pleasure greater than is possible to achieve through sobriety. When adults tell children not to do drugs because drugs are bad and children go on to use drugs and discover how absolutely wonderful drugs are, then those children are likely to lose regard for the opinion of puritanical adults and continue on with their drug use unprepared for the dangers ahead of them.

It takes time to get addicted to drugs. The first 1-100 times you use drugs you may not be an addict. You may just be enjoying the moment, but over time the addiction will creep in, and you won’t notice it’s there until it’s too late. So if you’re going to experiment with drugs you need to be vividly aware that you’re not just enjoying the moment. You’re courting addiction, and once your body becomes dependent on drugs you won’t be able to just quit any time. You might be able to quit, but it’s going to be painful…and not just the one time you decide to quit cold turkey.

Habitual drug users tend to start out using drugs simply for the sake of experiencing euphoria, but as you become addicted your body craves the drug all the time the same way your body craves food, water or sex. When you don’t have it you get this unexplainable sense of hunger for the drug, and your brain will want it so bad that it will help you make excuses why you should spend more money to get more drugs. This sounds dramatic, but the way it feels to fledgling addicts is deceptively commonplace. There’s just a thought in the back of your head that says, “Hey, a cigarette or beer or joint or line would sure be nice right now.” Then your brain answers back, “What the heck? Let’s get some more.” Then you do.

At the same time as this is going on your mind is also getting accustomed to experiencing an unrealistically euphoric reality. So normal life becomes boring and dull, which makes you want to do drugs more often. Then, the more drugs you do the more damage you do to your organs and deplete your vitamins. If you damage your organs long enough and starve your body of essential vitamins you won’t be able to experience the fullness of sober reality anyway. In fact, you’ll start developing minor aches and pains that will motivate you to do more drugs to erase those pains. And since you’ll feel like you’re starving when you don’t feed your body’s addiction then the nature of your habit will gradually change. Instead of using drugs simply to chase euphoria you’ll use drugs to run away from the pain of withdrawals. You’ll tell yourself sobriety just sucks, but in reality, you’re making sobriety suck.

The longer you do drugs the more likely you are to come to the “logical” conclusion that if life is extra fun while you’re high then why not just be high all the time? Then you’ll be happy all the time. Technically that’s true, but the prize comes with many costs. If you’re a wealthy trust fund baby who will never have to work a day in your whole life then spending your life as a self-destructive hedonist is your choice. You’re going to die someday anyway. Whether or not you live a long, sober life or a short, euphoric one is an interesting philosophical question, but your addiction might not amount to more than that. However, if you’re from the working class then the consequences of addiction are far more serious.

Long before you develop health problems from your addiction you’ll suffer the consequences of having to pay for your addiction. Legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco are priced as high as possible and taxed as high as possible on top of that. Businesses price their goods high so they can make as much money off of killing people as possible, and governments make sin taxes as high as possible to discourage substance abuse (supposedly), but an addict will pay whatever they have to in order to cope with home much life sucks, ward off withdraws and feel euphoric.

Doing anything every day becomes incredibly expensive very quickly. Doing drugs every day requires you to set aside a significant percentage of your income. This means you’re going to have to sacrifice something else in order to free up room in your budget for drugs. At first, you might not go out to eat as much or buy as many new clothes, but the more addicted you become, and the more substances you become addicted to, the more money you’ll have to budget for drugs and the less other things you’ll be able to do and buy.

As I said earlier, life sucks for billions of people in this world through no fault of their own. They’re victims of a heartless economy,  and they’re victimized most at work. We grow up in a world where the average worker is paid as little as possible to do as much work as possible while being treated with as much indignity as is it takes to get workers to meet their quotas and please their customers. Living like this our entire lives we take it for granted that this is the natural order of things and anyone who doesn’t like it is ungrateful and lazy. People who use euphoric drugs know how good life can be, and they know they don’t need to climb to the top of the corporate ladder to make their dreams come true. They don’t even need a fancy house or new clothes. All they need is a case of beer, a bag of weed or a needle of heroin.

Drug addicts tend to become disenchanted with the promise of a lavish retirement after a lifetime of being treated like shit at work. After using enough drugs you may even come to the conclusion that since you’re not going to live to old age you don’t need to save for old age or impress petty, sadistic bosses. The fact that your brain is skewed sideways from so much drug use it becomes easy to justify decisions you would have found illogical when you were sober, and since you’re feeling euphoric all the time, you don’t feel the consequences of rash decisions the way you normally do. So the more drugs you do the more likely you are to give up on traditional career paths and simply find whatever work will cater to your drug use. Ironically, most of the jobs that don’t care about your employment history and don’t make you take drug tests are inhumane minimum wage jobs that don’t offer benefits or retirement options.

So long-term drug use increases the likelihood that you’ll end up broke and working at a shit job. This will make you want to do drugs more, and since you won’t want to do anything during your free time unless you’re high you’ll spend more money on drugs. And since you won’t be able to function normally while you’re high you’ll tend to just stay at home and do drugs, and that will become your life. The scariest part is that you won’t feel bad about this. In your mind, you’ll have reached Shangri La, but to the outside observer, you’ll be a poor junky living in a sparse house who wasted your potential.

That’s a worst-case scenario. There are billions of people who have used, are using and will use drugs who won’t end up anywhere near that point. But the ideal life is nowhere near that end of the spectrum. I’m not saying that nobody should ever use drugs. When done in moderation you can experience majestic highs without selling your soul for it, but every time you use drugs you need to be aware of the fact that you’re warming your feet at the gates of hell.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Drugs and addiction

October 4, 2017

7 Reasons Your Muscles Hurt

By wise sloth

1: You’re suffering from repetitive strain injury. 

You probably live in suburbia, where you wake up every morning on an old mattress. You get out of bed, put on your work clothes and an old pair of shoes. You make breakfast standing up in your kitchen, and sit at a table to eat it. Then you sit in your car and hold your hands on the steering wheel and drive to work, where you spend all day doing the exact same thing you did every day before. Then you sit in your car and hold your hands on the steering wheel as you drive home and spend the better part of your evening sitting on a couch or at a desk.

If you hold your body in the same positions all day every day, and you perform the same motions with your limbs all day every day, it’s only a matter of time until the muscles you overuse get tight and knotted, and the muscles you use less, atrophy. When that happens, your tight muscles will pull and hold your skeleton in a contorted position that your atrophied muscles are powerless to prevent. Your body will try to correct the contortion by tightening other muscle groups in an increasingly counterproductive attempt to straighten your body. The longer this goes on, the worse your muscles will hurt.

Simply varying your daily routine can reduce muscle strain and prevent muscle pain… but there are only so many different ways you can sit in a chair, hold a steering wheel or perform your job. For most people, it’s impossible to completely avoid repetitive stress injury. You can minimize and treat it though by varying your routine and following the rest of the advice in this list.

 

 

2: You need to buy better shoes, pillows, and mattresses.

Your brain is constantly figuring out how hard it needs to tell every muscle in your body to flex in order to keep you from just falling to the floor like a puddle of jelly. Your brain also constantly figures out which muscles it needs to flex in order to hold your body in a position where you can walk straight with your eyes level.

When external factors like cheap shoes, a cheap bed, or a serious injury tilts the posture of your skeleton off balance, the muscles in your body automatically tighten/loosen to hold your skeleton in a way that allows you to walk forward with your eyes level despite whatever factors are throwing your posture off.

Another way bad posture can cause muscle pain is by creating an imbalance in your fascia. Every individual muscle in your body is basically shrink-wrapped in a stretchy film called fascia, and every group of muscles is wrapped in an additional layer of fascia. Where two muscles meet, their fascia connects. These bags don’t flex like muscles; they just passively conform to whatever shape they’re stretched in.

If your skeleton is tilted off balance, in the same way, every day, eventually your fascia is going to get over/under stretched around the muscles you over/under use. These awkwardly stretched/stressed bags are going to pinch your muscles, causing pain. And since all of the fascia bags around your muscles are ultimately connected, that means stretching the fascia in the top of your body can pull the fascia at the bottom of your body, causing pain in a completely separate location from where the real problem is. The longer your fascia conforms to bad posture, the more it sets and becomes tougher and less pliable. That will reinforce the bad posture that’s stressing your muscles and causing you pain.

You’re going to spend half your life in your shoes, and the other half in your bed. If they don’t support your body ergonomically, you will develop muscle injury and pain. So spending money on a good bed, good pillows and good shoes will bring you more happiness than buying pretty much anything else that costs less than $1,000.

 

 

"You are either in your bed or in your shoes, so it pays to invest in both."

“You are either in your bed or in your shoes, so it pays to invest in both.”

3: You need to stretch more.

Each of your muscles is made up of millions of fibers that are about as thick as a strand of hair. Muscle fibers are made of living cells that consume food, generate energy, die and need to be replaced. Each fiber is also made of thousands of microscopic chambers that contain moving parts that latch onto each other when injected with calcium and release when the calcium is drained. When you strain your muscles, they become inflamed, which can constrict the microscopic chambers in your muscle fibers and cause them to seize up. This will trap the calcium being used to activate the machinery in your muscle fiber chambers to get trapped there, which means that fiber won’t be able to relax. To make matters worse, since your muscle fibers are living cells, they’re always producing waste, and eventually, they all die. If the chambers of your muscle fibers are damaged and locked up, your body won’t be able to flush out all the cellular poop and dead cells. All the toxic debris in your muscles will cause inflammation and pain to the surrounding areas.

Simply stretching your muscles can do a lot to un-jam the dysfunctional compartments in your muscle fibers. Probably more important than that though, stretching lengthens the constricted fascia around your muscles that is pinching and suffocating them.

Taking yoga classes could be one of the best things you ever do for yourself. If you’re just not going to do yoga, you would probably benefit from doing some simple military stretches daily. If nothing else, make a point to stretch your limbs out like a cat when you get out of bed. Every little bit helps.

 

 

4: You need to exercise more.

Every organ system in your body is intimately connected. The healthier one of them is, the healthier they all are. The sicker one is, the sicker they all are. Exercise makes all of your organ systems healthier. The healthier your heart and circulatory system are, the better your body can send oxygen to your muscles, remove waste, repair itself and fight disease. The better your bones are, the stronger of a connection your muscles will have with your bones. If the pulleys that are wrapped all around your skeleton aren’t firmly attached, you’re going to have a wobbly pulley system, and something is going to tear eventually. If your respiratory system isn’t working well, you’re going to have a hard time getting oxygen to your thirsty muscles. If your digestive system isn’t working well, you’re not going to be able to get energy to your tired muscles. I’m not saying exercising will cure every problem in every organ system. I’m just saying, if you want to avoid pain, you should be exercising.

When you work out your muscles, it immediately stimulates blood flow in your muscles, which helps flush in things your muscles need and flush out things they don’t. It also breaks up stagnant tissue, preventing fibrous tissue build, and it stretches your fascia, which prevents it from hardening. Of course, exercise makes your muscles grow, and the stronger your muscles are, the less likely they are to hurt after doing simple physical activities.  When all of your muscles are strong, then the ones you overwork a little too much won’t have such a disastrous effect on weaker opposing muscle groups. Then your muscles will be able to hold your skeleton straighter, and you’ll never experience the chain reaction of connected muscle groups seizing up to correct each other’s bad posture.

 

https://youtu.be/-mW55jAeBOE

 

5: You need to drink more water.

There are several trillion cells in your body, and several billion of them die every day. All the cells in your body are replaced every few months. Your cells are about 78% water, and everything they do requires water. In order to feed all your healthy cells and flush out your body, there are about 100,000 miles of tubes crammed in your body that circulate about 5 liters of blood through your body about 50 times a day. Your blood is about 92% water, and your kidneys remove about 2 liters of waste-water from your bloodstream every day in the form of urine.

Your entire body is about 60% water, which means you’re basically a walking waterfall. If you don’t drink enough water, the micro-machinery in your body won’t be able to grow to full size, function at full capacity, feed, clean or rebuild itself properly. This negatively affects every cell in your body. To put it in perspective, dehydration is worse for your body than smoking. I’m not saying that drinking water will cure all your health problems. I’m just saying, if you want to avoid pain, you should be drinking water at least every two hours, and about 2 liters of water every day.

 

 

6: You need to improve your diet.

The human body is more complicated than the Internet. It’s made up of reproducing, regenerating cells that perform millions of unique actions that require different nutrients. Bones build themselves with calcium, and muscles use calcium to contract. Most of your cells use protein, and all your cells use glucose for energy. Antioxidants keep the atomic structure of your cells stable. This list could go on for thousands of pages. The point is, eating healthily is responsible for a reason. Your body is a complex machine that requires specific types and quantities of nutrients to operate efficiently. If you don’t give your body what it needs, it won’t work correctly, and it will create pain to alert you to the problem. If you do eat healthily, every organ system in your body will work better and be more able to overcome any pain-inducing problems within its self.

Your muscles and skeleton are designed to work best at your optimal body weight. An unhealthy diet that puts on unnecessary weight will naturally strain your bones and muscles. Eating healthily will help you lose weight and improve your organ system functions better than dieting or exercising alone. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to exercise. It just means that until you’re eating healthily, you won’t be able to achieve and maintain your ideal body weight or enjoy all the benefits of having healthy organ systems no matter what else you do. If you’re already eating healthy and you’re not losing weight, talk to your doctor about what else you can do achieve your health goals. If you choose to drink sodas and eat fast food every day, understand that it’s only a matter of time before you develop muscle pains. If you accept that, then that’s your prerogative. It’s none of my business how you choose to live your life, but I (and your doctor) really think you’d be happier if you fed your body more of what it needs and less of what it doesn’t. That’s all I have to say about that. Do with it what you will.

 

 

7: You need a massage

Massage isn’t just for rich, spoiled spouses who want to be pampered. Almost everyone in the world can benefit tremendously from massage. I would go as far as saying that it’s as important to see a massage therapist as it is to see a dentist. Massage relaxes and lengthens your overworked muscles and tones your underworked ones. It breaks up adhesions and lengthens your fascia. It stimulates blood flow, which helps nourish and clean your muscles. It also stimulates lymph flow, which increases the speed at which your body removes toxic material from your body. Just the simple act of a compassionate human touch has positive physical effects on your organ systems. Plus, it’s emotionally rewarding and stress-reducing. Most importantly, your massage therapists can identify over/underworked muscles in your body and work with you to develop a plan to help you avoid recreating the same muscle pains in the future. If your muscles are hurting, you should seriously consider seeing someone who is professionally trained and licensed to fix muscle pain.

 

https://youtu.be/qti_d1i12V4

 

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