Fitter, happier, and other fantasies of modern life
slightlymarxistfounder.com
slightlymarxistfounder.com
I don't stress about not achieving personal goals immediately, as long as I'm making progress, or at least learning. My diet, for example, is pretty much a model of what many people would ideally like to eat. I didn't do this by going cold turkey, but rather by a decade of trying without judging myself for each failure.
By contrast, I've failed pretty hard at trying to wake up earlier over the last decade: instead of forcing myself to do so, I've made sure that my time commitments allow for it. It turns out this was a pretty great way to handle it, as I just found out I've had a sleep disorder for pretty much my entire life. Now that I've addressed it, waking up earlier has become a lot more feasible. If I had pushed myself and judged myself for failing the way the author does, I feel like I would've failed at both those endeavors.
H2 blockers lower your stomach's response to histamine. I believe antihistamine allergy medicines are H1 blockers: they work slightly differently but have roughly the same mechanism of action.
Amongst other side effects - antihistamines inhibit/block tanning.
Nasal strips, by contrast, are literally just holding your nose open. The worst I can imagine is that my skin might get irritated from regular contact with the adhesive, but so far that hasn't happened. They also work insanely well for me: Occasionally when I'm trying to get back to sleep, I remember that I can now take full breaths and I do it, and I IMMEDIATELY feel my brain sinking into sleep mode.
Sleep is SUPER important, and these things are all inexpensive and basically risk-free from a health perspective. (Though I would probably at least ask your doctor about reflux before deciding to take H2 blockers regularly. It's just prudent when deciding to take a new drug regularly).
Only drawbacks I've noticed to long time use (4 years): they are expensive, at least in the UK. And I think it has slightly altered the appearance of my nose (making it look puffier where the strips pull up) - but this is hard to know for sure, as I don't have pictures to compare as a baseline. I've tried to minimize any physical effect by using as small strips as possible.
I started 3 months ago and I am still not great at exercising, I do 2 minutes at a time at most. And I'd do this a couple times a day. But no excuses allowed because it's too dang easy to do, and I sound like a tiny baby complaining about one single pushup.
Within a couple weeks of doing this, my sleep improved. I fell asleep a lot easier, and woke up more refreshed. There's a freedom you get when you can truly say "something is better than nothing", and then stick to it.
A number of times I have literally done one single pushup for my workout. :P And it's just fine.
Edit: Actual routine (2 min) 20 pushups (maybe), 20 squats (maybe), halfass jumping jack things (30 secs?), 20 crunches (maybe), 20 stupid looking back crunches (not a real thing, but I like them), swing my arms around (monkey exercise?), twist my next (feels good). I attempted a pullup multiple times a day,finally after 2 weeks of this, I did a full pullup!
Today I did 2 pushups. :)
Good luck, and keep up the good work
Also, another rule I have, if it hurts, I stop. Period. So one day I did a few squats, my knee felt funny on one, a little pain on the next. I stopped. The next day it was fine and I did 20 squats again.
Thanks for the suggestion.
A month ago I went to a health spa and within a few days all my pain was gone. I wasn’t doing very strenuous excercises, but the important thing was I was doing something every day and using most of my muscles - it was basically aerobics designed for middle-age people.
My point is firstly that pain can be caused just because you aren’t using the muscles. Muscles get stiff if not used and that inturn can cause more problems (I believe most of my back injury was caused by tight hamstrings).
And secondly it’s often easy to fix, you don’t need to be deadlifting 300lbs and spending 3 hours in a gym, just some simple excercises you can do at home is enough. I wouldn’t even worry about how many you can do or whether your form is perfect (within reason), just using the muscles is the important part - especially for most of us who are at a desk for 9+ hours a day.
It's almost comical how rarely I've heard the kind of advice for light exercise. It's almost always "you have to get your heart rate up to 120 bpm for 30 min or you are wasting your time!" bah. "you need to do 200 reps or you're wasting your time!" double bah.
I run a totally lame mile run a few times a week, and I like my exercising, I make it easy and mostly enjoyable, and it's turned my life around.
I agree with the sore muscle thing, I had my acheles tendon hurt really bad when running. So I had to stop for a month. But when I started to run again, it still hurt, I was worried.
Here's the really dumb part. My TV/movie based medical knowledge told me that I may have to work through some pain (ie, like in physical therapy) to get my ankle back to normal. It was healed, just not in shape, or some such dumb thing. And it worked! (yah for the movie about the hurt army soldier who had to get his legs working again! and the stubborn nurse that wouldn't let him quit!)
Remember in old british movies/tv they would go out on a "constitutional"? (I thought that was so uptight and funny when I was younger)
I put a pullup bar where I walk past consistently, so I don't have to go out of my way to make a try at it.
Source: https://untotheone.com/public/health/excercise-programs/
I think a general "pay attention to your body's warning signs" is a good common sense rule.
Conversely, I've often reached goals by accident from a permanent change (ie, system) but rarely have I reached permanent change by reaching a goal. (even when they are spectacular goals).
(got to go back and finish the article now... a note of trivia, I had an inlaw that worked in the same office as Scott, and thought the cartoons were funny. He worked for a phone company in California.)
I've recently started doing step-ups when I first get up in the morning whilst waiting for the kettle to boil. I've a strong coffee table which is about 20"/50cm high and I do five steps leading with each leg, then switch legs and repeat until the kettle boils. I'm currently up to a total of about 50 step-ups and get my heart rate up to 145-155 region in that time. No sweat and no stiffness.
I'm not sure how much this is actually doing but having seen a few things on HIT recently it could well be a very good two minutes for my health. I've noticed a difference in how I can now spring up a couple of flights of stairs so something is changing for the better.
The most important for me is I can fit it in with zero 'cost' to my time and it's fairly easy to do every day.
Edited to add I also stand on one leg when cleaning my teeth. I've an electric toothbrush which 'pings' every 30 seconds so I swap legs each ping. Again it's zero time and may well be helping a little with balance and some of the core fitness.
I did run into an issue though. Just like you, I'd exercise while my milk was heating up (quick coffee, switched to hot chocolate (organic, don't give me greif)) but when I cut back on that too, it affected the number of times I worked out. lol. :P
Any suggestions on how to get a routine in where there's not triggering event?
My stopping of the gym was due to the kids changing schools so my routing changed. Like with your cutting back one small change can have consequences you'd never consider.
But running didn't help me with my neck and back or arms, so that's why I started with the upper body stuff, but I am noob with this. :P With the milk I microwave it, I have electric kettle for the tea though. Maybe I will have to make my self drink more tea to my exercise in?
Another note on the jogging thing, I run on the balls of my feet, to avoid knee/hip/spine issues associated with running. Though it's more strain on your calfs/ankles/tendons (soft tissues that repair easier than cartilage), and it's a little more exertion.
But my rule was I waste so many 10 min blocks of time in my life, I could do this.(10 min getting dressed, 10min in the shower, 10 min reading news, or eating breakfast, etc...) I was in physical pain all the time from years in a desk, I was desperate, that was my motivation. That was probably 3-4 years ago. This past winter it was too cold to run, so I tried the "actual" workout stuff.
What is a "press up for zero time" mean?
> What is a "press up for zero time" mean?
By that I mean it doesn't take up any special time, like doing my step ups when the kettle is boiling. Even if that extends to 3-4 minutes that's still done in no time.
BTW I measured the table and it's actually 17"/43cm high which is coincidentally about as high as a natural step up would go.
Can I ask what this consists of?
Given that nutritional science is such a dumpster fire, I basically end up with a hybrid diet that's based on the parts of nutritional science that aren't too controversial: high in fiber, low-GI carbs only (and less carbs than most eat), fats are almost all "healthy fats", mountains of vegetables and fruit, and I try to minimize red meat.
I eat a LOT (and a variety) of vegetables, quite a lot of beans and lentils, quite a bit of fish, eggs fairly often, a low to medium amount of meat (about 50% poultry and 50% lamb and pork). I get some additional fats from olives (which I cook with fairly often) and nuts. Whole grains make it in there to round out fiber intake, but not in particularly large quantities. I don't enjoy or eat much dairy (excl plain yogurt, I love it), fried stuff, or processed carbs. The only thing I would change about my diet for health purposes would be to go fully vegetarian (for a combination of health and ethical reasons), but I just find that whenever I weightlift regularly, it can be difficult to get enough protein without meat.
This sounds like I'm unusually ascetic about food, but I actually LOVE food: before I started cooking, I would eat a different cuisine everyday, and now that I cook regularly, I try to rotate through at least a handful of cuisines (keeping every cuisine's ingredients around is tougher). My relationship with all the unhealthy foods that people crave tends to be analogous to how you probably feel about Pixie Stix: yes, to some degree we're wireheaded to enjoy it, but once you're out of the habit of it, it actually starts tasting pretty gross. The flavors are unsubtle and uninteresting, once you stop being used to the dopamine hit you get from it. This is how I feel about (eg) grilled cheese, or bread-heavy dishes, or the cheese and dough part of pizza.
This is probably made a lot easier by the fact that the cuisines I decided to focus on when I had to narrow it down for cooking were Mediterranean (excl Italy) + Middle Eastern + North Indian, and most of the Mediterranean makes regular use of olives.
[1] I'm relatively new to regular cooking, since the first few years out of college, Google fed me, so a lot of my cooking is still following recipes by the book
[2] I really enjoy Fish Veracruz, which is a good example of this
Fish Veracruz looks tasty, thanks for the suggestion!
I would think, for example, that the author would look down very much on your definition of success in eating, given that your standard appears to be "a model of what many people would ideally like to eat."
That was perhaps oddly phrased, but I believe you're misunderstanding me. The way I eat is 1) extremely enjoyable to me, 2) feels _really_ good from a health perspective, and 3) _is_ healthy, at least according to the best guess nutritional science has to offer.
Could you clarify what exactly you think the author would find to look down on? It sounds like you misinterpreted me to be saying that my goal was _per se_ to eat in a way that people would think I'm awesome. I really couldn't care less what people think of my diet, as evidenced by the fact that I consistently deal with mild social pressure around my diet (eg, that it's super weird to not like pizza or fried things).
What I actually meant was that I don't really suffer much from succumbing to food cravings that I believe aren't healthy for me, because my dietary preferences happen to align with my best understanding of what healthful eating is. (The main exception here, as noted in my other comment, is that I'd ideally eat less meat).
The guy got played by the system and he's mad about it, plain and simple. There's no new information in this article, just a somewhat novel and ironic perspective of how capitalism is a 'terrible' thing. Because we've never read about how people earn money taking advantage of the uninformed before.
In all of my research of self-help it's usually very clearly stated somewhere in big red text 'INDIVIDUAL RESULTS MAY VARY' and somehow this genius missed that. His shortcomings from blindly following in the footsteps of others is now the fault of an entire industry interested in offering perspectives to those who wish to grow.
I've always had a strong drive for self improvement; in fact I'd go so far as to say it's one of my primary drives. The reason I haven't really faced the issues that the author is describing is because what I do has nothing to do with "productivity porn" or "disgusting consumerism". I buy books to learn things or use the library, I weightlift regularly in the school issued gym shorts from my high school soccer team, and everything I've learned and practiced about mindfulness cost me nothing but my time.
I don't have a problem with the author's castigation of productivity porn, but rather with his lazy conflation of all efforts at self-improvement. Hell, look at the verse he chooses to quote from Fitter, Happier[1]: it's about eating well and exercising regularly.
[1] incidentally, I had an OK Computer poster with this songs lyrics on my wall in college, so it's not like the complaint about productivity porn doesn't resonate with me.
[1]https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/willpower-limited-resource.pd...
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
It's good that you've found something that works for you, but sadly it won't necessarily generalise. And the danger of this is thinking that people who don't do this are lazy.
To anybody struggling with this, the thread "Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?" [0] is full of frank and good advice.
Another peculiarity I've found is that all the little things I do are connected. Something as simple as going on HN to read through comments, instead of some other medium, will snowball into a huge change, as the rest of my habits start becoming more in-line with the effects of "reading HN comments." The main point here is that you have little control over your circumstances, your mood, and your self, but you have a very simple choice: engage in something that's beneficial regularly or don't. If you do, everything else has a way of "falling into place" as you unconsciously veer away from negative activities towards more productive ones. The same can be said about friends, as they will undoubtedly have an effect on your overall actions.
With this in mind, the gym becomes this "center." That one thing which you enter voluntarily. The one choice you make to go lift for an hour daily, will be the foundation for everything else to build off of. The choice of doing something that requires discipline will carryover into other areas of life, as you become more independent of outcomes and things that don't matter. A more apt example would be having a family. If you make the intentful choice to make sure your family is doing well, then as long as they are, everything else will be fine. Perfect even. Lifting is no different. As long as you get that 1 hour of discipline, everything else will be just fine.
But another thing's been nagging me. I see it often, this "danger of this is thinking that people who don't do this are lazy." That the side effects of judging people are worse than the benefits you get from the actions which warranted that judgement. There's also the veneer of self-rationalization that I cannot shake from reading such comments. Maybe it is sour grapes? I don't say this with the intent to insult, but I cannot shake the feeling that there's something off about these sorts of thinking. Maybe it's the trying to poke holes in the topic instead of using it as a standard to aim for. Maybe it's the seesaw of polarization. Wherein these people have went from one extreme, of hyper-productivity and massive effort to be "efficient," and then swung to the other side as they burned out and feel like they've "grown as a person," and realized it's ok to be "yourself." Which in itself, would be a good thought, but it's adulterated into being an excuse for lack of want to do something that may or not be beneficial, but hard.
This doesn't mean your solution is wrong! It's just a csse of different circumstances. Very hard to generalize this stuff.
If you aren’t clear on what it is you want, you’ll always be caught feeling unsure if you’re doing enough.
Well said.
People generally crave social validation, but very few will pay for it. Yet, that is exactly what that proposal entails: reduced salary in exchange for (forced/insincere) validation and recognition by management. The only difference is that the latter is the passive choice.
I generally agree that corporate head-honchoes will bilk anyone they can for every penny they can...
It seems like people are unable to focus on the big picture stuff that actually matters (don't get fat, sleep enough, have enough money to not be broke, have good relationships with family and friends, managing stress effectively, etc.). So they get obsessed with these random things nobody gives a fuck about and fail at the big picture stuff.
I am nicer and more forgiving when I don't have a sore throat or a migraine. And when I have more energy, I can play with kids instead of taking a nap.
Or make it _harder_ to not behave like a prick?
People trying to improve their lives is not a bad thing, whether that is getting more exercise or trying to be more mindful. That's not actually the problem. On the whole, a given person would live better if they could magically add exercising 3 times a week to their life. The problem is, really, lack of empathy. The problem is that we blame the person for not doing so, instead of their situation. We blanket request that this person achieves this, but not for their benefit, but for ours...
People in the world are actually in very different phases of life, and some phases are simply worse than others. People don't all start out at the same exact point so that it takes them all the same amount of resources to reach exercising 3 days a week, for example. People have very different backgrounds. This is often ignored, so the whole idea of self-improvement tends to just not take into account the general ugliness and messiness of the world. Then, people brought up in such a world, comparing themselves to expectations born out of refusing to see the ugly world, will of course feel inadequate. And what this tends to do is squeeze out the people who don't feel welcome and generating an elite of sorts. "Live fitter, happier, more productive" does not have a very diverse audience...
Another problem is that modern living simply has more information and tasks to keep track of. The pure amount, after a while, takes a toll that's very hard to directly calculate. But there's a very big difference between stress of having to do 2-3 things, but having little control over other long term things, vs having (theoretical) control of most facets of your life but that resulting in 20-30 things to keep track of. Having so much control creates this impression that everything is your fault, resulting in nearly an endless source of guilt if you don't nip it in the bud.
Of course people turn to productivity apps and hacks - they have more to manage and are overloaded! Many people end up unable to manage the process automatically so they, understandably, use various tools to help.
"Gilbreth noted was that the so-called expert factory workers are often the most wasteful of their motions and strength. Because of their energy and ability to work at high speed, such men may be able to produce a large quantity of good work, and thus qualify as experts, but they tire themselves out of all proportion to the amount of work done."
What would happen to the change-your-life-in-24-hours book segment of the economy; the fad-diet book industry; the people who claim authorship of the books; the photographers who sell their images to a middleman to license to the publisher; the publishers that print them.
And when the books don't work because there's an entire industry devoted to feeding consumers misinformation and convincing them that the low-effort obvious things they can do (moving your diet as far away as possible from what the processed food industry is selling and becoming more active) won't work unless you're deeply abnormal in some way, the situation is beneficial to the healthcare industry that benefits from prescribing antidepressants and treating obesity-related diseases.
The wealth-creators of these industries are creating jobs in growing sectors of the economy. If you fix the real underlying problems, people will be out of their livelihoods.
I was simply attempting to construct an argument that can be made before somebody else did so. It's not something I agree with, and I suspect few could agree with it as being overall good with the examples I used, but the economic upsides do seem, to first order, to be undoubtedly real.
It's really more like an adaptation of the Parable of the Broken Window [0]. The problem is that for each commercial party involved, any fixing of the root cause makes things worse for them and those they employ. In other words, this is an area where pandering to business interests will never fix the root problem, because economic improvement for a host of industries requires people getting worse.
Politicians don't generally want to put those that elected them out of work. And yet sometimes the alternative is shortening or worsening the lives of others. The thing is nobody will associate the shortened life expectancy or the worsened state of being with the decision-makers but they will if their action causes the loss of their jobs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Getting up very early sounds like an absolutely terrible idea, and I would never recommend it to anyone. You’re just going to be sleep deprived, and sleep deprived people make dumb decisions and work slowly.
It also makes me feel dumb; and judging by things I've written recently, I am trading misery for intelligence, at least in certain areas. Misery, it's worth pointing out, can lower an individual's cognitive abilities.
Side note: I agree about food and exercise. I knew, from past experience, that I need to pay careful attention to what I eat and how I exert myself.
I just couldn't seem to get going. I have no rational explanation, but there you have it.
So far, the sleep-restriction experiment, consisting of one night per week without sleep, is showing favorable results. I know I'm coming off as a dullard more than I usually do, but I'm not clawing my face off worrying about it. Oh, and it seemed to lift whatever was preventing me from improving my diet and activity levels. I wish I had a better solution, or that I had some innate drive to just do the things I strongly believe beneficial simply because doing beneficial things is rational.
Once you realize that every core belief you once held was manufactured by a corporation/religion/government in an effort to empower that agency, then life really begins.
This is too extreme. Corporations, governments et. al. are not original generators of these things, they just co-opt them.
Exercise is co-opted by many groups, but it didn't originate with those groups, it has always existed and worked really well. Same with most of these things.
The fact that an agency decided to make money off of it (why wouldn't it? Why is that, in itself, a negative?) in a capitalist society (where things are valued through money) is... expected? And, in many cases, it's a positive development: making it easier for people to exercise.
I'm just not really seeing the nihilism.
We sort of use exercise to supplement our jobs/lifestyle that doesn't require physical activity. The crisis of finding time to exercise is exasperated by the very lifestyle that doesn't give time for the benefits physical activities give you, but still creates feelings stress and anxiety. Feeling bad about not exercising is somewhat of a negative feedback loop.
Humans exercising recreationally, and generally putting a lot of effort into their health was normal across history, it was just limited to smaller more aristocratic groups in many cases.
Basically, people partaking in recreational exercise is not some sort of a mysterious corporate, religious, or governmental invention. It's, if anything, primal behavior that mostly goes down to the fact that exercise is fun for a lot of people and people also like feeling better and looking good. I see nothing wrong with people providing associated services to supplant these activities getting paid for it in an economic system that's literally all about being paid for providing services.
Agencies co opting something doesn't eliminate it. Sometimes it even helps it. Sometimes it, yes, harms it. But that's a far cry from "every core belief you once held was manufactured by a corporation/religion/government in an effort to empower that agency". That's a major philosophical claim that you can't back up with misgivings about sedentary jobs in the West.
> Feeling bad about not exercising is somewhat of a negative feedback loop.
Feeling bad due to not measuring up was a thing since this whole process got jump started where not measuring up meant you die, suffer horribly, or both. That's my major philosophical claim for the day.
Why do you believe or desire the things you do? Be honest with yourself and try to keep in mind at all times the role of moral/social pressure. Think about history and the different forms of status and normality that came before.
Go ahead and read books by great thinkers but don't let that be everything. The most valuable form of learning is when you can untether yourself from appeals to authority in conversation and speak intelligently about your own conclusions.
nor are the smarter people among us burdened by corporate-created fantasies, tbh.
http://diffuser.fm/radiohead-fitter-happier/
"I'm not standing behind the lyrics any more. Sometimes your ideas get entangled with other ideas and then you have to apologise for the original idea because it doesn't make sense any more. That's what happened with 'Fitter Happier.' Now, I listen to the piano part."
The ending line is pretty harsh on people who just want to improve their lives ("A pig in a cage on antibiotics"), I've always had mixed feelings about the song when I've heard it when trying to fix a (perceived?) problem in my life.
It's a a bit of a childish view on adults, every lyric writer will look back on his teenage/early 20s thoughts and see that growing older has suddenly made you understand your elders and cringe at how ridiculous your views actually were when you're young, immortal and carefree. When it turns out youth doesn't last, we all die and mummy and daddy stop paying at some point.
That has a bit of a different implication.
How many older-than-millennial folks feel this same pressure?
IDK, I think my generation are the ones who took up the mantle and crammed this stuff down the youngsters' throats. I'd imagine that most marketing agencies are run by folks my age who came up through the ranks while the millennials were in their formative years and they grew up being brainwashed by the hippies who took over the education system after their revolution failed.
Growing up though, it was perfectly acceptable to be a slacker with plenty of role models on TV and in the movies.
I go to the gym twice a week and have done so for years. My mom in her 70s still exercises weekly as she has done since as far as i can remember. I have other active friends whose parents were the same while my inactive friends parents were and are inactive.
personally sitting around vs. hiking or climbing a mountain or swimming laps would drive me crazy. Theres so much to experience and enjoy.
Seeing through yoga pants marketing trick is not enough. You have to look further. You want perfect models in books, like 4 a.m. waking up CEO. Because we all know it is hard to change or become like model from a book. But you still can be better 5% than yourself a week ago by trying to do it.
Responsible adult should know those are only perfect guidelines. You also know no one will buy book that will tell him how to be 5% better. Why would I read story of my neighbor who lifts 5kg more on the gym? How would it motivate me to even try to get better?
Whole pop culture and pop science is about creating perfect vision of life. If we achieve 5% of that we will be a lot better.