Seeking: The math behind 'Do you even lift bro'
Imagine you are grumpy about your health. You are sleepy a lot.
Somebody tells you, ‘do you even lift bro’
And you are annoyed not because it is trivializing your issue, but because you actually have lifted before, quite a lot, and it didn’t help.
The issue could be any number of things. Health, dating, having energy to keep up with your kid, your wife being into you, finding clothes that make you look professional, your skin looking good. A number of issue can be solved with lifting more.
However, it can be annoying to hear this, especially if you keep hearing the same “fixes.” When it’s men talking to men, it’s usually to lift. When it’s women talking to women, it’s usually to lose weight or get better clothes.
In part these are offered as solutions because they work so well to solve a large number of issues, and even if they do not solve the issues, often put you in a better state mentally and a better state with respect to society, that it gets you at least one step closer to having a better status quo, defining a new problem, and potentially having new solutions offered to you or available to you.
Often people have tried these general solutions before, and these things have not made them happier. It is actually pretty hard to go through life without having tried these things!
Furthermore, people have usually had the ‘end results’ of these things in their pasts. For women — many women are pretty and skinny when they are in middle and high school. For men — many men are in good shape and do team sports in high school and college. Having had the successful ‘end conditions’ for the recommended activities in the past, and still currently having your current problems can be discouraging!
But the ways that people are discouraged from doing something again, that they have already tried before, without it working, is not trivial and should not be dismissed. That the most common solutions, that are often recommended because they are usually so effective, are also the solutions that people get discouraged about probably is important and interesting somehow.
There are lot of men who were in great shape at some point in their lives and still did not have the person they wanted to marry love them back.
There are a lot of women who were in great shape at some point in their lives and did not get everything they wanted out of life.
However, the feelings that it will be futile this time around does not mean you should not try it again.
Imagine you are sad because you want to be learning more. Somebody tells you to read a book. You are discouraged because you have read many books before already. Why would reading a book now, solve your problem?
You can see right there that the logic doesn’t make sense. Books generally help you learn new things. Reading a book should help you learn more things at any stage of your life.
But there is a bit more to it.
Reading a book previously obviously doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read a book now, regardless of if reading the book helped you before. Perhaps reading the book did solve your problems previously, but now you have different problems. In that case, do you really know if the book won’t help you again? Maybe it will be a different book. Perhaps the book did not solve your problems previously, but now you have different problems. Maybe it will help this time around. Perhaps the book did solve your problems previously, and now you have the same problems. Why not try again what worked last time?
In each of these situations, if you have a complicated situation with unknowns, doing the thing that generally makes you a better person and improves your health is a good bet.
Meanwhile, if for whatever reason you cannot work out and cannot read, then that is a good clue for the shape of the problem that you are experiencing, and can help you figure out things to work on. In what ways are you unable to work out or read books? That is your problem statement.
If you can’t read something useful and can’t work out, then figuring out what you should be doing instead, with an eye on some day being able to do these things and getting joy from them, can be a way to actually think about solving your problems without creating more problems that take you farther away from being able to do the things that generally allow you to solve problems. (If you come up with a solution that takes you farther away from lifting, or wanting to lift, then that option of ‘what if you lift bro’ is farther away from being a solution to some other problem you might have, and generally it is cool to have problems that can be solved.)
I bet there is some cool math to explain this. If anybody has leads or suggestion, I would love to hear it!
There’s something to this that’s about creating a baseline, actually. To someone who wants more mass or to be stronger, ‘lifting’ is ‘lifting’.
To someone who wants to…I mean, I dunno, ‘know more’ is a stretch, but I guess if you want to read more books you buy or borrow more books.
Of course that's what a person would do--what am I talking about?
I mean to address the guilt or collapse loop of not doing something one 'wants to do' and is 'reasonably able to do' but just...doesn't. You brought up health and reading.
I got one: I get paid for art, right? And sometimes I don't do it. WHY? Don't I want to be paid to make MORE art? (Yes.) What's the f'n issue here?
I want to be healthier--->I don't know how
*Nope, that's not at hand here
I want to be healthier--->I'm not willing to eat wholly different foods (as an e.g.)
*Closer but I don't think we're stuck on particular obstacles
I want to be healthier--->fuck that shit I'll just fuck it up
*I don't know about you but here's where I find myself (though with $$$, not health)
When I'm paralyzed in that unreasonable space that just refuses, and we talk about 'lifting', that doesn't come to mind as a betterment for bulk or mogging or even strength...
I hear 'consistency of an action', because I'd consider myself a runner. I hear meditation when I hear 'lifting', and it's not because I see bodybuilding culture or gym culture or its adherents as holy and humble and mostly spiritual...it's that MY RELATIONSHIP to my body is in that space when I hear something like "yoga" or "lifting" or "running" or "lap swimming" or even things like racketball or squash (do people still play squash?) Which means it doesn't have to be lifting. Or meditation. Or a 'walk'. It's some consistency of a measurable action--temporally or task-wise.
Consistency of an action starts to clarify and run hard water over the other parts of your life where you're fucking stuck but shouldn't be (hi!), where you're fixed on something you should let go (hello there!), or when you know exactly what you want but like a Mule will not even SHIFT YOUR WEIGHT toward it even if you were more than halfway across an opening drawbridge literally THROWING YOU AT YOUR DREAMS (omg this is about meeee!).
My flailing times come more from a lack of consistent action than a lack of money/love/rest/health, if I'm being honest.
I need to turn this into a full blown article, I think. Let me finish on something silly I noticed the other day: I've been at my job for six months, right?
My Duolingo streak is over 100 days for the first time since I made an account. I stand at 184.
The moment I started my job, I started my streak. Consistency of action is a holy measure, not in an of itself--but it what it reveals about the parts of your life that require more attention, more flow.