Plague of Strength

None of this has anything to do with lifting- it’s the bits and pieces of a framework for helping you motherfuckers be less miserable, because it seems a lot of you spend much of your time either treading water or actively unhappy. That said, I’m no life coach and am not rich- I’m just intensely content with my life and my lifestyle. I thought perhaps poverty was in the past some kind of driver for me to train more intensely, but I think I was just intensely unhappy and stressed and thought I was training harder than I was because I was already breathless with rage upon beginning a set. As I’ve gone from being discontented but manageably so to happy, content, and strong as fuck, I have come to realize that at the very least the following is true:

1. If you are unhappy, you will sleep poorly and recover poorly.
2. If you recover poorly, you will not make the gains you might have made if you were well-rested.
3. Happiness and contentment = better sleep
4. Better sleep = better at everything while awake.

I’ve no idea how anyone else looks at their day to day lives, though it seems to me that people spend an awful lot of time wishing for shit they don’t have rather than enjoying their present and improving their day-to-day lives. I am hyper-focused on self improvement (though it would astonish people to discover that I’d sooner eat a bullet than read a self-help book, because they disgust me). I personally create a framework for living that allows me the financial freedom to enjoy the little shit (like bountiful weed and being able to pay myself to write) without sacrificing my sanity or happiness in the balance.

That said, I am hardly flush and have no kids, so my method of life structure is inapplicable to most, especially since I live close enough to New York that I can use public transportation instead of a car. The life structure isn’t as important, in my mind, as making yourself believe you’re worth liking, which required of actual work on my part. Most of therapy seems to consist of dealing with past baggage, and I don’t carry around my baggage so much as I use my last few years of life as a barometer for who I am as a person. I don’t care who did what to whom when I was a kid and will never understand why people allow that shit to get in their way, but I don’t care so much about the perceptions of others as I do about my actual physical track record, because so long as that looks good, I can be personally happy with myself.

Though psychologists almost certainly would disagree, I doubt most people can actually come up with five genuine reasons why they’re not a piece of shit. And my goal isn’t just not not be a piece of shit, but someone who genuinely made the world being better for having in it. Being better than everyone else at everything means everything, including empathy, sympathy, and general behavior. If you can’t prove to yourself you’re a good person, that’s because you’re not. Thus, the obvious answer is to become a good person so you can like yourself.

In the past, I struggled with facing the day for a awhile when I really only had drunken debauchery in my immediate past and no reason to like myself even a little. I’ve never been one to rest on my past accomplishments, and really have no interest in what a person in the present did in the past beyond the broad strokes so that I have a frame of reference for dealing with them. As such, if I had no recent accomplishments to rely upon for a measure of self-confidence, I was lost. I had to start doing stuff every day, first thing upon awakening, that were both relatively selfless and positive so that I had a positive outlook for the day. So that is what I’d do- do little rad shit in the morning for the cats or the neighbors or something (or just randomly make a cool lunch for my wife, etc), then set about doing what I needed to do. I ensured that whatever I did I threw myself into it, because I figured with as much people gossip, I could at least have a day of super husband/information sponge/hard-ass worker shining bright in my recent history as a reason to make me get noticed for a positive reason.

That said, no one fucking wins every game of Call of Duty, and even if they can pull it off for a day, they can’t pull it off endlessly. Furthermore, there is more than one way to announce yourself victorious in shit like Call of Duty- I personally have my own balance of Win-Loss ratio, Objectives, and K-D that I continually try to improve. If I’m having an off day I can still ensure my team wins, for instance, and call it a victory, or if I’m trying to buoy a shitty team by pulling a Michael Jordan I might lose the overall but have had a stellar game in losing. Life is precisely like that- you’re never going to be all green lights all the time- it’s an impossible pace to keep up over time, and your overall performance ends up degrading to sub-par even for a regular, non-chaos magician hell-bent on achieving immortality through intense and and incessant physical, mental, and spiritual improvement.

Don’t Be a Piece of Shit

As a historian, I can tell you two things about most of the “great” people in history 1) they were a piece of shit, and 2) if they were in power they mostly paid people to scrub their histories, rather than not be a piece of shit. That said, the bar is set pretty low for most people and I have very reasonable expectations, as I have the benefit of around 4500 years of historical facts jammed into my cranium to form those expectations. There are certainly a bunch of people that are remembered (quite rightly) as great, but then there the Vince McMahon style of “great person.” Is he a phenomenal businessman? Undoubtedly. Did he single-handedly create an international industry? Absolutely. Is he phenomenally rich? Definitely. And yet, he will be remembered as nothing more than a piece of shit. The Chinese Civil War war a battle between two egomaniacal shitbirds who were utterly detestable, yet both of them ostensibly won. And though both men are revered as national founders and heroes, I think it’s pretty unlikely anyone would want to have either of them to dinner if they were still living- you’d likely end up homeless and/or dead.

Similarly, I recall Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (who were famous US politicians at the nation’s founding who fought a duel, killing Hamilton) as “one asshole killed another asshole and life went on as usual.” Hamilton should’ve been shot in the fucking face and left for the dogs for inventing a fake war with France to institute the Alien and Sedition Act (though I concede he was right about federalism versus confederacy).

And while anyone is going to have a “but he/she/they DID do this horrible thing” on their resume, it’s far easier to just be decent than to barely survive on your PR campaign like you’re minor-league Trumper Matt Gaetz. I’m no saint and I’ve said a lot of stupid shit in my day, but I try to keep the dumber and more detestable stuff in the past. And if I get called out on it I jump on the grenade, because fuck it- you can’t change the past.

All you can do is be better today than you were yesterday, because you can’t change the past.

So treat life like Call of Duty if ya gotta- each morning is a respawn. You can salvage a shitty day by doing nothing other than not dwelling on what made it shitty in the first place and dealing with the day a it stands. If you’re in the middle of a firefight and you’ve got white phosphorous burning through your abdomen, bitch away. Otherwise, from both a historical and objective perspective whatever is bothering you is relatively easy to resolve if you just look at it rationally. So go the fuck to bed and attack the day when you wake up.

• If you’re a WoW person, refrain from doing any of the things that you’d do in the game. Grinding levels is something Chinese gold farmers do while working in computer-filled sweatshops, and it will not bring happiness.
• If you are gonna step in and blather on about your various mental illness diagnoses, I don’t give a fuck- science says at most your genetics account for 50% of your happiness (the range is 35-50%), so you are at least 50% in control of your own happiness even in the midst of a mental health crisis. If you need a psychologist or psychiatrist, get one, and if you lack the energy or courage to do that, drink a Reign and bang some test, then do it. You’re in control of your own life and your excuses mean nothing to anyone but you.

To that end:

Smile More. Neutral facial expressions are for the profoundly autistic, and I guarantee autistic wish they wore a different face. I’m not referring to chicks with this, by the way- this is for the dudes, and particularly those who wear a lot of metal/horror/black-in-color shirts. Smile or you look like a brooding menace, which is a fucking retarded look unless you want to eventually be chased out of town with pitchforks like Frankenstein’s monster. Because I’m a wildly emotional person who has always been laughed at for having no poker face, I worked hard to have an impassive face, which was fucking stupid. One, it didn’t work, and two it likely gave the impression I was quietly plotting to kill everyone because I’m shy and made few facial expressions. If you want to rock a big, shit-eating grin, that is on you- I just shoot for a borderline smirk so as not to look insane.

And to those guys who think their placid demeanor is supposed to belie some fearsome beast underneath, it doesn’t- you’re just the weird stiff guy holding up a wall and glaring at everyone for no reason. Don’t be that guy. If you’re holding up the wall, then you’re missing the point- also, it’s pretty easy to start an conversation by loudly saying “let me break this awkward silence by introducing myself,” because facing someone with whom you’ve made eye contact but haven’t spoken has to be the most awkward shit ever, which is why it’s always in high school movies. Any cop will corroborate the first sentence of this paragraph, by the way- there is a difference between the strained calm a rookie cop thinks he’s displaying the first day on the job and the loose and easygoing confidence that belies either an idiot or a person who is comfortable in any situation for a reason. Hell, most things are like that, when you get down to it- they’re called try-hards for a reason.

And the “bad” reason: for those of you who like to mix every now and again, there is nothing that starts a instigates a fight in which you have a clear cut case for self defense in the righteous beating you hang on them than grinning at someone acting tough. Grinning and chuckling at a tough guy is the easiest way in the world to get them to swing, and you know it is a right handed haymaker when they finally shut the fuck up and get down to fighting. If they ever shut the fuck up and get down to fighting, I should say.

Be Social. I am not saying this because I’m on some hippie shit- I am saying this because living in the South for about eight years drove me totally out of my mind. I was so anti-social when I got back to civilization that I couldn’t have a fucking conversation without arguing and was so emotionally repressed from stifling my hate with no outlets but drinking that I blew up my life entirely. Over the last couple of years my wife and I both realized we’d gotten really weird over the preceding years and needed to unfuck ourselves, so we started being social with the neighbors, which led to volunteering to feed the near homeless and got me my current rad side gig. Though much of that social shit was an utter disaster, a lot of really cool shit came out of it, including such things as actual real-life friends and overall life satisfaction and happiness ratings of 100 pretty much every day.

Hurt feelings, nervousness, and a fear of new situations are all a part of life. Hiding from that shit turns you weird and mean, though, so just suck it the fuck up.

Be More Generous. Yeah, it’s likely that they’re gonna go buy a bundle (of heroin, for the non-English-as-a-primary-language crowd) if you hand a homeless person ten bucks, but in my experience it’s entirely possible they’ll take that shit, get a sandwich, and just go back to being quietly insane and generally a pleasant person. And you’ll have made their fucking day with that ten bucks, which will make you feel good. Don’t demean it by filming the fucking thing, and you don’t tell anyone about it- it is your little gold star on the inside of your chest that no one can peel off. Especially when you, like me, are not really built to hand out tens- if you’re giving it to someone on the street, you’re giving it to someone who needs it worse than you do. Or buy them some burgers- for the real derelicts I generally do that. They appreciate it even if they’re occasionally dicks about it. And if they’re dicks just laugh and walk off, because no matter how much of an asshole you are, you can at least rank yourself above them on your worst of days if you just grin and tell them not to choke on that food you bought them.

I am not going to make any claims along the lines of prosperity ministers or The Secret, but I will say that generosity always seems to get repaid in the end, one way or the other.

Do Some Charity. This is very, very different from simply being generous, because simply being generous doesn’t require you to leave your comfort zone. We spent a little over a year working with a charity to deliver food to the nearly homeless, but as with many things that thing disintegrated into weird fighting about who was in charge, which I found weird for a bunch of hippies but whatever. Over the years I’ve done a bunch of work with Meals on Wheels, and delivering food to people in need is a rad way to help people out. Mostly, they just are lonely as fuck and will tlak your ear off, so we’d just blaze and let them babble away. Everyone won, and we’d go away feeling damn fine about ourselves for making a shitload of people happy on our own time.

This will also get you over the social weirdness you probably claim you don’t have. That fear you feel volunteering is pretty fucking crazy, but you pretty quickly get accustomed to being around a lot of different kinds of people, and people with whom you would likely never otherwise come into contact. That gives you more context for the world’s goings-on, making you both a better person from a spiritual and emotional sense as well as an intellectual one.

And remember- you respawn every day. Every day is a new opportunity to take the stage and rock the fucking crowd, and it’s up to you to maximize your ability to do it every day. Put the past behind you- dwelling on it won’t fix shit, and really all you can do is own up to your fuckups and do better going forward. I recently made the decision to stop eating pork because pigs are too intelligent to keep as food animals, and frankly it’s a pain in the ass to have a conscience. That said, the easy way is for pussies.

There are my suggestions, which you can take or leave as you see fit. If you have a addition to the list, feel free to leave it in the comments. I realize that this might come off as a bunch of pussy shit, but it is frankly one of the uncomfortable acts of charity of which I wrote. This sort of thing is intensely uncomfortable for me to write about, but I’m doing so in the help that it is of aid to anyone out there who’s done any of the silly shit I’ve done in the past. If my discomfort can save a couple of you a couple of years of unnecessarily drunken self-destructiveness, I’ll jump on that grenade for ya.

“He’s making a fucking jerk of himself. I mean, well, why go on with that? Who’s gonna benefit from that, huh? No, you just gotta kill it and put an end to it. You don’t linger on about it, you don’t fuckin’ go around weepin’ about it, and you don’t, you know, behave like a kid with a sore thumb, you know, loco suckin’ it, now ‘mmm, my poor fucking thumb!’ I mean, you—you gotta behave like a grown fuckin’ man, huh? You gotta shut the fuck up. Don’t be sorry, don’t look fuckin’ back, because, believe me, no one gives a fuck. You understand?”

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