Plague of Strength

Contentment Vs Idealism: You Need Both to Fuck Shit Up in the Gym

Jamie Chaos

“Health is the noblest good for mortal man; the next is beauty; the third riches acquired without guile; the fourth enjoyment of social pleasures with your friends” -Greek poet Simonides

If the feats of their athletes and trireme rowers weren’t testament enough, or their invention of dumbbells, or the physiques of mythological heroes in their art, the above quote definitely illustrates how seriously ancient Greeks took being jacked and tan. Unlike modern Westerners, whose poetry in no way lauds physical beauty or interpersonal relationships, focusing instead on shallow bullshit like drugs and material wealth, Greek social life centered around various forms of badassery, and they held aloft physical, intellectual, and social perfection as ideals that could and should be striven towards on a daily basis.

“Percocets. molly, percocets. Chasin’ checks. Never chase no bitch.” With music like that being fed to them, it’s no wonder kids are shooting up schools and offing themselves.

The Greeks seem to have been wholly unconcerned with the modern trainees’ preoccupation bordering on the pathological with “unrealistic expectations,” which those trainees and their coaches claim leads to discouragement, disillusionment, and eventual abandonment of training. Putting aside the fact that I find people of that ilk to be fucking disgusting, it bears discussion that this mentality, though at odds with that of the lifters of antiquity, is the prevailing sentiment of the young lifters of today. They pose philosophical questions like, “is good enough really good enough?” Well, what in the heavenly pornhub the fuck does “good enough” mean, anyway? The bar seems to drop lower and lower every day, fueled by “exercise scientists” and their fans who thrive on discarding the elite as genetic outliers, drug cheats, or outright liars, so at this point good enough might just mean you mustered up the courage to waddle your dumpy ass into the gym and foam roll for a half hour while shittalking real lifters on the internet.

Granted, there is much to be said for being content with one’s self. Idealism does indeed breed discontentment, but the two outlooks needn’t be mutually exclusive. Just like a burn victim who has mastered The Game‘s pick up artist nonsense to the point that he’s regularly getting ugly chicks off with the use of his tongue and scabrous stumps where his immolated hands once were, you’ve absolutely got to appreciate the strides you make in the gym. But just like that dude’s goal to land a supermodel girlfriend, not every goal you have will be entirely likely. Nevertheless, maintaining that goal and making steady progress in its direction can only improve your life, unless you’re a weepy bitch who constantly laments what they don’t have rather than appreciating what they do.

To wit:

“A failure promoted by optimistic ideas is the source of much unhappiness. In moments free from pain, our restless wishes represent, as it wedre a mirror, the image of happiness that has no counterpart in reality, seducing us to follow it; in doing so we bring pain upon ourselves, and that is something that is undeniably real. After wards, we come to look with regret upon that lost state of painlessness; it is a paradise from which we have gambled away; it is no longer with us, and we long in vain to undo what has been done.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer looked like what you’d expect a natty bro who jacks off to Pubmed might- ugly, wild-eyed from surfing 4Chan, skinny, and with a neck too weak to hold up his fucking head.

Schopenhauer wasn’t done with his bitch-made prescient ramblings- he continued his paean to justify the weakness of future pussies living out their twenties in their parents’ basements in kiddie pools filled with their own tears with shit like:

“Suppose that, with the exception of some sore or painful spot, we are in a physically sound and healthy condition; the sore of this one spot will completely absorb our attention, causing us to lose the sense of well being and destroying all comfort in life.”

If that doesn’t sound like a far more eloquent and erudite version of the typical troglodyte’s reasoning for not setting his or her bar for personal success higher, I don’t know what does. The problem, however, with that type of reasoning remains the same:

It’s all bullshit.

The belief that only the genetically gifted, literal freaks of nature, can achieve peak physical condition is an artificial construction that favors a tiny elite at everyone else’s expense. This construct leaves two options: ape that elite’s methods in the hopes of achieving similar results, or the abandonment of any effort to match or exceed what they have accomplished. What people fail to realize, however, is that the people setting those elite marks are people who placed no artificial limits on themselves in the first place. They saw something greater than the norm for themselves. Instead of erecting barriers to forward progress, they created opportunities to smash shit and stomp through the rubble. Instead of “genetic limits,” they looked to the stories of the great humans of the past and saw in themselves the same greatness.

Milo Steinborn, squatting pioneer who did a rockover squat with 522lbs at a bodyweight of 200lbs. Genetic freak, or just a man who actually fucking believed in himself?

Perhaps the issue at hand isn’t the difference between achieving and ideal and being content with being slightly above average- perhaps it is the unwillingness to recognize the difference between possibility and probability. It seems almost instinctive, as chaos magician Gordon White posits, to believe that the most desirable possibility is most probable, and the “logical” denizens of the internet then turn that natural inclination on its head, believing the most probable outcome is the most desirable. The most desirable outcome, then, is the one that requires little to no effort, no conscious thought, and is by far the easiest to achieve.

Welcome to the science based bullshit and natty superfriends mindset.

Yeah, there is a relatively low probability that a 500lb bench is in most people’s futures, but it’s not due to genetics- it’s due to effort, dedication, and outside events and influences. Most people are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices of time and effort to even make a serious attempt at benching 405, which means that rather than being an unlikely future occurrence it is an impossibility because one cannot arrive at a destination without actually making the trip. Moreover, there is about seventy years of psychological research backing the idea that a positive mental attitude in the face of setback and obstacles is directly linked to eventual success… in stark contrast to the prevailing belief on Reddit, which states that a goal is only achievable if you set the bar so fucking low you cannot help but trip over the thing.

A drug free 500 pound bench with a two second pause is possible even if you spent a couple of years hiding in the Alps eating wild mushrooms during your formative years, so shut the fuck up with your excuses already.

The solution, then, is very simple- adaptation. Pursuing a big goal in large, single attempts like year long programs churned out en mass by strangers, especially when there is no accommodation for intervening complexities (i.e. illness, stress, bad sleep, you grandma dying, or whatever other bullshit people use as excuses when they post vids that should have been deleted on the Gram), cannot be successful. Success is multi-factorial, and there are simply too many variables in the equation for a single methodology to work optimally for more than one person, because most or all of the following (incomplete) list must be accounted for:

  • sleep (both quality and quantity)
  • food (amount, macros optimized for the individual, nutrient timing optimized for the individual)
  • exercise selection
  • pre-existing conditions like injuries, weaknesses, muscular imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, drug interactions
  • developing injuries, weaknesses, muscular imbalances, and illnesses
  • stress
  • sex hormone levels
  • time allotted for training
  • energy allotted for training
  • vacations
  • training interruptions
  • energy/interest/aptitude for lifting, because let’s face it, there are plenty of motherfuckers in the game just because they want to be part of something “cool,” not because they enjoy it
This broad takes her bulk seriously. With no other calories in sight, she asked a friend to share.

As such, people who approach training like they’re some implacable foe of life devoted only to the gym are idiots. Personally, I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve been consistent to the point of near insanity in both training and diet, and progress has even at those times been somewhat illusory. Goals change, life throws you curveballs, and no matter how hard you fucking try, no one can consistently add weight to the bar year in and year out. Moreover, adding weight to the bar day after day, year after year, cannot be your primary motivation. If it is, you will invariably quit, because 1) it is impossible to do s, and 2) that concept sucks the fun entirely out of lifting. Contrary to what this bitch-made new jack internet breed of coaches and lifters seem to believe, the primary motivation behind longevity and success in lifting weights is, and must be, sheer, unadulterated enjoyment. You’re not a machine, no matter how hard you jock the band Harm’s Way and jack your dick/clit to that dipshit from Big Bang Theory and those two autists from Star Trek.

Harms Way doesn’t have a song called “Become a Beast” because that’s an achievement he’s already unlocked.

As Gordon White said in The Chaos Protocols, “whether you achieve your goals or not depends on how you navigate the intervening complexity between where you are and where you want to be.” Thus, your overarching goal might be the 300-400-500 club (is that even still a thing?), so that you’re benching 300, squatting 400, and deadlifting 500lbs. It’s far from an unreasonable goal, but if you are in your first month of training and never played a sport, you might as well add “with Chris Hemsworth’s physique, training only three days a week, and while on welfare” for all of the probabilistic good it will do you. Is it impossible? Certainly not, though it would likely only happen on a long timeline. As such, you should allow for more time in your plan and break your goals into bite-sized chunks. Treat every massive goal like Kobayashi approaches a mound of 100 hot dogs- he doesn’t just swallow each sausage and bun whole. Nor does he just stuff fistfuls of food into his mouth like an asshole. Nor did he begin his life as a baby trying to attack the world record for competitive eating. Instead, he trained his stomach over time, continually refined his methods as he progressed, and eventually came to dominate his sport. Do you think a virgin would set out to break the goddamned gangbang record without ever having broken her hymen or sucked a dick? Hell no. She masturbates multiple times daily about epic gangbangs, starts fucking, likely has a terrific string of bad luck and a vicious coke habit, and only then embarks on an effort to break the record. That lofty goal is the shining light toward which you continually move, whatever it is, but you take steps to get there rather than just jumping up and down like an asshole trying to reach it before you’ve even figured out how to fly.

An excellent goal, but not one that she would happily achieve on day one of fucking.

“The Buddha’s solution is for us to give up attachment, to give up striving. This is sound advice where you stay a peasant if you were born a peasant. No amount of desire could turn you into a prince. But we live in a world where, at least in theory, one can accomplish great things regardless of their birth status.” – Gordon White

Why anyone would take the advice of a lazy vegetarian with a serious eating disorder is beyond me, but in the lifting world his “satisfaction is the death of desire” horseshit will lead a lifter directly into the “nobody gives a fuck” percentile of their peers. Successful lifters are marginally content with their accomplishments but forever striving to improve. This doesn’t mean setting a goal of 100lbs per year on their total or anything so precise, but rather a commitment to making constant, small improvements that will yield massive results over time. As Charles Fort said, “all biologic phenomena act to adjust. There are no biologic actions other than adjustments.”

If you’re unfamiliar, Charles Fort was a chronicler of crazy shit like spontaneous combustion, pictured above. And even after seeing frog rains and people with their torsos completely immolated but their legs unburned, he still thought life was a game of inches.

I.e., tell people accusing you of program hopping to have a coke and smile and shut the fuck up. The simply want you to fail; to blindly follow the herd off cliff after cliff rather than making innumerable small and occasional large tweaks to your process as you go.

In closing, don’t conflate satisfaction with settling for mediocrity. Nor should you blindly chase idealistic goals without incorporating a reason and acknowledgement of the intervening complexities you will face. Lifting is a journey- there is no destination, and if you think it has one, you might as well just fuck off and play checkers, because you’re just wasting the time of the people around you by interacting with them. It is a limitless, pride-and-ego-filled, thoroughly enjoyable quest for self-improvement and the transcending of the normal human form. Good enough is never enough and it shouldn’t be- climbing the next hill on the horizon, embarking on the next adventure, and learning the next new thing is what life is about.

Movement is life. Complacency and stagnation are death. And question everything.

“In the topography of intellection, I should say what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.”- Charles Fort

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!
Jamie Chaos Avatar
Jamie Chaos
I am a former all-time, all federation world record holder in raw powerlifting at 181lbs, a record I broke just to say fuck you to the internet’s “lifting” community and the powerlifting community at large. Over the last ten years I’ve written over 500 articles on strength training, nutrition, and supplementation, and continue to do so simply to fight the tide of weakness and sadness that currently pervades the scene I’ve called home for the better part of three decades. I’ve got personal trainin certs, BodyPump and BodyCombat certs, a BA in History and East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona, and MBAs from the Vienna University and University of South Carolina on my side, in addition to some sick lifts and a hell of a lot of rage. What the fuck have you got?

25 responses to “Contentment Vs Idealism: You Need Both to Fuck Shit Up in the Gym”

  1. Brandon Avatar
    Brandon

    Which Chaos Magick book should one start with, in your opinion? This stuff has been floating around in my head for years but I didn’t know there was a name for it.

  2. Tony Avatar
    Tony

    Jamie I got a quick question. Are you worried at all about cell phone radiation when you lift at the gym. keeping the cell phone by the junk might be a bad idea for the sack.

    1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
      Jamie Lewis

      That’s random as shit, but no. I don’t think any study has found a solid correlation between low level EM emissions and cancer, and there’s so much of it in the air at this point, your phone is the least of your worries. Is that actually something you worry about? Shit, plastic is a far bigger health issue that everyone ignores, haha.

      1. Tango Avatar
        Tango

        You should do a post on plastic

        1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
          Jamie Lewis

          I covered phyto and xenoestrogens years ago: https://plagueofstrength.com/soy-is-devil-and-not-in-fun-way-22-12/

          1. Lucas Avatar
            Lucas

            Is there anything you haven’t fucking covered by now?

  3. Chinese dick sorcerer Avatar
    Chinese dick sorcerer

    Jamie,

    I love the new site and perpetual wisdom. You do a great service to your fellow man and your art is a gift to the world. I’m going to go fuck off now and eat some people.

  4. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    Always thought provoking.
    The 300 400 500 thing is a good goal but once you have cracked it Isuggest you have milked most of what you are going to get out of that quest and nothing wrong with considering other tests.
    Take the concept 2 rower. Some strong guys have given that a good fight.
    Kettle bells.
    5k.
    You think 300 400 500 is tame? Tag on a sub 25/20 mins 5k and a shitload of kbell snatches in say, ten minutes.
    My thought is that pursuing a very narrow path ( say powerlifting) is ultimately less satisfying than a broad range. It’s like comparing someone who slowly puts together a complete product and takes pleasure from it and some crippled factory worker who incessantly carries out a tiny detail.
    The logic of profit vs the logic of enjoying the process. Ultimately, the individual gives this meaning.

  5. Gero Avatar
    Gero

    Who is the air-tight girl from evil angel? That’s the best gif you’ve posted, easily

    1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
      Jamie Lewis

      Honestly not sure. I only know the names of like three porn stars, haha.

  6. phreakshow Avatar
    phreakshow

    “Nor should you blindly chase idealistic goals without incorporating a reason and acknowledgement of the intervening complexities you will face.”

    Well said. The ‘Anal Reddit Autistic Gymgoer’ – hoodie’d, depressed, unsmiling and hunched over a smart-phone updating his meticulously planned six month routine while making sure to track every disgusting protein+carb ‘meal’ they eat – is a very real thing.

    Who the fuck could stick to an X-day per week routine for months on end? Abnormals, that’s who. Glad I learned early the value of heavy/light/med. Get one heavy session in a week? The weight’ll probably move week to week month. Miss a l/m? Carry on as normal. Get in there on wednesday/friday feeling bored? Pick up some DBs and go mad for an hour.

    I burst out into laughter every time I see a workout that requires an advanced maths degree to compute.

    [Mr. Lewis – Really liking the revamp, especially the chaos magick post namedropping Grant Morrison. Some of these new articles have best your best in a long while. Do something about the home page though. It doesn’t feel intuitive to browse.]

  7. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed of the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say, by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.

    Ha ha ha!

    1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
      Jamie Lewis

      Hell, these flat earth weirdos are just as bad as that, if not worse.

  8. stephen sutton Avatar
    stephen sutton

    I think maybe instead of the term idealism which has a philosophical meaning (one I do not subscribe to as a materialist) you maybe mean long term aims?

    1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
      Jamie Lewis

      Yeah, ultimately. I wasn’t really using the idealist/materialist dichotomy. In a strictly Luciferian sense, your god is your idealized version of you. That is what I was referring to- the ultimate you that you can envision.

  9. stephen sutton Avatar
    stephen sutton

    I like the conclusion, our adventures in the gym give us a glimpse of what life could be like outside of the constraints modern capitalist society place upon us. Life could be an endless adventure/banquet/passion and to a certain extent we can introduce such experiences into our lives in the here and now, but there are very real chains preventing the self realisation of all but a few in a warped way. This are not simply mental chains, ideal, but material. The fetters have to be broken. I mean revolution, destruction of capitalism, its economy, its political structures, all of it.

    1. Eetu Avatar
      Eetu

      A glimpse, indeed. Outside a collective, capitalist or otherwise, individual hardship would be very pronounced and as such life would be an adventure, although one that you couldn’t simply walk away from. Survival of the fittest and all.

      But is that not the case now, too? The world is out there, ready for you to conquer at your leisure; open for seekers of truth like some ancient tome. Nevermind those who desire nothing beyond fulfilling their basic societal functions.

      T. Kaczynski wrote about surrogate activities that people embark upon seeking purpose to their lives. Acquisition of material, status, skills as hobbies and so on would be used to garnish the inevitably dreary framework of the life of an individual in the context of the society. Do you merely pepper your ordained course of life or are your passions a gateway to something greater, not an end in itself?

      1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
        Jamie Lewis

        I don’t know that I’d quote the Unabomber as a general rule when trying to make points to support a logical argument. He was an unwashed hippie who had a psychotic break in college and never looked back.

        1. Eetu Avatar
          Eetu

          It just happened to be the Unabomber in whose text I read first about said surrogate activities some ten years ago. Seemed logical to me, then. Should probably give it another read in the near future.

          I knew he quit his university career in mathematics, but didn’t know that during college he was part of a “purposely brutalizing psychological experiment” for three years. That might’ve affected him on some level, although he seems to be far from an incoherent, rambling lunatic.

          It’s true that quoting known evils of our time rarely works as intended in reinforcing one’s argument. I suppose that at times, it is just too confusing to separate form and substance from each other. Luckily I’m not doing any sort of PR work in this comment section, and I don’t think I need to worry about misconceptions at all, given the type of folk I presume to read your writings.

  10. Ruben Avatar
    Ruben

    That singer looks like he’s all of 4′ tall, but since he has no neck that is excusable.

    Training, or any passion should indeed be fun. Fun especially because it hurts, not fun in spite of the pain. Moving an arbitrary object through a gravitational field is fucking meaningless and not fun at all. The knowledge that I’m doing what many are too pussified to do, THAT is what keeps me coming back to the gym.

    Six months to go until my 30th year lifting, and looking forward to setting a PR. If only in amount of muscles torn in a 24-h period.

  11. Anderson 79 Avatar
    Anderson 79

    The Unabomber was certainly a certified crazy, but his manifesto described SJW idiocy/ideology almost to the letter. Keep it coming, Me. Lewis! Looking forward to your next Hatecast.

    1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
      Jamie Lewis

      Hahaha- any emotion would bother an autist, which that dude certainly was. If there is a group of people who need to be exterminated in this country, it’s young male autists. They’re a fucking menace, in addition to being wildly unfunny. At least the SJWs refrain from random acts of violence due to their unfuckability and stick to annoying people online.

  12. Shaun G Avatar
    Shaun G

    You wrote training the deadlift leaves you fried. If all you wanted in life was your best deadlift, what would you do?

    1. Jamie Lewis Avatar
      Jamie Lewis

      Training the deadlift leaves me fried for the squat. I can’t imagine why all you would want in life is a good deadlift, but I’d cut out full squats and replace them with partials, throw away my belt, and do a fuckload of rowing in addition to training the deadlift. Then, I’d get two massages a week from a deep tissue therapist.

      1. Shaun G Avatar
        Shaun G

        I enjoy it so much. Thanks.

Search

Latest Posts

Latest Comments

Categories

Archives

Tags

anti-motivation Arthur Saxon baddest motherfuckers biology bodybuilder bodybuilding boxing Bruce Lee catch wrestling Chicken circus diet Ella Hattan fencing Freyja'd Knot Harold Poole history horror karate Keto kettlebells Life behind the curtain lifting lifting history miscellaneous motivation Mr America nutrition powerlifting pullups questions answered Russian history squat steve reeves strongman training true crime Turners vaudeville weightlifting What we Eat William Miller workout wrestler wrestling

Newsletter

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Insert the contact form shortcode with the additional CSS class- "wydegrid-newsletter-section"

By signing up, you agree to the our terms and our Privacy Policy agreement.