Being that we live in the “Information Age”, we’re generally buried assneck deep in a massive pile of information, of which the vast majority fucking sucks.  Unless you’ve got an bullshit destroying Israeli killdozer, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction, especially with a variety of hacks and general fuckfaces preying upon your doubts and amplifying that shitty little voice in your ear that occasionally tells you that you suck.  Everyone has the voice, but it’s what you do with and to that voice that determines your lot in life.  If you listen to that voice, you end up digging ditches for a living and taking a break from drinking Pabst in your trailer just long enough to knock one of the few remaining teeth in your morbidly obese wife’s head onto the floor for mouthing off.  If you don’t you end up living whatever you consider to be the good life, basically bending life over and assraping it, and then following it with a bit of ATM before you head off to another day of awesome with a predatory grin on your face.

Due to the span and depth of information to which we’re exposed on a daily basis, we generally use a variety of diagnostic labels to lend a bit of clarity to your personal fog of war.  Any system of classification up with which you come, however, is going to have its positives and negatives, based on a wide array of factors and your overall mindset.(Brafman 74-75)  Additionally, life itself, or the people therein, will likewise place labels on the things and people around them, and you’ll get caught up in that system.  This is nothing so organized as the Dewey Decimal System, but is rather a nearly arbitrary system that’s by and large predicated upon the astonishing amount of suck most people generate as a matter of course in a given day.  Though you know they suck, and that they’re opinions are likely (at best) arbitrary, the labels they place upon you can affect you
greatly.

I’m sure you are at this point screaming “Bullshit!” in your head and vowing never to read this blog again, as I’ve asserted that everyone on Earth falls prey to the judgement and labels of others, no matter how mentally tough.  Even the toughest motherfucker on Earth, however, can have his own personal Alamo.  No matter how tightly you seal yourself up in a fortress and massacre the opinions of the teeming unwashed hordes of mealy-mouthed shittalkers walking the Earth, finding yourself covered in gore from stabbing those roly-poly shitbirds to death, you can end up losing.  This is because psychologists have shown across the board that even the toughest snake-eating, Carlos Hathcock motherfuckers can lose subconsciously to societal labels, and that being labelled with  harsh terms like “bipolar” can reduce formerly chipper students into weepy bitches.  Luckily, this shit works both ways, and positive labels like “high-achiever” give you a leg up in life, and generally leads to a much higher success rate on everything from physical to mental tests (Brafman 98-99).  Sounds ridiculous, right?  It might, but it’s been proven in everything from high schools to the military to the workplace, and works mysteriously both for and against those being labelled.  The phenomenon’s called the Pygmalian effect when it’s positive, and the Golem effect when it’s negative, but it all boils down to the same thing- when we brand or label people, they take on the characteristics of the diagnosis (Brafman 100-101).

For those of you who are poorly read, Pygmalion was a sculptor in Greek myth who fell in love with his own statue, and eventually wished it into a live woman (not unlike the movie Mannequin), who he fucked and gave birth to an entire city thereafter.  Golems, on the other hand, are unthinking mud-men made by Jewish wizards to do their evil bidding.

In any event, it’s enough to make you want to build a fucking hut in the woods and mail nailbombs to people.  There’s not much you can do against this type of sway, however, as humans are social animals, and our unconscious is programmed to absorb those labels and adapt to them.  That is, of course, unless you understand the source and discount it.  I, as usual, have more than my personal experience to go on for this.  The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer stated that one “must be able to observe that other people are badly disposed towards him, … [and] straightway ascribe them, …to the defective knowledge of the speaker” (Schopenhauer).  That’s certainly worked for me, and it’s easy, because most people are unbelievably stupid cows with little reason and even less knowledge.  Additionally, there’s really no point sitting around like a bitch and crying into your soup because a pack of lazy, insipid, fat people are trying to will you into being as lazy, fat, and insipid as they are, so you might as well put up a staunch mental defense against the teeming hordes of fuckheads and sally the fuck forth.

The main way society gets over on the average lifter these days is by telling people they suck right from the outset.  The main format for the delivery of this is the myth of the “hardgainer”.  A hardgainer, for those of you who are blissfully unaware, is a person who has trouble putting on size and strength.  This, of course, means EVERYONE ON EARTH.  This theory is so fucking stupid that it defies description, and really only exists to apply salve to the wounded egos of a bunch of weepy bitches who want everything right now and throw tantrums in their parents’ basement because they’ve been training a whole 6 weeks and don’t look like Ronnie Coleman yet.  It’s the quintessential example of the instant-gratification craze that’s swept the modern world, and it’s fucking disgusting.  To back this load of Stygian stables-sized bullshit is the completely disproven and academically-mocked theory of somatotyping, which is still only clung to by mouth-breathing asshats in the bodybuilding world.  Continued adherence to the theory of somatotyping is akin to a continued belief that masturbating will give you hairy palms, or that JFK was actually shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.  In other words, you quite literally have to be a waterhead to place any credence in it whatsoever.

 

If you’ve got doubts, consider this- pure ectomorphs and endomorphs (if they existed) would comprise 2/100  and 1/100th of a percent of the population, respectively.(Sheldon 30)  That means that in the US, there’s 6140 and 3070 terminally skinny and terminally fat motherfuckers in the entire United States of America.  This fucking nonsense makes me literally want to stab anyone who utters the words endomorph and ectomorph, because even if they existed, it’s almost guaranteed the person bitching was not one.  Neverthelkess, they don’t exist, except in the minds of people who want to sell people a bunch of shit that doesn’t work anyway, and then  turn around and blame that person’s somatotype for their failure.  (If you’d like to read more about this fantastic pseudoscience, go here)  In other words, if you’ve classified yourself by somatotype, punch yourself in the fucking face, immediately.  Then, remember that when people feel as though they’re qualified to make a diagnosis (like after reading a poorly written article about a debunked pseudoscientific theory written by a person who hasn’t even read a primary source on the subject), people “become overly confident in [their] predictive abilities”, and completely fuck up any progress they might make because “we often ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe.”  (Brafman 88)  Therefore, you’ll go off half-cocked with bullshit information, and ignore anything to the contrary, which means you’ll go on believing you’re a bitch and can’t gain any muscle and you’re doomed to be fat and have a shitty squat and that you can’t get laid.

FUCK THAT.

If someone else told you that you were an endo or an ectomorph, rip off their fucking face, wear it as a mask to gain entry to his girlfriend’s house, and then smash the fucking granny out of her in front of her parents during their Sunday dinner.  According to the Necronomicon, that’s the only way to cleanse yourself of evil magic.

To add insult to injury, you might recall that the only reason the hardgainer theory exists is to excuse failure in the weightroom.  This is fucking ridiculous- FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION.  A winner accepts responsibility for himself, rather than pawning responsibility off on others, and immediately takes charge of shit, even when he has absolutely no authority to do so.  Even if you’ve no idea what you’re doing, a strong belief in victory will serve you far better than the mealy-mouthed defeatist bullshit coming from anyone who labels you a failure before you’ve even started.  Pessimism is the sole purview of losers, and belief that one is a hardgainer is nothing but pessimism. (Van Fleet 64-66).  Though the above quoted philosopher, Schopenhauer, might believe that man lowers himself to a simple member of the animal kingdom by allowing will to triumph over reason, one will never see a lion fail to catch a gazelle because he didn’t believe in himself.

Let nothing stand in your fucking way.  

Brafman, Ori and Rom Brafman.  Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior.  New York: Doubletree, 2008.
Sheldon, William. Atlas of Men: A Guide for Somatotyping the Adult Male at All Ages. New York: Gramercy Publishing Company, 1954.
Schopenhauer, Arthur.  Studies in Pessimism.  1908.
Van Fleet, James K.  Hidden Power: How To Unleash the Power of Your Subconscious Mind.  Paramus:  Prentice Hall, 1987.

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