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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Why are gymlets so vicious when people don't share their boring obsessions?

Dial down the antagonism. This isn't the first or third time you've been warned about this, so this gets you another three-day ban.

Gyms are not the only form of exercise.

Let's hear a message from our sponsor, noted vicious gymlet Socrates.

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

Fortunately I don't let old dead men who had no conception of what a smartphone is do my thinking for me.

99.9999% of what you do in your daily life (I am not sure about the number of nines, but a bunch of them for sure) is resting on thinking done by the old dead men (and a few old dead women too, thankyouverymuch) who had no conception of what a smartphone is. Even if you are a genius far surpassing such people as Newton (who wasn't too proud to admit his debt to his predecessors, old dead men who didn't have a concept of calculus or gravity), you still could not manage to create much of what you enjoy from the first principles without relying on those dead old men's work and thought. Even if you skipped the exercise time. You could be thankful and appreciative for it, or you could throw a juvenile temper tantrum and scream "you are not the boss of me!" and slam the door to your room, it doesn't matter - your debt to those old dead men is still real, enormous and never to be overcome. Unless you renounce everything and go to the caves (to think of that, I think Rousseau already explored that too?). Given that you post here, it's probably not your cup of tea. Which is smart. Enjoying what the old dead men could give you instead of petulantly denying them would be even smarter.

Everyone knows that you need a smartphone to even have a shot at eudaimonia.

“The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us.”

— Aristotle, “Nichomachean Ethics”, Datalinks

Because it's a simple fact of life that lack of exercise reduces life expectancy.

Here for a good time, not a long time. I'll take my extra spare time now, and not worry about losing a couple of years of gently shitting myself between bingo rounds in Shady Orchards retirement home.

There are plenty of obese people dead of a heart attack decades before reaching retirement. I suspect that most of them were not having a particularly "good time" in the years prior to their death either.

As ever, "exercise addict" or "morbid obesity" are not the only two options in the world.

Agreed. But I hope you would at least concede the point that people who never exercise are orders of magnitude more likely to end up morbidly obese than avid exercisers, or even people who get 2-3 hours of moderate exercise a week.

Probably, yes. Orders of magnitude might be overstating it a bit. I'm just saying it's not inconceivable that you can look after yourself without deliberately setting aside time to exercise. I just walk to the local shops when convenient, play interesting VR games occasionally, and otherwise try to keep myself too busy to feel too hungry. Overeating is a symptom of boredom, I find.

I see what you're driving at. This obviously isn't a new point, but probably bears repeating. Our bodies evolved under the assumption that we would lead physically demanding lives filled with vigorous exercise. Even after the industrial revolution, up to about a hundred years ago the average lifestyle was so physically labour-intensive that there was no need to set aside time to exercise. It's only in the past few decades that mechanisation has progressed to the point at which physically demanding jobs are the exception rather than the rule and it's become possible to live a truly sedentary lifestyle: it's only under these circumstances that deliberately setting aside time for exercise has become a necessity if you want to get any exercise at all (unless you cycle to work). I'm not saying it's impossible to live a largely healthy life while getting effectively no exercise, but it would be very surprising, in light of the fact that our bodies evolved to exercise frequently and vigorously. It's even more extraordinary a claim than certain vegans' claims that they are even more fit and strong than meat-eaters, in light of the fact that our bodies evolved to eat meat (leaving aside any question of the morality of doing so).

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