A grocery list of desires.

This thought crossed my mind the other day about people my roommate Adam calls “flaky”. Basically, a flaky person is someone that will make plans with you and then will not show up, or always call last minute to cancel. The more interesting thing to me is how we both believe you should deal with flaky people.

To give a good idea about how I believe these people think I can compare it to shopping in the grocery store. People like myself have what I call a grocery list. This grocery list is my life priorities, and although I do not have the whole list completely clear, the top five items or so are very clear. The list can be shuffled when things change, and one thing that might change is your friend gives you a call and says we should hang out this weekend, so you put them up with you priorities, and make sure there is some time free, but they do not do the same. They just liked the thought of hanging out, and did not actually set time aside.

To put it another way we can pretend that the isles of the grocery store are days of a week. Let us say that I see my friend in isle one and tell them to meet me in isle five where I have something really interesting to show them. I stand waiting in isle five and believe they are getting closer and the day is approaching. In order to get to isle five they have to go up and down each isle before it to reach me. A person with a grocery list will bypass all the things off the list, because they have an appointment. Those who have no such list will become distracted by the items they see on the way, and then when days pass and you call on your cell phone they either do not answer, or they say oh yeah, I am in isle three, and you ask why are you there when you are supposed to be here? They do not seem apologetic and act as if what they found interesting is important enough to use as an excuse.

I know a number of people who fit this criterion on a regular basis. Perhaps we all do it sometimes, but some people do it far more noticeable. What action should we take to try and fix this? This is where my Adam and I would likely differ. He tends to approach people with this belief that he has the ability to make them conscious by making them aware enough times, and this in turn will make their lives better because he made them more self conscious. This method is proactive. I tend to approach people through reciprocity. I do not believe it is our job to try making other people aware of their actions. It is only our job to be aware of our own actions, and when someone rubs them the wrong way you react in your favor till they go away because they did not get it, or start treating you otherwise. They become conscious about the particular things you do and do not like, because they always get the same reaction when they step on your toes. This to me is far easier than chasing people down and trying to make them aware for their and our own good.

Perhaps there is a time and place for everything, and maybe being proactive works better when you live with people, or spend large amounts of time with them, and you happen to be the socially dominant personality. We have to keep in mind though that most people do not live with us, or care much about us, and if we go out of our way to try teaching them they may just run away. One example I have of this is when we had a third roommate and Adam, who is very socially dominating constantly tried beating him over the head when it came to working out and eating right after roommate three said he was interested in such things. In time he began to slack and Adam took a proactive role, but this only made our roommate run away, and he would just come home and go to his room. He eventually moved out because Adam made him very unhappy. If there is a method of being proactive to be used it should be soft power. We can be more aggressive with a young child by spanking them, but an adult wants some respect. It seems better to do the best you can to make it appealing to them to want to be more like you without force. I tend to be more reactive and when Adam tried being dominating to me I had strong reactions where we butt heads till a mutual respect and better communication was found. I happened not to run away and benefited much from my time with him in the long run. In this case his proactive method worked well. If someone is dedicated to a relationship for the long term they will eventually work things out. If pupils want to learn they will stay in your class, but Adam in some cases wants to be a proactive street teacher like Socrates that people do not want to listen to. Not a full blown street teacher, but one in the sense that people we know and do not spend large quantities of time with should be tracked down and forced to be made conscious for their own good and the good of the community. It is not till we set an example that others might take an interest, and we cannot expect everyone to take an interest. If they do and we happen to be proactive, then we can just be ourselves, because they want us to be proactive toward them. What is more important is that we find things in common with people where we do agree, and eventually this can trickle over into other areas if they choose to get closer to us in time. If they do not then they will just be our drug dealer where bump into them on the street, do our trade, and move our separate ways, and most people in life will be just that and nothing more.

The problem with opposites.

Going further into the concept of opposites, and how we naturally tend to do the opposite of what causes us pain, there arises another problem on top of the issue of only doing the opposite mentally instead of physically. This problem is that mentally is only one version of opposites compared to a physical opposite where we convince ourselves to feel different about the same situations. These other versions of opposites exist epiphenominal to one another and in relation to each other. When we think of doing the opposite of what is not working there are several versions of opposites that exist at once, because many particular avenues exist opposite of many particular sequences interconnected. To choose one may be the key to a solution, to choose all may be a solution too, or too choose all could be a mistake because choosing just one may be the only proper solution, or doing all could be a contradiction in itself, which is the next point I’ll make.

We want our goal to be physically the opposite of what does not work, because what is physical is tied to what is mental. The mind does not end at the skull. The mind ends at the limit of our perceived environment. We are interactive with the world around us, and this in turn causes plasticity in the brain to adapt to the perceived environment for better survival. Those who only change their mental outlook to a physical situation will find they have fooled themselves into a situation out of their favor. Just changing physically alone can work in that it will bring results, but to attach deeper thoughts to why it is working may allow us to come up with better physical routes than just reflexes. In some cases people will subconsciously just have good reflexes to certain situations and perform the right physical actions without knowing why they made the choices they did. This would likely be because good genes when it comes to these situations. Genes can be passed on both a priori (sexual reproduction) and priori by the environments of people we learn from and interact with to better survive.

When it comes to opposites there are several interrelated activities all taking place at any given time. When we think of how to be the opposite of what we perceive of fat, which is skinny, we have to do the opposite of what we are doing to get there. However, we are doing several things at once that make us fat, and should we change one, many, or all the things we think are the cause? Eating too much may be one reason we are fat, but not exercising could be another reason. Which one should we do the opposite of, or should we do the opposite of both? In this simple example it would make sense to do the opposite of both, but from my own experience the emphasis would be on food intake first.

A more complex example of opposites can be approached in the abusive relationship example from my last writing. When dealing with people the opposites are more frequent, complex, and interrelated to things in the mind and environment than we can comprehend. In the last example a husband is abusing his spouse. The opposite action on one hand is for the spouse to leave her husband. However, this abuse could be physical or mental. To physically walk away from physical abuse may make the most sense if we are physically weaker, but emotions for the abuser can still exist, and this may not be so easy, which is why in many cases the spouse does the opposite mentally and tries seeing the situation differently. If the abuse is verbal the spouse may also walk away, but another opposite action to being abused verbally and running may be fighting verbally, which is the opposite of running, but also the opposite of being stagnant during abuse. You certainly cannot fight as the opposite action, and run as the opposite action to stagnation at the same time when those opposite actions are also opposite of each other. If a tiger is going to eat us the opposite of getting eaten is to not get eaten, and we can do this by fighting or running, which happen to be the opposite of each other too, and cannot be performed at the same time. So, doing the opposite is not always possible when there are several avenues of opposite. We can only choose the opposite of the primary thought at hand we fear, and that is to fight or flee, but the actions taken can all be opposites of each other, and therefore we can only use our reflexes to act on any particular situation.

What we end up having is a case of several particulars taking place at once. Since we cannot concentrate or be aware of all these particulars at once, we choose to focuses primarily on the dominant one, which is the one most obvious or made most obvious. This is why when we think of doing the opposite we tend to only do the opposite of the problem that immediately comes to mind, or the prominent problem, which is the most emotionally embedded problem based on past environments we have interacted with. Since we are always emotionally in a moment we must fight our fear in that moment. Fighting a fear in the last scenario can be either be done by fighting or running, because both are still the opposite living with a fear like being eaten, but we still have to choose one or the other even though both are the opposite of each other. One may be a better solution than the other, but we only live in this particular situation with this particular problem at a particular time. We may never know which solution has a higher probability of working better. All we do know is that fear, disappointment, and pain is not good. We may come upon a similar situation in the future and do the other opposite than we had in the past and get similar or different results, because we are now acting with a different person who also has their own particular past, and may act completely different to the same action we did to the last person. We never really know which action is best when dealing with people except that built by our prejudice. The only thing that may unify some actions under an umbrella is that the actions are taking place in the same culture, or very similar cultures where the overlap can carry over. The most we can really do is worry about how we feel and how to best address our pain, and not worry about whether others might be hurt by our actions if they are hurting us. In the end our own feelings will always matter most, and if we show weakness by showing pity to others who keep acting out of our favor, they will take advantage of being able to abuse us for their own pleasure. The lesson from all this is to not think too hard about how to attack the aggressor (fear), but to just attack it with what we best know how to, and learn from the interaction itself.

Fear can also exist in comfort or complacency. When we exist in a group of people that cater to the same ideology we do, we find comfort in many cases. Sometimes the individuals will challenge us frequently and keep us on our toes, but in other cases the comfort may keep us from questioning the world outside. This fear is created by what exists outside of comfort. Outside of the group we are in is a world we are not comfortable with, and may challenge us in a ways that make it so we do not want to consciously struggle over the complexities of it. It is not so much that there is anything wrong with comforts to retreat to and recover in, but just as much as the group is created under a roof for comfort and happiness, it is also created for security due to fear of the unknown outside. This paradox may always exist, but some groups are primarily created from fear (a gang) while others are primarily comfort (a biological family). Groups primarily created by fear will naturally do the opposite of pain or discomfort in the outside world, and seek comfort together, but because the primary drive is fear of what is different the group is actually running together instead of fighting together from the outside world. In many cases these groups come across as very aggressive in order to frighten off what they really fear, and that is a world they feel does not accept them. Doing the opposite in this case is not in our interest, but it is also hard to notice when we are in the group and everyone is acting with us and us with them. A group primarily built on comfort will have most individuals existing away from the group with other groups at times to bring in new information or ideas to challenge the existing order of the group for the purpose of strengthening them. This creates new conscious struggles we can seek to improve ourselves with. In the modern world people do not like complexity and prefer technology takes care of it for us, and it is easier to shrug of deep thoughts, but these deep thoughts we can integrate into how we live everyday will make us less fearful and more skilled. We want skills because skills are like legs. If a bipedal represented two main skills we put all our time into and we lost a leg we would no longer be able to walk. We want several legs, and each of those legs can attach themselves to several kinds of people. If we lose a leg we still have many legs, but we can only grow these legs when we overcome our fears in a department and create new comforts primarily in those departments. Those legs grow out of the home we primarily find comfort in.

Mentally but not physically the opposite.

In the past I have said that we are naturally utilitarian, because it is animal instinct to run from pain and towards pleasure. To take this idea to the next level I want to address a deeper question, which is if this true then why is it that some people stay in situations that are painful instead of acting the opposite of pain? The answer I came up with is that they actually do act in the opposite manner, but the difference is mentally compared to physically. All other animals do not rationalize a painful situation as we do and physically react to pain, where in many cases we mentally rationalize the opposite of what hurts to give ourselves hope. It is a natural instinct for us to do the opposite of what hurts us, but in some situations we may believe there is greater pleasure around the corner than the one we are currently in, which is why we surrender happiness to others in the current situation. One example of this could be a spouse who is being beaten by their husband. Why would they remain in this situation instead of doing the opposite?

The first part of the equation seems to be that the spouse believes that the concept of a relationship is happiness in essence, and should be maintained no matter what because of the long-term rewards of this happiness. In this case happiness is a concept or a label that should be maintained in order to be accepted by others. This other could be the husband they want to love them, because being loved is better than being alone even if beaten, or accepted by family who disrespect leaving a man regardless of the situation. If the spouse loses the label of girlfriend of wife others she cares about will shame her for not living up to the label. Sometimes the label will not be noticed by others this person cares about (like family we no longer stay in touch with), but the morals of embedding this label as a priority that they look at themselves with or that god can look at them with will bring shame of some sort too. If this is the case then the label or concept is what is bought into as pleasure, and what the husband is doing to them is pain, so they place themselves in a world in their minds where they run towards the pleasure of the concept they embrace in their minds and away from the physical trauma of their current situation.

The second part of the equation is not an idea but an action, and this action is done through deception as well. The belief may be that husband will eventually stop beating them and start acting in a manner that they desire. The deception can either be partly played out by the husband who seems loving in some cases and creates a hope of more of the same actions in the future, the spouse convincing themselves through deception of a hope they created in their own minds that things will change based on some good actions by the husband in the past that will return, or a combination of both. The spouse who creates this illusion in their own mind of course would not do so if it were not for prior experiences that convinced them that this could be so, which would only exist if people from their past or current environments were able to persuade them of such. In other words, this is purely based on the physicality’s that exist in the environment that alter behavior to believe there are future benefit to come and not just a mental label.

The combination of concepts created by the mind and its interaction with the environment is what shapes our perceptions of pleasures and pains. The reason people do not change physical habits in their everyday life is because they create alternate environments in their minds they run toward and away from. This means we are still naturally utilitarian, but part of our nature seems to be that in order to survive in some harsh environments we have to invent happiness in a made up environment. Since we are limited to the resources our environment gives us for survival our mind seeks to find new resources or create technologies, but when those resources and technologies are not to be found we invent tools in our minds that convince us the situation is other than it really is or will be in the future. Although we naturally do the opposite, the opposite is sometimes invented outside of the world around us and reinvented in our heads so we can keep ourselves in the current situation and live in denial of the pain it causes us. Insanity is performing the same action again and again without getting new results. If happiness is a conscious struggle that keeps creating results, then this pain without achievement is the opposite of happiness. This “happiness” is only a short-term reward that hopes for a different future than what is currently happening.

If we really want happiness then we need to seek physical actions that give us tangible rewards in the now. The only rewards we can trust in the future are the ones we plan on ourselves, by ourselves, and from ourselves. This is not to be confused with things like business where we invest in something for a later reward, but it is similar in that we take risks in hope of payoffs. As long as the dividends from a bond are coming in we are getting a reward. A relationship that keeps paying us dividends is a good one, but if it ever stopped we may live in denial that it may start again. Anyone who is standing in the way of what we physically desire in the now should be cut off like a diseased body part or cancer. We cannot trust others in the current to change their actions in the future. We can only trust ourselves to continue what makes us feel good each day we live. As long as someone is giving us more pleasure in the present than pain we want to keep him or her around. It is not till the moment of betrayal that we change our actions. This will give us the reflexes that will create tangible rewards in our everyday lives. Are you doing the thing I want you to do now in my life?

How abortion can reduce the number of poor and under educated.

A contradiction liberals and conservatives seem to run into when it comes to abortion is that conservatives do not want to pay for welfare and complain poor people have children on purpose to collect more welfare, but do not believe in abortions that would lower the population of poor people, because this would be immoral. Liberals on the other hand do want to pay for each extra child a poor person has, and also believe in abortion because these are both seen as moral. Conservatives want to take away the incentive to have kids but will then complain if more people have abortions, and liberals will complain if we stop paying for poor people’s babies, but will not give people the incentive to change habits.

The problem with both arguments is where they place morality, and on top of this there is an emphasis on deontology versus utility. The conservative puts moral priority on procreation regardless of circumstance, and sees the utility in taking away the financial incentive to have more kids. The liberal puts moral priority on paying for a child regardless of situation after birth, and sees the utility in allowing abortions to help reduce the poor population. Both believe that the outcome will create the greatest happiness for society. I believe that it is not till we put happiness above morality that morality is gained, because true morality exists in proper ethics, and proper ethics are practiced when we create the most satisfactory outcome. On the issue of abortion I am a utilitarian more often than not. This means we need to take the utility of both arguments to create the most happiness for society. Poor people are not naturally stupid, but it is because they lack resources that they cannot live well and be educated well. Having fewer kids will leave more resources available for fewer children to live a better life. I believe there are a number of incentives that need to be put in place to make people change behavior for the better, but the focus here is on family size as a method of helping the poor.

The first utility is education, and in this case the liberal dominates the conservative, because they believe teaching youth about contraceptives, responsibility, abortion and abstinence. The conservative only wants to teach abstinence and act is if young people do not have strong sex drives or the desire to try sex out of curiosity, but if an accident does occur the child must be born for the conservative, which means paying more welfare. Education will keep more people from getting pregnant to begin with, and if they do get pregnant abortion can be an option without guilt.

The second utility goes to the conservative, and that is not paying extra money to people because they have more kids. Having fewer children the poorer people are will allow them to divert that many more resources to just one child or two both emotionally and financially. This can be done through tax incentives. The first child could allow a family a tax credit to better raise that child. Everyone should have incentive to have one child. The second child however would not get an increase in that tax credit, so the credit would have to be split between two children. The third child would result in a removal of the credit completely, and the forth child would actually cost more in taxes. This makes it less appealing to have more and more kids.

The third utility is my own idea and it can only be possible with universal health care. This would be free or very cheap vasectomies and tube ties. That way it becomes much easier for the poor to keep accidents from happening after one of two children if they do not want to pay more money. It also helps people of any income bracket that do not want to pay more extra kids.

The focus is to let people remain free to choose whatever life they desire, but give them incentive to change the bell curve of the actions society performs for future benefit. Someone highly devoted to wanting many kids will also have to be determined to become wealthier. If more wealthy people have children compared to poor people the resources available to both will become closer to equal. One more point to add is that since some people have a problem with abortion this would not be supplied by the universal health care system with other people’s taxes. Planned parenthood would remain a private business where individuals with their individual money could choose to have an abortion if they so desired without using the money of others. These incentives would lower the population and create more equality in general without infringing on the freedom of members of society. In fact it would probably create greater freedom when both society and poor individuals are paying less for the poor and give greater social mobility to the poor at the same time.

Thinking too much?

An interesting topic that I have come across several times recently with others is thought and how much one should think when it comes to daily life. More often than not the advocacy seems to point in the direction of not thinking so much, because thinking too much takes away from happiness. People seem to believe that not putting too much thought into life will bring greater rewards simply because happiness is a greater reward than anything else we can strive for, and this is achieved by not stressing ourselves out too hard about our actions. On the other hand the advocacy by others seems to lean towards morality as a priority, because this will bring the greatest happiness in the long-term. In this case we should think hard about being moral, because the outcome will be more beneficial and bring long-term happiness. I have written in the past about happiness and without going into to much detail I will sum up the idea that happiness can come in two forms. The first kind is happiness as a state of mind that comes and goes. The second is happiness as a way of life when we do the right actions out of habit and regularly throughout life. These people will have more happiness states throughout life. If we look at both of these definitions and look at both of the arguments for thought we can see that happiness as a state of mind that comes and goes may be reached easiest by not thinking too hard about short term actions in everyday life. Happiness as a way of life lines up well with thinking hard about moral long-term investments. Happiness in the short term also seems to line up with investments in people better than things, and happiness as a way of life seems to line up better with investing in things instead of people. We cannot be very happy without people and they should always be included in our everyday lives, but they come and go in our lives when their interests are no longer ours, but if we invest in ourselves, skills, and things enough we will be flexible to be what people might want as we go through life. Therefore, we should always be seeking out new friends, but they will not care much for what we have to offer if we never invest in ourselves much and only invest in seeking to treat others good with the little we have accomplished.

This also seems to line up with conservative and liberal mentalities in many ways. Happiness when we picture a conservative is someone strong, self sufficient, stoic, and puts deontological morals above all else, because the proper means will bring about the happy ends. The liberal we see more physically weak yet friendly, gregarious, cooperative, and caring about the people connected to the community they live in. This lines up well with international political thought where the weak will combine forces to balance against the strong. The liberal is a utilitarian opposed to the deontological conservative. The actions they perform now may not be the happy ones, but they do not want to think too hard about the now. They just want to exist in the proper cooperative and caring community that will bring about the right ends where less stressful thought needs to take place. The conservative sees the proper means as the individual doing the moral act to bring about happy ends, and the liberal sees the happy community existing interdependently as the right means for functioning utility ends. Both would claim that their means would bring about the ends that make a good society. The down side of the conservative is that morality in some cases is even more important than happiness. If they convinced themselves there was a moral way to die that would kill everyone around them. So, not all moral means will bring about happy or good ends. The down side of the liberal is that they are too trusting in their desire to care about others, and this can cause them to get taken advantage of, and on the same token they lack self investment sometimes and can only offer their good will and basic body.

What is the proper way to think and therefore bring about happiness the most often? I would argue that both have some good and bad ideas, and it is not wise to practice either way of thinking all the time, but there are proper times to think certain ways. Starting with the pros of the conservative we will find that self-investment is very important, because if we do not build up our skills and resources nobody will care when we have nothing to offer but good will and our basic body with no extensions. On the downside many conservatives do this more out of a fear that people will try and harm them or take their stuff, so they want to build themselves up at a safe distance. These things and ideas we invest in become habits, and should be thought very hard about through conscious struggle. The reason is because whenever we master a skill it eventually becomes more and more subconscious till we no longer struggle with it and then becomes a habit. At this point we should be phasing into new struggles. We want good habits that are productive and have the ability to provide for people we care about. Those people can be anywhere from a household to a community we live in. These hard thought out actions are investments that will benefit us in the long term. Nobody will ever understand us as well as we understand ourselves when it comes to an investment, but others close to us will understand better than us sometimes if our investments are actually bringing about real productivity and benefit when they see us. This is why friends are important to pointing out our flaws, so we can adjust our investments and recalculate for the long term. A self-investment is like watching paint dry. The results take a long time, but when people finally see them they are blown away by the hard work and conscious struggle we put into an action a little each day. The more investments and conscious struggles we have each day in our lives, the more we diversify our portfolio and the happier we can be with ourselves. The proper means will bring about the proper ends when we put hard thought into our actions.

As for the liberal version of happiness it involves not thinking so hard about our actions because this is stressful, boring, and we do not want to be robots. Liberals in this sense are cool and not a drag to be around, and of course funny unlike those uptight conservatives. Liberals are also more likely to invest in people with the skills they have compared to the conservative who develops their skills out of protection of assets from others and rarely shares. Think of the prisoner’s dilemma when you think of a liberal, and realize that cooperation makes us all better off. Even if person A and person B do not each individually have the same skills as the hard working conservative, they can combine their skills to create a larger benefit. For example, person A and B have level 4 skills for a particular project. Conservative X has level 6 skills but will not cooperate with a team and believes he or she works better alone. When we combine A and B let us say it creates level 12 social benefit for both of them. The conservative may invest 6 and get 8 back when they happen to have an unintended interaction, and these interactions occur far less, so the liberals have more social benefit to go around because cooperation has a multiplying affect. The down side of the liberal of course is they may not invest much in themselves at times, or they may free ride thinking others in the group will take care of creating social benefits for them and others to keep the community strong. The point to be made here is that life is about people in the long-term. Investing in ourselves is worthless unless others can benefit from it in some way. On the same token, investing in ourselves purely for others is ignorant, because people may not appreciate our hard work, and if we do something that benefits ourselves primarily at least we have something we can be proud of for our own sake. That means the self-investments are important and we should benefit from these before anyone else, but if these investments do not benefit others too at some point later on in a social manner they are worthless, because nobody cares about a man who can lift a thousand pounds that lives in a cave. As far as liberal thought goes, it would appear they have something going for them when it comes to daily interaction with people. These interactions should not be too hard thought about. This is play versus work and self-investment. If we develop our personal skills well in our own time we will develop good reflexes when it comes to providing those skills in real time. People unlike things and ideas however, are not predictable most of the time. We may have an entire plan to bring a girl flowers with a vision of her being very flattered and then when we act it out in real time she does not care one bit. Unlike personal skills in things, interactions with people are about reflexes that we reflect on after a situation occurs, and the natural instinct is to do the opposite of what did not work the time before, but every situation is different and what may not have worked before may work with someone else the next time. How do we know which reflexes are proper? The answer is we really do not. That is why not thinking too hard about our interactions with people daily is a good thing. We can really stress ourselves out and racket our brain over how to talk to someone the next time due to a prior interaction with him or her to correct a past mistake. We cannot help but dream about what might happen in an interaction, but it is best to remind ourselves we are dreaming and to just jump into a situation. The more we jump into social situations the more we learn to build social reflexes. The best way to get good at these is just doing it.

One more thing to add is how can we best combine these two methods of thought into daily life? One of my favorite methods of interpreting text that I have read was by Stanley Fish who is a writer of the New York Times. Some methods involve the individual as the sole interpreter, but Fish realizes that we belong in communities. The way we interpret a text comes about due to the fact we belong to certain communities we talk about a text with, and that in turn shapes our outlook of the world. Who is our community? Our community in a sense is always changing as we move through life. It is organic and shapes to the new environments we move through as we change to adapt to new ways of living. At any given time however, there is a small group of people we are very closely tied to that we can usually count on one hand. This community is our core community. It is the community we use to interpret the world through and it is interconnected to other communities. In a sense we are individuals that want to self invest, but we are also part of this core group and want to invest in each other. If we strengthen this group we strengthen our environment. These are the people we want to cooperate with and build our reflexes through so when we enter other groups temporarily in the future we have better social skills than the lone ranger. At the same time people who are not part of this group should not be too important to us beyond staying on neutral yet friendly relations. We do not have time to get to know everyone, but it makes sense to be pleasant to others in your secondary community. So, we want to think hard on investing in ourselves and think little about social interactions with our community, but we do want to think hard about long-term investments in our core community. A family is a good example of people who will be close to us for a long time. It would be wise to invest in bettering them as people and bettering their skills as individuals for the group. A family can be anyone we live with or are close too and are not necessarily a blood relation. We can think hard about our core community the way we would ourselves because they are a part of us, and therefore a part of our investment, but everyone else is a social reflex we want to build. A core community does not happen overnight, just like any other investment we make in ourselves and is also like watching paint dry. Therefore, we cannot just invest in anyone who seems to care about us. We should only invest in people that manage to prove they can provide us with what we want in our lives over time. Then we can think hard about how to benefit them in our lives as well.

The diet for life.

I may have just discovered a diet I can eat for the rest of my life…and it may just be a good balanced diet for the average person too…who likes exercise. I have tried numerous diets over the years with mixed results. I tried the zone diet (30% P, 40% C, 30% F), the bodybuilder diet (40% P, 40% C, 20% F), the Mediterranean diet (30% P, 30% C, 40% F), and the good old conventional diet (20% P, 50% C, 30% F). I tried each of these diets for a couple months at about 2000 calories and kept working out as usual, and now I can tell you what they did to me. The zone diet got me pretty ripped as long as my calories remained real low and the protein was from real solid sources and not powders and eggs. This is not a good muscle building diet though. The bodybuilder diet had way too much protein and get ready for this. The excess protein building muscle idea is a total myth. The only thing eating extra solid sources of protein will do is make your body work harder, which in turn can shed some extra fat, but it will stress out your kidneys too. The Mediterranean diet made me real flabby. High fat diets, low carb, and moderate protein diets are not the answer either because the carbs help shed some fat by keeping the metabolism up. Believe it or not I gained the most muscle on the conventional diet. The secret to building good muscle is eating between .5 and .8 grams of protein per pound of lean mass body weight. The rest is just more carbs to keep fueling that body to power. I understand most people do not have body fat testers and scales around the house like I do, so when people ask how much protein to eat I tell them to aim for half their weight in grams of their desired body weight. If you are 100 pounds then eat 50 grams a day.

Now I am ready to move onto the diet I discovered through all my playing with numbers. The problem with all the other diets was they gave you a set percentage to calories to eat each macronutrient at. In other words, no matter how many calories you are eating you have to eat a certain percentage of that from protein, carbohydrates and fat. My new diet allows you to eat what you body tells you to eat based on what your shape is. Once again this takes a body fat tester and a scale to calculate. Math and science will not let you down kids. Let’s say I weigh 187 pounds and then use the body fat tester to find out that 30 pounds of that is fat. That means I am 157 pounds of lean mass. Since I only need .5 to point .8 grams per a pound of protein to maintain or build muscle, I multiply that number by .8 and get 125.6 grams of protein. The reason I use the higher of the two numbers on the spectrum of grams per pound is because I am likely to continue to gain muscle, and eventually that .8 will become .5 of my lean mass as I grow, and every few months I will have to add more protein to my diet.

As for carbohydrates I will double the number of my grams of protein, and that will be the grams of carbs I eat in a day. That means 125.6 x 2 = 251.2 Obviously you can round these numbers up or down a tenth to get whole numbers. As for fat, 20% of total calories seem to work well. We want just enough to stay healthy because the carbs are what make us run well for energy and muscle growth. You just add together the grams of carbs and protein and multiply it by 4 and that will tell you how many calories you are eating. 125.6 + 251.2 = 376.8 x 4 = 1507.2 calories. Add 400 calories of fat and divide that by 9 to get 44.4 grams of fat. That makes a total of 1907 calories. This balance will keep you lean and give you good energy too. I personally multiply my grams of protein by 3 for my carbohydrates in the winter to build more muscle and then when I am ready to lean out for the summer I switch back to 2 my grams of protein a day. By this point I have more lean mass so I can eat more carbs every summer as I grow through the years, but muscle will atrophy with age and that is okay, because based on my lean mass I will know what to eat for that weight in lean mass and that is why this is a life diet based on your own body and not some other balance someone makes up out of the air to suit everyone.

Why I have no more room for my metal head friends.

I found that metal heads and conservatives have a lot in common most of the time. There is an underlying theme of insecurity and fear driving the entire ideology and lifestyle. A conservative lives in a world of fear based the idea that everyone is going to hurt us, take our stuff, and we need to be completely self reliant without cooperation to be happy and successful. This premise is built on the idea of fear, so we need to keep everyone at a distance where they cannot hurt us so we can build up our strength and keep from ever being hurt. This likely stems from prior pain in the life of many people who think like this. Even Christianity is built on a similar premise of looking to an outlet for strength and hope that is prayed to in order to find hope for change, but a real change can only come when we face a fear instead of projecting it into a being that we hope will take care of our problems for us, or performing all actions unto a being where the only pay back is a reward deferred in heaven. Christians like conservatives live in a world of credit, where they continually invest in things and ideas now instead of people now, and there is a hope for happiness and rewards later.

Metal heads are very similar because they too live in a world of fear and insecurity. They became metal heads because they did not belong in the mainstream and a subculture of fear is created. One may point out that that they seem aggressive and angry so how can they be fearful? I would point out that an animal shows its teeth when it is fearful and is therefore aggressive to ward off enemies. We may not always show our teeth, but the aggression of our words and actions are a defense mechanism we create to scare away what we see as potential harm. People who act tough are fearful to put it simple. The only difference between and a metal head and a hardcore kid is that hardcore kids realize others are as fearful as they are and form rape gangs to beat up on others out of their insecurity. Just as the Christians project their fears and insecurities into another being, the metal head projects all their fears and insecurities into anger, because anger is a safe place to hide. Anger gives us a sense of power, but anger is not real power unless it gets results. There are proper instances to be angry so people do not step on us, but to live angry all the time is like wallowing in our own mud. Instead of changing the things these people are fearful of, they choose to live in denial of their pain and be angry, or they choose to accept their problems and be consciously angry about them because it gives a sense of power, but this sense of power does not actually improve their lives. It just gives them an excuse not to change so they can be angry that their life is not that great and remain feeling powerful.

This is why power cannot be found by investing in things and ideas the way it can be found by investing in people. I understand that material well being is important to living well, but to have material well being without happy people around us leaves us still that much more insecure and fearful of those who do not share our well being, because they might take it or harm us in some way. Anger does not change a problem beyond the short term in most cases and neither does projecting our problems onto others. We need to invest in ourselves as people so we are valuable to others. Conservatives have this part of the equation right. They want to build up assets, things, and ideas, but it is never with a vision of bettering others in some way through that accomplishment later on, or bringing others in the picture to help bring about that goal easier or better than it could be. The problem with conservatives is they want to invest in things only for the sake of protecting themselves from others. Metal heads want to invest in the heavy metal lifestyle like concerts, buying music, clothing, and acting “metal”, and this is done to project their problems into the aggression of their music and act tough instead of seeking a belonging in society that will bring them success in many cases. On the other hand Christians and extreme liberals have the other half of the equation correct because they want to invest in people, but they just want to keep giving what they do not have in many cases. They only have their good will and simple acts of charity, but they never build themselves up to be strong because they keep investing their energy into strangers who will not repay the deeds. Christians are by far the most confusing. On one hand they are fearful of the forces of evil and anyone not like them, so they find internal cohesion based on external threats, but then they turn around to help strangers who may very well be their enemies in the name of god. In many cases this is to try and convert them to their side, but in others they do good will because they want to be rewarded in heaven or blessed in life.

It only makes sense to invest in both ourselves and those close to us. If we just invest in ideas and things we will be lonely, fearful, and insecure. If we just invest in strangers we do not actually improve ourselves to the point that we have anything to offer others, and nobody will want us in their lives if we have no worth. Investing in family seems to be the solution to the problem. Family is not something that is by birth or blood. Family is people who have proven we can trust them over time, and reciprocate our good deeds towards them. These people are usually only small in number and we can count them on one hand. They live with us or near us and we seek to improve each other’s lives, because we find that we can grow stronger as a unit than on our own. Family can change slowly or quickly. A teacher can be part of a faster changing family. Children can be part of a slower changing family.

I understand these are generalizations and I do have some friends that are conservative or metal heads and are conscious of themselves on a level where they will seek improvement in themselves and others, but the generalization seems to hold true more often than not. It was just the other day an old metal head friend of mine said he likes being angry. Of course he does. He likes to not improve his bad situation and be angry about it. Another friend from the same background on the same night said pain is just a feeling, as if it is okay to have as much pain as happiness and that we should stand idle while the pain resonates instead acting to change our situation. It is obvious to me that anger created by letting pain resonate is what gives a sense of power with no actual improvements in life. I have chosen to move away from many of my old friends because they continue to live in fear and insecurity. I am seeking moderation in my life and believe this can only be achieved by living in the environments conducive to my goals and this is achieved by living among those who share those goals with me. I want to strengthen my environment.