Heh.

No more internet for me!

Nowadays I swim at right angles, hoping to reach the shore. It’s gotten me to slightly better places.

I’m more of an anarch than a rebel. True freedom begins within.

To a point. But we are swimming in a large body of water with a flow. Some swim better against the flow than others.

It used to be everybody wanted to be my frenemy, but I eventually figured out how not to attract those people. The key is never look to others for support.

Would be nice if society around us would provide support.

Relationships are plenty crushed by the modern world; education is thrown at us to the point of counter-production; emotional resilience now comes from a pill bottle; exercise is possible, but sedation is coin of the realm; we’re practically tube-fed food and drink. Smoking does get some structural proscription.

It’s a necessary methodological assumption that you have some power to improve your lot by changing what you do. Then fill in the details.

What worked for me was experimenting on myself. Try different changes, keep track, measure results.

Example: black pepper in my coffee helps me lose weight. I’m not saying it will work for anyone else. For all I know, I’m the only one on the planet that this works for. But it works for me, so I’m doing it.

Which way does causality run? Could it be that those with a naturally happy disposition are more likely to eat right, exercise, be productive — all things that reinforce their good health, which in turn reinforces their natural happy disposition? While those who naturally have an unhappy disposition (we have all met people like that) experience the reverse — over-eating, under-exercising, gaining weight and becoming unhealthy and even more unhappy?

Are happy-well people (and sad-sick) born or made?

The only thing that has consistently paid off for me is a blend of empiricism, pragmatism and cynicism. The more cynical I am, the better my life gets. Suck it, idealists.