Month: January 2021

I have always been mostly an intellectual guy, an academic guy, a cerebral guy. Always in decent physical shape (backpacking, rock climbing, fitful efforts at physical training) but basically a dad-bod guy. Not an athlete by any definition.

So why do I now aim at being a beast? This conjures up images of steroid-inflated men, one-dimensional, not deep in intellect or spirit.

Which I am now convinced could not possibly be more wrong. My own ego and prejudice turned against my own enlightenment.

This enlightenment started with seeing a few Joe Rogan and David Goggins clips on YouTube. Those men know something. They know some truths. And they gained that knowledge through disciplined, hard physical effort.

I want what they have.

I’m a bit sheepish, even now, to proclaim my objective. Somehow it contains (for me) equal parts attraction and revulsion. It is attractive to see someone in beast mode. I want to have that power, focus, determination, discipline. Not really as a tool to get something, but for the feeling itself.

Right now when I set a decision to run a four mile loop and I run it, I don’t give two fucks for calorie burn or building strength or building endurance or any of the physical payoffs from running. What I get is the deep emotional satisfaction of “I did what I set out to do, and what I set out to do was big and important.”

That feeling. It will not, I suspect, change of my run is 10 miles or 40 miles. The feeling will be the same, because the accomplishment will be the same: satisfaction (which doesn’t begin to describe the feeling) of setting and accomplishing something you don’t think you can do.

Now, four miles is easily achieved. But four miles day after day after day after day after day? That is the mountain I climb. And every day that I run I get the happiness of stacking another day on the pile. The four mile distance itself is not the point.

I believe I can do four miles daily. No excuses, no bullshit, just do it. My mantra as I run, which is where I want to go next, is “10k, every day”.

Yes there will be injuries. Externals don’t count. Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics: externals are not in my control.

Back to seeing myself as a beast.

Where I went off the rails was with the revulsion. The instinctive response (“That’s not for me”) to seeing someone in beast mode was an internal doubt that I could achieve such a state.

I doubted that I could be a beast. So it was easier to ridicule the man showing beast mode drive and determination. I can’t do what he can do, so he is stupid.

That’s why I want to be a beast: it directly challenges my previous surrender prior to engagement. My view of other men was wrong, and my view of myself was wrong.

Objective: be a beast.

How: through physical training, where external signals (fitness, weight, body fat, whatever) help me see progress.

Explanation: age and genetics are fixed, and the only variables are diet and exercise. Diet and exercise are controlled by discipline. Do I seek truth (the knowledge of what works and doesn’t work)? Do I apply that truth relentlessly, to the best of my ability, every day? Discipline means doing.

But where to begin? How will I know, in my heart, that I am a beast?

I am beginning where I stand now, which is running. It is the most accessible, lowest friction way to simultaneously expend effort and reinforce discipline. I walk out of my door and start running. Shorts, shirt, socks, shoes. Nothing else matters. Discipline says run four miles. I do it.

My daughter mentioned someone she saw doing handstand push-ups – a man in his 40s. She asked him how she could get there. He said yoga. So she went off to a yoga class.

Davis Goggins runs. I’m sure he does other things, too. That man does yoga. I’m sure he does other things, too.

For the moment I will run. The discipline muscle will be the “no matter what” muscle. Run no matter what.

Next week we have a prediction for rain. I’m already debating in my head what to do. Answer: run. I will be wet. I will be cold. Yet I will run.

I’m not concerned about distance. I’m not concerned about speed. I’m not concerned about any skills. All I am concerned about is the crux: the “just run” discipline.

When the gyms open up I will add something to the equation.

I will slowly experiment with adding discipline to diet.

But for now, I am a demonstrably a beast, today, when I run — no matter what — my four miles.

That’s my beginner’s yardstick.

What do I know and what do I not know?

Seneca:

Meanwhile it is foolhardy to condemn that of which you are ignorant.

Letters, 91.21.

Just a reminder to refuse to have opinions ungrounded in experience.

For a good essay on this topic, see Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small. That essay is why I titled this entry the way I did.

My aim is, given my age and genetics, to be a beast.

The only thing standing between the me today and the beast me . . . is discipline.

What I eat today makes the beast me. My workout today makes the beast me.

Upstream of diet and exercise . . . is discipline.

The only variable in this equation is discipline.

Four miles.

I’m on a shopping expedition, picking up an online order. There’s a long queue and I’m at the end of the queue.

I’ve done this before. Routinely I have been busy until they text me to say it’s my turn.

This time, I’m sitting on a bench in the January sun, listening to the freeway, the store’s piped-in music. Smelling the kettlecorn stand 25 feet away. Watching the shoppers come and go.

Do nothing. Be bored. Feel the sun. Check the queue progress periodically, and wait.

No podcasts. No information or exhortation from my phone. Just sit.

For several months I have followed the intermittent fasting practice of eating only between noon and 8 pm. This has been successful: the number of times of broke this practice must be only four or five, and then during travel.

The primary benefit for me has been the setting (and respecting) of behavior boundaries. The secondary benefit has been the easy maintenance of weight at 180 lbs, given normal variations plus or minus a pound.

Now I am going to revise that plan and create a new plan. The objective: to be, physically, a beast. This means that I am as strong and fit as, given age and genetics, I can possibly be.

It also necessarily means that I am already a beast, by mindset. I cannot achieve mastery without knowing that I am, in fact, already a beast. And I always have been.

I will take the clear boundary philosophy of intermittent fasting and now apply it to the types and quantities of food I eat. Up to now, it has been an “anything goes” practice during the noon to 8 pm timeslot. I want ice cream? I eat ice cream.

The terminal hour for eating will be respected. This means no late-night snacks and no indigestion and heartburn to wake me up at night.

The morning: I am going to start mornings with cheese. Specifically I will start with four slices of Swiss cheese from one of those pre-sliced packs.

Lunch is still free-form.

Afternoon snacks: there is a copious amount of crap at work, for the taking. I successfully stopped eating chips and crackers. Now it’s time to stop the candy bars masquerading as healthy snacks / protein bars / health bars.

I will take cheese to work and keep it in the fridge.

Theory: cheese, because of the fat and protein, will be better for nutrition and satiating hunger.

And of course, physical training continues with the objective of installing hard boundaries (“no matter what”) in that practice, in the same way I have installed hard boundaries in other areas of my life.

Hard boundaries are good. They stop the debating society in my head.

Beast. I can thank David Goggins and his YouTube videos for making this an admirable and worthwhile objective.

And it’s the best kind of objective: as soon as it is set, you achieve it. I am a beast even though I run four miles, not fourteen or forty. The physical me will catch up with the mindset me. It is inevitable, an irresistible consequence, that a hard physical man will be caused by a self-perspective of being a beast in all areas of life.

I didn’t have the Freedom filter protecting me from the internet. After reading a bit of Seneca (pedantic and dry, and I’m soldiering through because people speak so highly of him) my fingers turned to the usual uproar stuff on the internet.

Someday I will be unflappable. I’m not there now. So for the moment I must keep the filters strong: feed myself with what is good, by not allowing myself to search for and dwell on finding fault with others.

Now is the season to become strong. The Kingdom of God is within.

Ethics. Physical health. Wisdom.

Now is the time to speak of these things. Not as a promoter, a preacher, a politician. These people have no soul. No, now is the time to speak as a practitioner. Speak by example. Speak by living and doing. And by plainly calling bullshit on bullshit people.

For now, developing wisdom or the virtues (along Seneca’s lines, though I see scant difference in many ways between Seneca and The Carpenter) and radiating those values is my life.

And per Taleb, if you see a fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud. But that, after all, is just a practical application of virtue.

Today’s readings from Seneca contained dissections of syllogisms and the like. Nothing jumped out at me.

Well, except the comment that the study of the liberal arts (which in his definition, I think, more or less maps to our modern definition) has as its objective the creation of a free man.

But there is only one really liberal study, – that which gives a man his liberty.

Letters, 88.2.

I imagined a college class taught with this aim. College-age me would not have reaped much from that class, as I imagined myself wise but unskilled. How wrong I was (about wisdom).

We all imagine we know virtue, until we come face-to-face with a test of character. We all imagine we know what is good and what is evil. Hitler? Evil. Trump? Evil.

Pick your bogeyman. It doesn’t matter. It is interesting that evil can be neatly encapsulated in pointing at The Other smugly. As if that makes you good! In fact, the fruitful and only place worth looking is within.

This is a task I could not and did not perform in my twenties. Only in my early thirties, confronted by the cumulative consequences of my decisions, did I become open to looking within.

I faced a stopping point that could not be excused by bullshit excuses to myself, a stopping point that I knew no one else had created. (This certainty took a great deal of time, even after hitting the wall, to accept).

So now I am at the point in life where there is no classroom, no teacher, yet I am engaged in a course of story of the liberal arts — the study of matters that make me a free man.

There is no other liberty.

And I study with fervor and intent that the student me never possessed.

What stops me is boredom.

I run without music, without podcasts, without audiobooks. I run with my head. Intentionally.

When my head is noisy and talking to itself, I am distracted and I put distance under my feet. Usually this means some imaginary argument about something that will never come up, with someone I will never meet. But in my head I showed them up.

The nice thing about running is that sooner or later in the run all that imaginary fiction evaporates. The ego is fed, or the ego is embarrassed. Either way, the chatter stops.

But when I am calm and quiet, I start talking to myself, and the talking is always about quitting. How much will I run today? What if I just do one loop instead of two? After all it’s late and my legs hurt.

There are always reasons. Explanations. The conversation is never about doing more, putting in extra effort. The conversation is always about less. And it is seductive.

Yesterday, I was in the conversation within the first 5 minutes, negotiating the run. What pace? What distance? What time? Should I adjust (shorter of course) the route?

It’s a standard route, starting from my house and just over 6 km (almost 4 miles). Two loops through the neighborhood. Uphill to home.

What I realized last night: everything got really quiet (in a good way) when I said to myself that I will do these two loops even if it takes me 90 minutes and I shuffle painfully all the way home.

My current mindset: I’m a beast, a savage, a monster. I run. Whether it is four or forty miles, I finish.

Last night I simply multiplied the distances by 10x. I’m at the 3/4 mark of my 4 mile run? This is what it feels like to see 10 miles ahead of you. It’s the last half-block to home? This is what it feels like to pace out that 40th mile.

I wear an Apple Watch. I don’t check the time or distance. Why should I? The only thing that matters is finishing. That’s liberating.

I don’t know how many times I have listened to the quitting voice and cut a run short. Frankly that was the old me in his default mode.

What I realized last night: I need to learn to live with boredom. Same streets. Same slight incline on the last long leg of the loop.

Same same same same same same. Go go go go go go.

Be bored. Run anyway. Work anyway.

I suspect it’s not really boredom. It’s something more basic. I’m going to run (literally and figuratively) at this mindset shitstorm to see what happens.