Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for March 2020

Four Maxims: A Spiritual Exercise

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Ancient philosophy was characterized by the philosopher’s burden to help individuals and city-states overcome their slavery to the passions through mental and physical exercises designed to strengthen the will’s resolve and aim it in the direction of the good.

To Philosophers like Musonius Rufus, Philo of Alexandria, Epicurus, or Clement of Alexandria, a spiritual exercise was some thought process, physical habit, or specific activity that was designed to aim the practitioner in the appropriate life direction, either by changing bad ideas, removing bad habits, or adding good habits.

Read in this light, the Old Testament is full of such exercises, like memorizing Scripture, reciting Scripture in the morning and evening, designating meal times for prayer, or negative visualization (imagining the loss of everything as in Ecclesiastes). One such exercise I’ve been using is a combination of material from the Old Testament and the Stoics. Solomon recommends memorizing brief sayings of the wise and mulling them over to obtain wisdom, and the Stoics speak highly of this practice as well, though Seneca says it can go too far and recommends making your own maxims as you grow in maturity.

My version of the maxim practice is to just pick four maxims per month to focus your attention. Some could be from Scripture, from a favorite author, or even your own devising to help you measure up to the circumstances that you face.

For this March 2020, I chose:

  1. Squat every day.
  2. Daily office daily. (I don’t quite read it every day, but the point is to remind myself daily)
  3. Write it then do it. (to temper my tendency to be overly ambitious for the day and also my job requires that I be hyper available, so it can be easy to prioritize all the petty urgencies of the day over more important tasks)
  4. Be efficient. (Think Ephesians 5:15-16)

What maxims would help you this month?

Remote Work, Transportation, and SARS-CoV-2

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In the past 100 years, the world has experienced three major technological revolutions with respect to human industriousness and communication:

  1. Mass availability of automobiles for personal travel.
  2. Mass telecommunications for mass one-way messages via television/radio and telephone calls.
  3. Mass availability of personal computers.

With these three technologies, one would think that the American dream would be to work from home or near home, to drive to work to solve in-person problems and work communications would be brief, informative, and useful.

Instead, we’re in this bizarre circumstance wherein traveling to a central location (because it came first) is the primary work mindset and telecommunications and computers are used to make employees more aware of their work bureaucracy from home.

Now, working from home has trials and difficulties, but it also allows for helping family, choosing hours, working efficiently without interruption from lazy co-workers, and so-on. This applies to education, most jobs

My hope during the SARS-CoV-2 quarantine situation is that we can make the family the center of American life with work as the intrusion.

This would be good. Old habits die hard, though.

Of course, the issues raised by a viral spread this large are both practical and speculative, for instance, while a smaller world with more local economies would make local quarantining far easier, having megacorporations like Amazon, for all the problems it causes, makes it easier for people to access things like vitamin C, materials they need for their small business when local supplies are unavailable, and so-on. Is there a way, in the future, to have a world that integrates the resources of a global economy while maintaining the local culture and efficiencies of local communities. Like, why is every building in America made of drywall when it mildews easily in humid areas? Mega-economies are efficient at spreading things everywhere regardless of appropriateness.

Low Hanging Fruit: Weight Loss

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I train clients in basic barbell movement as a side hustle and while I’ve tried some unusual approaches to dieting that make sense to/for me, they are far from the mainstream of dietary practice or science. In other words, they’re not what I would recommend to the general population. That being said, I do think that for individuals trying to lose weight there are some pieces of the puzzle that could get you 50-80% of the way toward your goals without creating a major hassle in your life. These are the low-hanging fruit of weight loss:

  1. Stop drinking calories. No cream or sugar in coffee or tea. No milk, no fraps, no soda, no juice. Don’t do it. When I was a barista, we served a blended coffee beverage that had nearly 1,100 calories in it. People would drink it with a 700 calorie piece of cheese cake. Don’t do this. If you had three of these in a week with normal meals, you could feasibly have gained a pound of extra fat if the frap takes you above maintenance calories.
  2. Pick a number of meals to eat during the day and stick with it. Whether three or two, eat those meals and no more and no less. When you’re losing weight, outside of certain methods, you’re just going to feel hungry, accept that now to make serious progress.
  3. Make your first meal, whether breakfast or lunch, high protein. I recommend eggs, chicken, cottage cheese, red meat, or pork. Protein is satiating. Protein plus fat or protein plus a carb will be even more filling. But if you can eat more protein for your first meal, there is some evidence that this helps your body burn more fat for energy through the day.
  4. Track your meals and snacks (though quitting snacking is wise). Peter Drucker was fond of saying, if it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed. If you want to manage whether you’re following these rules, then you need to measure what you’re doing by writing it down. I recommend getting a moleskine notebook, though you can just use your phone. If you plan, for instance, to only eat dessert on Sundays, you’ll want to know if you screwed up.
  5. Only buy food for your planned meals. No eating out, no snacks at work, not junk food at home (throw it away). If the garbage isn’t there it won’t be eaten. Will you have to cook and store food? Yes. Will it be worth it? Only if you want to lose weight.

There are more things to do. You’ll notice I left of counting calories. Why? It’s not low-hanging fruit because few adhere to it. There’s a progression here. Get discipline in recording meals, cutting desserts, and planning to eat, and counting calories for 2-3 meals a day will be a breeze.

If you decide to pick these fruit, you’ll find that about two days in something will try to interrupt you. You’ll say, “well, I can start tomorrow.” No. Don’t do it, don’t give in. The fact is that every time you start something new, an event that wouldn’t register in your mind as significant will suddenly be used by your brain as an excuse to revert to old habits. Everytime my evenings get too busy to lift weights and I set my alarm for 4:30 or 5am, my daughter has a bad sleep night on the first or second attempt. My thoughts: “I guess this is a bad day to train.” This is false, I wouldn’t have even changed a thing about my day if I was training in the evening. Don’t treat normal events as portents of bad timing on your part.