Health: good and bad

Clarification on physical culture

I spoke about health in last post, and you might get the impression that I am some extreme health nut that promotes obsessively tracking one’s diet and exercise, taking 3 different supplement stacks consisting of 10 supplements each, three times a day, and looking down on everyone engaging in the slightest unhealthy behavior. I am not, but maybe I should be to a greater degree. Way I see it, the real healthy and strong life is free from having to be concerned with its health to an excessive degree. Only the sick need health. When talking about these topics of health and physical culture in comparison to Ancient Greece, we cannot possibly come close to what physical culture used to mean. For us, it is a necessity grown out of lack. But it can also be a pursuit grown out of a surplus of health.

There is a type of human that you see arise more and more each day; typically a young guy, obsessed with fitness and exercise, sees himself as an entrepreneur of sorts, he is ‘different’, and could never really find himself in what the ‘normie’ was doing —drinking, partying, art, music, learning, adventure. No, he is ‘made for more’, so he spends his days tracking his food in some app, telling 50 year olds they should walk more to lose weight, and going to bed at 8pm every night. Although he is an extremist health zealot of sorts, he generally laughs at those who do more esoteric health-practices, practice unique lifts, or train in any way that isn’t ‘optimal’, he likes to ‘keep it real’, so he just sticks to steak, protein shakes, and cheap creatine, taking every chance to spew his resentment at the person drinking beer on occasion. And he will always recommend you to take your vaccines and listen to the doctor. He usually doesn’t train that hard, talks a lot about overtraining and optimization, and thinks you’ll break your bones if you train a muscle group more than twice a week. 

There is no adventure in his life, but he tells himself that this lack of adventure is the real adventure. Going out and experiencing the world? No, that’s for normies, I am special. There is this type, and I don’t blame them for existing. It is very normal that they emerge. When a people’s drift for exploration leads to disease, it becomes a necessity to take a step back and regenerate health. Sadly, in the process, the drift for adventure itself is starved and looked down upon. 

There is this other guy doing rounds on social media, optimizing his health and increasing life-span through ‘science’, Bryan Johnson. He looks like the pale guy from Star Trek, but more gay or androgynous. He is the perfect example of this trend where, wanting to preserve life, one stops living. Perhaps he will live to be very old, looking like a plant. But he will never have as much life in him as the soldier who dies young, the athlete who injures himself pursuing excellence, or the artist giving all of his energy to his craft. 

We should be very clear on this, as much as it is a necessity to become focussed on health and strength to a greater degree, we should be very wary of this pursuit becoming pathological.  

Life is messy, and the entire point of getting stronger and healthier is so one can weather the storm to a greater degree. To merely flee from the storm and hide away behind one’s supplement stack is not a sign of health. Although at times for certain individuals in certain times of life, it might be necessary to abstain from life to re-generate one’s powers. To live, life must sometimes take a step back from itself. Besides, however much the world might be fucked, you can always train. 

When talking about the degeneration of physical culture, one often points to modern drug-fuelled bodybuilding. The extreme monstrous physiques achieved through chemical cocktails and so on, protruding bellies and early death. Although I’d never look down on the level of dedication and mental fortitude required to achieve these things, I hardly see it as a symbol of the essence of physical culture. On the other hand, look at this video of Zlatan Vanev attempting a 210 kg clean & jerk. 

What you see is pure power, grit, and the simple nature of what physical culture is: man against matter, trying over and over, risking serious injury or death, just to move a piece of matter. It is simple in intent, and insightful as to that aspect of man’s spirit that requires physical culture: this dissatisfaction with how things are as of present, the limits of man’s power, and the drive to go beyond. He will try, and he will keep trying, to move matter. To free himself, in a way. To become more powerful than he is. If life stays as it is, it is already in decline. In all, physical culture is entirely opposed to the complacent lives described earlier.

There is a book by Eugen Sandow, where he says in a funny way: “Life is movement. If you stop moving, you die. Choose life.” And this is all there is to it, and why there is no culture without physical culture. If you stop moving, you die. Or at least, you rot away very slowly. Man’s drive to keep moving further and further, this is what physical culture is. An outlet for this drive, and something that allows this drive to stay alive.  

Not to live a boring and complacent life ‘following the science’, but to be capable of living a life of power and freedom. If you remember last post, in the Greek polis, the devotion to physical culture distinguished the free man from the slave. In both senses, that the free man had the freedom to pursue physical cultivation, and thereby, the creation of culture as a whole. But also, in that physical culture allowed men to be free. Free from disease, to an extent, but most importantly, free from weakness. Hence the saying: “Love of culture without weakness.” If one only loves what we usually take to be culture, without first taking into account the culture of mind and body created through physical culture, you will have a culture of weakness. There will be no strength to uphold ‘culture’, and cultural superstructures will turn against Man. It takes strength to create culture, and it takes strength to uphold a culture. And most importantly, culture is the strengthening of life in all its modalities, and nothing else. Hence why there can not possibly be a culture of slaves, and why there is so little culture in the West today. Music and gymnastics were the object of paideia. 

The presence of cities, institutions, systems of trade, art, entertainment, and so on, does not in any way guarantee the presence of culture. If by grace of these ‘systems’ the organism grows weaker, there is no culture. There might be people, and whatever it is that people do, but there is no culture, and there are no individuals.