I’m only a bit into it, but without intending to be this is a decent précis of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
The modern struggle
Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower,
fasting, meditating, and exercising,
up against armies of scientists & statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, & medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games & addictive drugs.
— Naval (@naval) January 14, 2019
Quite describes the modern condition, yes?
Tried to get a McGriddles with just egg and cheese. After explaining myself five different times and eventually having to order “a sausage McGriddles with no sausage,” they gave me two pieces of bread with nothing in it. Good shit!
— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann) January 16, 2019
Fast food workers aren’t paid much, and most rely on a mental script of sorts to put in orders. When you deviate from that script, putting in an order is exponentially more difficult mentally and since most don’t care as they are paid jack, bizarre things like this happen.
One time at a Burger King I spent half an age attempting to get something other than American cheese on a burger (as that is not cheese and is fucking vile), as I knew they had it for some other meal, but it was nearly impossible so I just gave up.
If the workers (the same workers) were paid $20 an hour, I bet these problems would not exist. It’s hard to care for $7.50 an hour.
Diets do not work. Lifestyle and habit changes do. If you’re on a diet, you will fail. I have never been on a diet and never will be, thus why I did not fail. And I’m not exercising or working out. I am a person who works out. This is the difference — it’s a lifestyle, a habit, not just some temporary state of being after which I will go back to some “normal” resting state.
I don’t mean to sound like some self-help guru but the main obstacle is always mental. We have crap software (Human OS 1.0 is terribly buggy) so we must overcome it however we can.
The above, in short, is the most effective way I know how and it seems to comport with science to a great degree. Lifestyles and habits, not diets and “hitting the gym.”
Every day, I am thankful that I was blessed with uncommon stubbornness. I discount often how much less relentless others are in their approach to life and problems and can’t understand why they aren’t doing what I do just as a matter of course.
I take no credit for this; as far as I can tell, I was just born this way. And it caused me no end of problems when I was younger, but it’s made my life vastly easier as an adult.
I’m so accustomed to bizarre conspiracies being almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon that I’m really discomfited by this new era of liberal and progressive conspiracy-mongering. Unfortunately, their conspiracies aren’t as fun as the kooky right-wing conspiracies of lizard people and such, just chants about Russia and how neoliberalism doesn’t exist, but if it does, it’s Russia.
Ads for women: Be thin, be thick, love your body, your boobs look bigger in this, dye your hair, embrace your grays, these pants are slimming, be feminine, wear makeup, look natural, hide your age…
Women: K.
Gillette: Men should be less shitty.
Men: Don’t tell us what to do!
— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) January 15, 2019
No, it’s more like for men in ads or outside of them:
Note that I am not saying this is true of all women or men and their expectations of men, but as she was talking about general societal and social expectations, I chose to as well.
I know women don’t have it easy, but it’s hilarious how many women don’t realize what’s going on in the lives of men while believing they have perfect knowledge. This is why the MRA movement was born, in large part. (No, I am not an MRA as I don’t have any disdain or hatred of women, which is part of that movement’s DNA.)
I have been thinking a lot lately how easy it is to find evidence that Microsoft is tracking you and your operating system usage and also how widely this is denied in many quarters. I have been trying to understand that strange phenomenon — what causes the willful ignorance and why many people are so eager to deny all evidence that it’s occurring.
This bit from Shoshan Zuboff’s new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, gets closer to the heart of it than anything I’d syncretized so far.
Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness. In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains.
This disputation of the bleeding obviousness of Microsoft’s pervasive surveillance in their new OSes (and retrofitted into older OSes) is I think one of those excuses that operate as a defense mechanism. “Oh, Mike is crazy, he thinks Microsoft is gathering data all the time. Ha, loser!” This despite the fact that it really is not hard to intercept and log DNS requests and do packet captures to see all the data that is being actively exfiltrated.
Mockery and denial is also a method of avoiding responsibility and useful for breaking out of paralyzing cognitive dissonance. If they really were able to make themselves believe the clear truth of OS-level surveillance, they might have to do something about it, to take some action. It’s just easier to believe what they wish to rather than the evidence; seems a common state of human affairs.
A martial artist looks at swordfighting in the movies.
Not only all this, but swordfights can basically never look all that realistic because the blows you use to kill and maim with a real sword are simply too dangerous to do consistently, even with a dull or covered blade.
I know this is everywhere already, but it’s so great who can resist:
Do watch it large so you can see her facial expressions as well.
I’ve heard many, many stupid ideas over the years but I think “intuitive eating” has to be near the top of the doofus list. Things that can harm me potentially I do not want to do intuitively; I want to do them very deliberately. How does “intuitive driving” and “intuitive neurosurgery” sound to you? Not so good, really.
Eating “intuitively” makes no sense in the modern era with hyper-abundance of high-calorie, low-satiety food. For instance, I ate a larger-than-normal breakfast this morning (I don’t usually eat breakfast at all, but this was larger than what I eat when I do), so consequently I ate a smaller-than-normal lunch. That’s the very opposite of intuitive eating.
I really do need to concentrate on eating more protein, though. That’s not intuitive at all for me, either, as I really like vegetables and carbs, but it’d help me a great deal with my weightlifting goals.