Optimal training strategies for each of the four main skills of life II

In my last  post I analyzed the most effective ways of developing four skills I had identified as foundational for a good life and most conductive to human flourishing. I had time to develop the first two, having to do with how to improve our ability to build relationships, applied to forging deep human bonds understood as good in themselves, and not as means for a further goal like ascending the corporate ladder or bagging a trophy wife to be deployed as status symbol; I also proposed what I considered the most effective path for intellectual enhancement, applied to increase one’s ability to concentrate and identify underlying relationships between apparently disjointed concepts and narratives. In this one I intend to finish the job by proposing the optimal methods to develop the remaining two foundational skills: physical fitness and openness to the transcendental.

Git yer body functioning, Bro!

Consider the following three situations:

·         Like recently happened in Hawaii, you hear in TV (and in the radio, and in every means the government has to communicate important news to the population) that nuclear war has broken out and missiles are flying towards your beloved city. You check in the internet and every news channel (fake or otherwise) is blaring it out loud and unambiguously: the end is nigh, the little hands finally did press the red button and rocket man is retaliating (or whatever other nightmarish scenario you may prefer to consider, feel free to add apocalyptic ayatollahs, crazed jihadists, the Pakistani military finally overrun by millenarian fanatics, the Chinese crossed by some maneuver in their side of the globe, the Russians overstepping their natural taste for mischief and havoc and whatnot). You look through the window and, understandably, the streets are packed with the greatest traffic jam history has ever seen, with people honking, crying, shouting, fist fighting, trying to cut corners when there are no corners left… Not a single vehicle budges, and most people trapped inside them will surely still be there when the bomb strikes. You have about 15 minutes left. Assuming you live 3-4 miles from the city center (the most likely target of the incoming missiles), just getting another 2 miles away may be the difference between life and death (the annihilation ratio of an average nuclear bomb, in a densely constructed city like yours, is about 3 miles, and you want a couple more for safety, and not be too contaminated with the highly radioactive particles that will shower and percolate everything in a radius of a couple more miles. 2 miles in 15 minutes is well within the means of every half functioning human being, and, contrary to cars, nothing impedes you to run away to your heart’s content…

·         You may have stroke gold this night: started a conversation with the cutest blonde you had seen in years, and you really hit it off and both seemed really interested in each other (and you are still sober, so she’s not “beer beautiful” and “beer interesting”, but legitimately so!). You propose to go to the bar to ask for another drink, ask her what she would like, and head off to the bar hoping to get the waiter’s attention, order, pay and be back on a moment’s notice. But a brute standing between you and the only available spot by the bar has been giving you hostile looks since you started your conversation with the beauty, and now he openly pushes you aside before you can even rise your hand to make your intention clear to the busy barman. You stumble but regain your composure without falling down, and stare right at your sudden opponent. He is not much taller than you, and not physically that impressive. His eyes look a bit beady, so he’s not probably that sober either, although not too intoxicated. You judge that a forceful shove would probably put him down for good, and he doesn’t look like the kind that would seek to retaliate and cause a real fight, so if successful you could resume your courting without much ado. The thing is, are you sure you could truly send the guy to the floor with a single push, letting him know it is best for him not to make a fuss about it?

·          You are adroitly strolling with your wife (fiancée, girlfriend, romantic interest… you name it) when a little thug grabs her purse and runs away with it! The kid is smallish and doesn’t seem to be armed, and unfortunately the neighborhood at that time of the day is deserted, so there is no point in screaming for help (for my male readers: screaming is simply undignified unless you have a major limb severed and are about to die if not immediately tended to… that would be the only occasion in which it would be OK to scream for a man, and even then I’d encourage you to do it in a subdued, appropriately low-key manner). You judge that a fast sprint would put you at striking distance of the mugger, but consider that if you fail to reach him you would really look like a fool (a more charitable view is you don’t want to depart from your partner’s side, traumatized and shaken as she surely is by the assault, unless absolutely justified; running after the perpetrator and failing to catch him doesn’t qualify as justification, although actually catching him and recovering the purse does). Do you gallantly dash towards the robber, or stay besides your paramour to jointly complain afterwards about the vileness and decadence of Western civilization, and how society is going to hell in a breadbasket? 

I could think of almost infinitely more examples, from the everyday and trivial (your aging mother hands you the proverbial pickle jar she cannot open expecting your powerful grip will do) to the improbably heroic (like Jean Valjean, you witness a car tripping over a passerby, and his only chance of surviving is for you to lift the hood a few centimeters so other pedestrians can drag his body off the wreckage), in which having a functioning body makes all the difference in your life prospects. Not being so dramatic, the three qualities I’ve highlighted (endurance, strength and speed) are all improvable (if we devote enough time to them) and make a tremendous difference in the quality of the life you can lead when possessing them.

Indeed, our fitness crazed age seems convinced enough of the importance of physical fitness as not to need much justification. A word of caution is required, however, as our age may superficially seem fitness crazed, but what it is really is beauty obsessed, and by a dysfunctional, unhealthy conception of beauty at that. Being strong, fast and resistant to fatigue are all important traits that will allow you to live a more fulfilling life, a life more in accordance with your conception of the good, whatever that conception turns out to be. Having visible abdominal muscles (or 22 inch biceps) are not. Which essentially means that I can endorse and heartily recommend a training program conductive to the former, but not to the latter. Doing a sensible amount of big compound lifts with progressive overload makes sense. Doing rest-pause sets of 20 reps with occluding resistance bands to restrict the blood flow to the muscles, so they grow more, does not.

So, once we’ve taken that off the way, what is the best way to develop that life enhancing fitness? That’s a doozy: lift weights regularly (three times a week), with an Olympic bar, adding a bit of weight in each session (until you cannot add more weight, when it is time to start either cycling your lifts or periodizing, more on that here: Periodization 101). Occasionally, do some steady state cardio or HIIT to keep cardiovascular capacity in peak condition (it doesn’t need to be some super-fancy, crazy aggressive routine: just go for a longish walk, 1 to 1,5 hours, twice a week, but pushing a prowler, doing hill sprints, jumping rope, cycling or jogging are perfectly valid substitutes). The key thing here is consistency. Not do it one week, and then find a gazillion excuses for three weeks about how busy you are at work, how demanding your family schedule is or how the flu season has hit you really bad. Those are, more times than not, rationalizations. It’s OK to lose one workout (if you are having chemotherapy for an otherwise terminal illness I may consider acceptable raising the bar to two missed sessions in a row), but never more. You can train (thrice a week plus cardio, remember) when working 80-100 hour weeks (not ideal, I know, just go to the gym and do 10’ of cleans and 10’ of squats, as many reps of each as you can with 70% of your 1RM, more than enough to keep on progressing and staying in mint condition). You can train and still be a caring spouse and nurturing parent that has breakfast w the kids, regularly phones his elderly mother and has meaningful conversations about the deep meaning of life w his siblings (I guess, not that I’ve been such saintly person ever for very long).

I’m not a tremendous fan of CrossFit, they are just too dispersed, and most boxes have turned a very basic, no-frills training philosophy (just do the WOD as intensely as you can) in a smorgasbord of incompatible goals (do the WOD, plus conditioning, plus mobility work, plus cooldown, plus follow one fad diet or other) which end up producing very subpar results. But they have one element which I still respect: they repeat as a mantra their motto of “no excuses”. Indeed, an overabundance of excuses is one of the defining features of our time. I didn’t go to the gym as I was supposed to do? Well, my boss had been mean to me, so I needed to indulge in some “me time” to recover… I had an unpleasant conversation with my girlfriend so I rather went to my home and spent 4 hours playing a FPS videogame to decompress… The last chapter of the TV show I’m following was unsatisfying so I ate a bathtub of chocolate ice cream, and couldn’t move for 20 hours… excuses, excuses, excuses. You can indulge, eat excess ice cream, binge watch TV or play videogames until your eyes pop out of their sockets from overexposure… after completing your planned workout, that is.

And you don’t need to overthink that workout, again. Lift a barbell and put it back on the floor. Either more times or loaded with more weight than the previous time. In movements that involve most of the body. And walk, or cycle, or run for longer periods every now and then.

Is this all that there is? Probably not, but that’s not the point

Which takes me to my last, and most controversial point. I hope you remember I mentioned in my previous post, when I enumerated the four basic skills, that I would justify the fourth chosen one later on, advancing that it would be the one most readers (of a certain bent) disagreed with. Time to comply with that promise. I’m assuming, by the way, that being engaged in a denser, truer network of relationships, being mentally more acute and being physically more fit are all are universally considered worthy goals, deserving of our time, effort and commitment (we may question the sincerity of such opinion, though, when the majority of people is dragged into lives of solitude, mental torpor and obesity without much apparent resistance, using work as the universal justification for letting go of all the other abilities, but that would be the subject of another post). But “transcendence”? isn’t that kinda old? Something only people of ages past cared about? And that because they were primitive and unenlightened, they didn’t have modern science, which has provided conclusively all the evidence and knowledge that those benighted religious folk thought was contained in the bible (Qur’an, analects, dao te ching, whatever) but we now know for certain was not (the whole content of such books having been debunked and proved false). If such were the case, the ability to consider a possible reality “beyond” this one would be just so much evolutionary dead weight, something we have grown out of, and we shouldn’t keep caring about. Just the three previous skills, plus a well-paying job (or a generous safety net in a modern welfare state) would be more than enough to leave a perfectly fulfilling, plentiful, happy and contented life.

Only of course, that is into the case. Not that the dominant culture wouldn’t try to convince you, unsuspecting reader of mine, of the contrary. The most read authors, the most respected opinion makers, the most publicized of public intellectuals, the most discussed philosophical currents seem to point towards the consensus view I call dominant reason, like in here: God, godlessness and dominant reason and here: ontology, epistemology and free will and which I criticized in a series of posts culminating here Sketch of dualist metaphysics III . According to dominant reason, religions and science attempt to do the same: “explain” what there really is, and provide guidelines about how to behave to lead the “best possible life” there is. Only science is true, and can succeed, and religion is false, and cannot. Science provide us with knowledge, and religion attempts to provide us with knowledge, but is really a bunch of lies, that have failed any serious attempt at verification by resorting to the “it was a metaphor all along, that is “true” (or at least not false) in a “different sense” (not subject to empirical verification).

To construct such narrative (indeed, I‘m very grateful to one of my teachers, the great Amelia Valcárcel, for pointing out to me that the scientific discourse legitimated by Darwin’s theory of evolution as epistemic model could very well be the only “grand narrative” that had escaped unscathed from the general wreckage brought about by post-modernism, although she saw it as a still open question) its proponents only required one strong previous commitment: none of them could have ever seriously participated in the practice of a religious tradition, because if they had they would immediately recognize the blatant absurdity of their position. It is one thing to denounce every transcendental belief (and its believers) as retarded, incoherent, incongruous, anti-humane and diametrically opposed to the best tool we have developed, as a species, to distinguish between true and false. It is a very different one to understand what those beliefs actually consist in, and then necessarily to ascertain that they pertain to very different aspects of reality (what Stephen Jay Gould called the only partially overlapping “magisteria” of religion and science). Be it as it may, I’m not interested now in denouncing the inconsistencies of the materialist-scientist view of the world, only in pointing out that it relies as much on an insufficiently founded set of previous epistemic commitments (of acritically accepted beliefs) as any good ‘ol revealed religion. The most obdurate of the “new atheists” cannot personally verify the validity of each experiment and the demonstration of each theorem that fundament his worldview, and has to take them on faith, exactly as the most obdurate evangelical believer in the literal truth of the bible (not the most original of arguments, I know). He does believe his faith is better founded, and is more open to refutation and adjustment by the constant encounter with reality (a highly domesticated reality, highly distorted and set in artificial conditions so it can indeed validate whatever set of beliefs it is asked to, as that is what we call “experiments”) but we simply shouldn’t lose sight that such belief itself is not amenable to empirical validation. It is a precondition of how he approaches reality, or the external world, or the community of likely-minded individuals he interacts with.

Which is not to say that every belief is equally unfounded, and thus equally valid. I don’t expect books supposedly revealed by the gods long ago to add much to my knowledge of how the physical world works (things like the electrical charge of the electron or the universal gravity constant are better determined by careful measurement in a controlled setting), and similarly I don’t expect physics or chemistry to provide me with arguments for or against the essential goodness (or evil) of the whole creation, or of every separate aspect of it. There is not a “normative astronomy” as well as there is not a “descriptive moral reasoning” (moral reasoning is normative through and through, if we attempt to describe how it works in everyday life we may engage in psychology, or anthropology, or politics, which is an entirely different field).

Now, if I’m roughly correct in that understanding (and I’ve most assuredly thought about it longer and harder than you, my dear reader, please accept my word for that) that means that there are a number of things that the scientific outlook, admirably suited to the description of the material world, is not the right tool to illuminate. Minor, unimportant things like how to live, or why there is something instead of nothing. And the really key concept to apprehend is that the second concept influences the first: we shouldn’t live the same way in a universe with purpose, meaning and value than in one produced randomly as a result of utter chaos where “one damn thing after the other” is all there is to it. And the ability to identify such meaning, such (possible) purpose and such values is what I’ve called “transcendence”. Again, a number of people will doubtlessly insist that such is a wrong approach. Feuerbach started it (in recent times, his precursors were Spinoza and Hume, and a whole coterie of French philosophes like D’Holbach and La Mettrie), Marx took Feuerbach’s torch enthusiastically (you already know how that ended, don’t you?), Nietzsche gave it a patina of tragic respectability, and after Nietzsche (an intellectual giant, albeit a very twisted one) we have nowadays a plethora of intellectual dwarfs droning along the same lines: “it is wrong, wrong, wrong to look for meaning and value outside material reality, that is just life-denying, worn-out idealism, that leads to nihilism, that is just a justification for a parasitical priesthood’s exploitation of the masses, slave morality, yadda, yadda, yadda…”

Fair enough, some of that criticism is warranted, some less so. If we try to separate the (sparse) wheat from the (abundant) chaff, we recognize that there simply cannot be something like a normative physics. Back to Hume, the “is-ought divide” is as wide and as unbridgeable as ever. In Moore terms, trying to derive how things should be from how they actually are is a “naturalistic fallacy”. Squeeze the hard sciences as much as you want, you won’t extract from them a single drop of value. You may accuse me of looking in the wrong field and combatting a straw man: it is not to physics, but to the “human sciences”, towards where we should turn our attention. Bollocks. First, there is no such thing as “human sciences” (in a Popperian sense, there may be in a Collingwoodian sense, but then so is numismatics), second, the observation of what people declare to value, or even of what people actually value is of as much import to determine what is rally valuable in itself as the consideration of the positive connotations of the word “positive” is towards the measurement of the electrical charge of a proton (that is to say: no evaluative or normative physics, just as there is no descriptive ethics). Appealing to “human nature” or to what “an animal of the natural world that happens to have the genetic makeup of a human being” to determine what is good for him simply show a lack of understanding of what “good” is. They are playing an entirely different “language game“ (and sorry for the Wittgensteinian quote). Evolution, nature, our genetic makeup and whatnot seem to predispose us to cheating our partners if we can avoid detection, altruism only towards those who can reciprocate and giving more weight to our short-term gratification than to long-term one. None of those things are good, and a life lived according to those precepts is not a good life.

So, again, if we want to search for value, meaning and worth, we have to resort to tools other than the ones provided by the scientific method. We have to turn, that is, to the transcendent (in Rudolf Otto’s words, the “numinous”, the “entirely other”). You may dispute it as much as you want, ‘til you are blue in the face, that’s simply how things are. So back to the original purpose of this post, how do you improve your ability for turning towards that “entirely other”? Well, this is probably the simplest one of the series: go to religious services every week. I’m not that interested on the denomination you choose, but try, as in all other areas, to be consistent.

“Whaaaaaaat?” I can almost hear my readers saying “You can’t be serious about this one… your are really trying to tell us to…. Go to mass every Sunday?” Yep, exactly so “But that’s just so… retrograde! So old-fashioned! How can you preach autonomous self-imposition of rational maxims and developing your critical thinking skills and then propose to go to the most anachronistic, heteronomous, acritical institution there is, to waste away one hour every week hearing the most irrational, anti-modern, sheepish, inegalitarian, chauvinistic discourse??????” 

Well, I would dispute the inegalitarian and chauvinistic part, but essentially yes. I’ll explain. Remember I explained why I didn’t need to tell you to pay attention to your “job performance” abilities because a) nobody truly knew what they consisted in or how to improve them (other than being socially nice, hard-working and mentally sharp, which we had already covered) and b) the whole culture was already telling you enough to focus on it, to the unhealthy exclusion of everything else. Exactly the opposite is at play here. The one thing almost every element of the culture is almost yelling in your face right now, since you are born, is not to pay attention to transcendence: Live for the moment! Carpe Diem! Follow you desires, your interests, your passions! Grab whatever you can, as life is fleeting and there is no tomorrow! Enjoy your youth, as it is the most valuable moment in life! When you grow up, keep on living as an adolescent jerk, as it is more pleasurable! And what I’m telling you is to create a minimal space for getting away from such yelling and consider there may be more things to living a good life than to have as much money as possible to buy as much attention as possible from others (which really means for boys to get laid as much as possible and for girls to be envied by their peers as much as possible -slightly stereotyping here, I know, but you get the point). Where do you have more chances to find such a space? In an old-fashioned church (not a modern mega-church that preaches the gospel of affluence, by the way, that’s just the negation of transcendence by those who should be affirming it).

You don’t need to believe all the detailed dogma of the denomination. Heck you don’t even need to believe any of it! Just show up, disconnect mentally when the priest starts preaching, and just let your mind fly to wherever it wills. Probably, at some point, it will touch on things that are distinctly non-material: what is the sense of it all? Why is there so much suffering? Is there something that really counts for something? Why are we here? What is this “here”, in the first place? As opposed to what, to a “there” that is somehow outside of it? Is this life of struggle, of striving, of never being really truly contented, truly sated, all that there is? And if not, what is, what else can there be? Again, I’m not saying structured, formal religion has all the valid answers. Believers (and please note, it is telling that voluntary participants in established religious institutions consider themselves “believers”, which they experience internally as very different from “knowers”) have been struggling with those questions for millennia, without being able to settle in an ultimate, self-evident, automatically-convincing answer. What I contend is that struggling with them is a non-negotiable, essential component of a life well lived. Not that the dominant culture would let you know. Once more, we are bombarded by messages insisting that those questions are ultimately outdated, that you can have a perfectly fulfilled life without ever considering them. But it’s just not true, we all consider them, we may just unthinking, unconsciously settle on answers that are aligned with the age and the zeitgeist and assume that is all there is to it.

Again, there is no substitute to drag your sorry ass to the services and ponder them afresh every week. Not just for you. We believers are a picky, grumpy lot. We recognize the importance of volition in belief, another point that completely escapes unbelievers… for them you have no choice at all in what to believe, you just react unwillingly to the evidence presented by your senses… what shortsighted, dumb misunderstanding! And such volition is strengthened not just by individual practice, but by collective one. By going to a collective ceremony you not only ensure a space for strengthening your commitment, curiosity, openness to the individual concept of transcendence you may harbor, but you send a signal to your co-religionaries that they are not alone in their own struggles. That the things they value are also important for other people, that their faith is not dying. “Ah!” You may say, “but it is dying indeed, secularization is an unstoppable tendency of modern society and it is only a matter of time until all religions are but a fading memory”. Maybe, maybe not, I’ll wait for the judgment of History (with a capital H) on that one, and do my part to postpone such outcome as much as possible. I don’t find much solace in the fact that a society that is committing demographic suicide, that has passed judgment on the ultimate value of life and decided that it is not really worth it, so much so that it has stopped reproducing itself, may be wrong on that issue as it is on so many others… I’ll just resist going with the flood, and educate my sons to also avoid it.