Addressing The Most Basic Basics
An amped up racehorse parading around the ring just prior to his race is a sight to behold. This majestic beast is in the prime of his athletic life, ready to thunderously gallop across the finish line for the win. You can see the ripples of his striated muscles as he gracefully moves around the ring. His flared nostrils, wild eyes, and alert demeanour all speak to readiness and engagement with the task at hand. He has been bred and trained for this very moment.
We humans can learn a lot form this image of potency. Although our lives are not dedicated to racing per se, there are tasks we seek to accomplish, for which we can make ourselves optimally ready.
The Most Basic Basics
We can make this life very simple. There are some bog basic necessities, the likes of good social interactions, sleep, food, and physical movement, that we can optimise and ensure we’re getting the most out of. If we fail to optimise for these bog basics, we suffer as a result. Think of them as non-negotiables. Without them, or with poor quality versions of them, our lives are negatively affected.
If, like me, you’re after some piece of mind, while also striving to become the best you can be in certain areas of your life, then I think the following schema might help. It’s by no means exhaustive. But simply a way of thinking about life that I’ve managed to articulate.
Reduce Your Life to The Most Basic Basics
Social Interactions
Slough off all the unnecessary mental baggage you insist on carrying around that does nothing but weigh you down.
Our deep sociality as humans means the people we interact with affect us in more ways than we can imagine. It is paramount that we ensure our social interactions are working for us, rather than against us.
We’re evolved creatures, with certain baseline requirements that, if left unmet or addressed poorly, cause us to suffer. Exceptional sociality is a diagnostic trait of human beings. If we go without social interactions for too long, we risk losing our minds (The movie Cast Away does a good job of illustrating this!) If our social interactions are with people who are mostly negative, we will not be able to resist sinking down to that mostly negative view of life.
Quick, Actionable Tips
- Don’t be afraid to strike up conversation with a total stranger. Small talk has its own unique advantages. If nothing more, you get to practice being more of an appealing and sociable character.
- Work towards completely cutting out those people in your life whose net effect on you is negative. Don’t try to convince yourself that you can change them, or that you can resist their gravitational pull towards negativity. It is futile!
Sleep
Every single creature on this fine earth, without exception, sleeps.
Sleep is such a fundamental aspect of what it means to be an evolved creature. It’s one of those things that, if you can get it right, will disproportionately affect the rest of your life
for the good.
But for many, sweet slumber can be hard to come by. In a future post called “A New Landscape of Threats,” I will do my utmost to address some of the more novel factors negatively affecting our sleep cycle. For now, consider implementing the below tips if you haven’t already.
Quick, Actionable Tips
- Don’t eat anything 3 hours prior to sleeping. Make a conscious effort to wind down before bedtime (try to stay off any screens before bed, and maybe even light a scented candle or two to set the scene!) Take whatever steps necessary to prevent noise intrusion from disturbing your sleep.
- When you do manage to regularly slip into deep slumbers, train yourself to remember your dreams. It can be fascinating to see what your cognitive processing machinery conjures up in the dead of the night. It’s like an endogenous source of psychedelic drugs!
Food
Yet another fundamental of human existence. Without nutritious sustenance, our bodies begin to fail us, wane, and give out.
Again, our hyper-novel world presents us with a new landscape of threats in relation to the foods we consume. Even if we think we’re making the right food decisions, there may be some unanticipated downsides as a result of hyper-novel interventions (I’m thinking of chemical pesticides and fertilisers, food preservatives, and GMOs for example.) “A New Landscape of Threats” should make anticipating and avoiding those threats that bit easier. So just hold out! It should also help clarify the link between ecological and human health. Something I’m very keen on exploring.
Quick, Actionable Tips
- Cut out any “foods” with artificially high concentrations of sugar. Although the mouth pleasure is undeniable, subjecting your body to a reliable supply of such food-like substances is equivalent to a chronic stressor. It’s only going to end badly for you in the long-run.
- Try to buy (or, better yet, grow and raise!) only whole foods. Make a habit of cooking your own food too. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your cooking. The internet is a great resource for finding little tricks that change your cooking game for the better.
Exercise/Movement
The evolved human organism has a physical body that’s made specifically for navigating physical space.
In an ancestral environment, there was no two ways about it. We moved to survive. Whether that be tracking and hunting herds of prey, or gathering fruits and berries from our surrounding ecology. We were constantly moving about to sustain ourselves.
In our hyper-novel world, movement has become an option. A lot of us live sedentary lifestyles, cooped up indoors all day, with no great physical demand placed upon our bodies.
Quick, Actionable Tips
- Voluntarily expose yourself to a number of different ways to move the body. Walking, hiking, fighting, swimming. Whatever floats your boat! Choose whichever ones you enjoy the most, and make them a feature of your life. Go as far as to mould you lifestyle around them.
- Understand that if you don’t expend the energy your body allocates to movement of some kind, that same source of energy will turn inwards, and begin eating you up form the inside out.
Conclusion
The rate and scale of change occurring across multiple domains in our world today outstrips our bodies’ ability to evolve in tandem. We are stuck with an evolved form that cannot stay apace with our radically changing external environment.
But fear not! We have been blessed with an unprecedented capacity to diagnose the reasons for our new, and ever-increasing number of modern ailments.
It is our obligation as humans of this hyper-novel world to accurately assess our situation, adequately describe it, and change our approach in accordance with this evaluation.
It begins with the individual taking it upon themselves to confront this adversity, courageously and fearlessly. We can optimise our evolved forms to make doing so that bit easier. I’m not saying that we’re guaranteed safe passage beyond the multiple event horizons coming our way. I’m simply saying that we can maximise our chances of a favourable outcome by beginning with optimising ourselves.
Treat Yourself Like a Thoroughbred Racehorse
