We are blessed daily with a Battery Full of Lunacy that must be discharged somehow throughout the course of the day. With this post, I want to explore how the Battery Full of Lunacy is helpful for physically demanding tasks in life. In this case, “The Battery Full of Lunacy” is synonymous with “energy”. But in a future post, I want to explore the
psychological effects this lunacy has on we humans. And how we might harness that to our advantage.
This battery must be discharged everyday.
Whether you want to expend the energy or not,
it will be discharged. You can choose to actively expend that energy on some conscious pursuit of yours, or allow the lunacy to randomly and chaotically dissipate without clear direction.
The default mode is random dissipation towards no clear goal. The decision you must make is
where to direct your lunacy.
If you fail to clearly outline a channel through which your lunacy may flow, it will chaotically discharge itself in such a way that causes maladies (physical and mental) and general misalignment with the world.
Let’s take this concept down from the high-up realm of abstraction, and see how it applies to practical, day-to-day life. But don’t forget, your lunacy has
both physical and mental ramifications. For now, we will explore how this idea relates to our physical being.
Let’s begin with the obvious: Your body has an innate capacity to generate and store energy that will be allotted to the physically demanding tasks life imposes on you throughout the course of your day. This capacity is adaptive, and ensured the survival of our ancestors as they went about their lives.
Just as is the case with muscle growth and development, unless you use the muscles and stress them appropriately, they will not grow. They will, in fact, atrophy to a low-level baseline.
The same can be said for this Battery Full of Lunacy. Unless you use the energy store, it will diminish to a baseline low-level minimum.
If, for example, you settle into a routine of only discharging half of your full capacity Battery Full of Lunacy, your energy stores will recalibrate to account for this inadequate discharge. With this recalibrated Battery, your new full capacity will only be half of what it was before.
You have a choice. You can either develop your Battery to its fullest potential. Or become a “lazy slob.”
The lazy slob route is the default route. Because our hyper-novel modern environments are nowhere near as physically demanding as our ancestral environments once were. Our bodies thus adapt themselves to this less energy-demanding environment, and recalibrate their energy stores to a low-level minimum.
Just as it is possible to atrophy your musculature to a low-level baseline minimum, so too it is possible to
increase that baseline of musculature by exposing yourself to a weightlifting regime.
This is the case also for your Battery Full of Lunacy. You can reduce it to a low-level minimum if you so choose, but you can also increase the baseline such that your new full capacity far exceeds the low-level minimum.
This can be done by exposing yourself to the right kind of stressors.
Antifragility is the opposite of fragility. Something that is antifragile will grow in response to stressors, perturbations, or chaotic/random circumstances. Whereas, something that is fragile would break in response to the same stressors.
Hormetic stressors are a particular type of stressors that induce this antifragile response. An example of a hormetic stressor for the human body is a cold shower. Under the stress of a cold shower, your body is induced to respond in a specific way. It seeks to conserve heat as much as possible in this cold environment by initiating many cascading physiological responses. Were you to stay in the cold shower for too long, you would die of hypothermia. However, with a sufficiently low dose, the response cascades initiated by your body actually make your body more capable of dealing with that same stressor in the future. And confer many benefits post-cold-shower as a result.
Your body responds by pre-empting the same stress at some point in the future, and making itself
more capable of dealing with it then.
The same antifragile response is induced by weightlifting. Your muscles grow in response to the stress of lifting heavy weights, making you
more capable of lifting those same weights in the future.
To more effectively discharge your Battery Full of Lunacy, you must be able to distinguish between those stressors that induce an antifragile response, and those that do more harm than good. Then actively choosing to expose your body to those stressors, as opposed to passively accepting how easy it is to remain physically inactive in our modern environments.
This way, you can avoid becoming the lazy slob, and instead develop your potential by committing yourself to certain conscious pursuits. Pursuits
of your choosing.
Even after the recalibration of your Battery to its low-level minimum in accordance with the dearth of physical demands imposed on you by hyper-novel modernity, you may still fail to adequately discharge it.
With this failure comes a number of negative effects. Physical and mental maladies, and a general sense of misalignment with the world ensues.
These negative effects will manifest differently for everyone. But some examples would be feeling unfulfilled and impatient with life. Irritability and confusion also.
Observing how this inadequate discharge negatively affects you is a task well worth doing. So that when the symptoms arise, you can address them yourself by restructuring your life such that the Battery is adequately discharged.
