How to Escape our Ongoing Apocalypse and Build Incredible Lats
A workout routine for the end of the world
You’ve surely seen the recent meme on the rule of 20s, which goes something like: for every 20 minutes of screentime/work, do 20 seconds of exercise/stretching, and then spend 20 years wandering in the forest.
That is roughly the ratio of time it takes me to write, or do anything, actually. But anyway I think about that meme a lot, memes like it, that seem to speak to our apparent worldwide burnout, flip out, meltdown. And I have been thinking about that particular meme now as I threaten to share a workout routine: ala do 1 pull up and then pull yourself up and out of the capitalist nightmare forever.
Apologies in advance for this digression. This is much worse than having to read an entire memoir to get to the buttermilk fried chicken recipe. Much, much worse. I promise I do get to my pull routine eventually but for some reason as I started thinking about all of that I figured that it’d be a good opportunity to riff on the American Dream and capitalism etc. Lol. But that’s what this newsletter is about? I guess.
I think that it was the ads in my instagram feed really that pushed me over the edge. I am super suspicious of, if not panicked by, things like optimization and performance being sold to us as goals. And I seem to be getting served an extra helping of Joe Rogan-y miracle mushroom teas and hair regrowth wonders, and secret sauces to biohack my way to a better life, a better stock portfolio, better relationships, whathaveyou. Ways to do better, be better, feel better. Which seems to beg the question: on what scale?
I guess I’ve asked this last bit before, in a slightly different way, when I wondered what metrics we ought to be paying attention to these days, what standards we use to measure our progress (as people? toward some goal?), our mental health, general health, whatever. And even if I was earnest then, and I was, I am clearly asking with a healthy side serving of cynicism here. Because I think the whole game is rigged and all our tools of measuring are a part of our imprisonment in this capitalism crash unto Armageddon in which we are currently engaged.
It is sort of right there in the language. All this corporate jargon about optimizing oneself, performing better. As what? Better consumers, better capitalists. And even attempts to address mental health and wellbeing make me a bit queasy. Like how to feel better about being on the Titanic as it sinks.
And so long as we are bound to global capitalism, that will be the only standards by which we are allowed to grade ourselves or the world around us. How well are we consuming and producing profit (and, sidebar, how can we feel better while doing it). We will never get beyond our addiction to extraction and consumption (squeezing every last atom of natural resources from the earth and work from the populace in order to increase profit share in the next quarter). And capitalism is almost by definition global, total, all or nothing. Colonialism was in part the expansion of the capitalism playing field at the point of a gun. It makes no sense to operate capitalism in one corner of the world when there are all those other valuable resources, people, etc to be exploited over there. (See for example: the “opening” of China by the East India Company.) And we are stuck on this path, for the rest of our time here, which is growing rapidly shorter. Because it is all bound up together. We cannot simply temper or even curb a few of our practices and behavior (which of course includes the never ending wars being fought for control of various resources) until we utterly change the paradigm on which our entire system is based.
I think there is this belief that there will come, soon, a new leap forward in human progress. A new invention of the wheel, new industrial or digital revolution, but one based on biohacking or AI or consciousness. I think we’ve been conditioned to expect that this step forward will come from technological advancements. If not Elon Musk’s wizard cap or whatever, then from AI or some such. I wonder, though, what the point would be. On our present trajectory we have like a generation left, tops. We’ve committed species-wide suicide, in plain daylight awareness of our actions. So why bother. Really why bother doing anything anymore, but I digress.
Is there another way to organize and orient our existence, ie on a scale that is not wholly constructed around competition and control (of attention, affection, and resources)? I’ve written a bit about competition previously. But that is just a symptom of capitalism which necessarily reduces everything to its utility. Its capacity for exploitation, whether it is a body, a brain, animal, mineral, IP… Anything, everything. As I wrote, back when I used to write like this:
At its core, the cult of competition believes that, in the new Thunderdome-style agora, the best will win out. It reveres dominance qua dominance, because competition, at its root, is motivated by fear and greed—which are really two versions of a perversion of the survival instinct. But, if it is painfully optimistic, imbuing a thuggish pit fight with the purity of an alchemical process turning the winner into gold, the cult is also guilty of the worst kind of cynicism. It assumes the world is out to get us, demanding that we harden ourselves against one another and everything else to survive.
But does competition make us, our ideas, our selves better? Does it separate the wheat from the chaff? Does the best team win the NCAA tournament, or does one of the better-funded, coached and trained squads merely survive through favorable match-ups, bounces of the ball, and sheer luck? And, is that survival the point to which we should be aspiring?
Maybe I was more, I dunno, optimistic, when I wrote this. But I do still quite like the candle image, idea here:
So, rather than the Either/Or dynamic proposed by competition … Beauty and wisdom and lots of other lovely things are not zero-sum quantities. Nor are they relative, cast in contrast to their lack, like sunny days to rain. The pursuits of art, and, frankly, most of the good stuff in life, are like the candle in the Buddha’s story, capable of lighting thousands of other candles at no expense to itself.
Which brings me to the point where I would posit something in capitalism’s stead, something like a sharing economy or a kind of collectivist anarchism or something. Newsletters need happy endings. I think everything does. We need to feel like there is hope at the end of the line, light at the end of the tunnel. But, like, really, do you think we’ve got a shot?
Anyway, here is a pull routine, because what else ware we gonna do.
Circuit I
Pull ups - body weight (today I did 8 sets to fail, 17, 16, 12, 10, 10, 10, 8)
Kettle bell deadlift (8 sets x 10 reps)
Leg raises (to fail)
Circuit II (I did three sets)
Inverted bodyweight row (lying back and pulling yourself up on trx or flat bar, to fail)
kettle bell upright rows
bentover reverse flies
SL reverse lunge with bicep curl (5 reps per leg / ten curls)
Circuit III (three sets)
Seated machine row
Hamstring curl (I did the two leg one today x 10 reps)
Ab machine (substitute any crunches to taste; I’ve been off my ab roller for a while, think I may go back to that in the evenings)
Cardio
Walk out of the gym and keep walking until you find a survivalist camp somewhere, learn to whittle or whatever, grow crops, live happily ever after