If the word “unnatural” is colloquially defined as “anything which humans do that the earth wouldn’t or couldn’t have on its own”, agriculture and animal husbandry are fundamentally unnatural endeavors— whether it is done in vast fields of noxious chemicals or a permaculture food forest painstakingly built over three decades. However, this point of view …
Health
Deus ex Natura
When someone uses nature, natural selection or evolution as the reason for something, my first question, with real curiosity, is “so who are you ok with letting die or suffer?” If you want to make nature your god, know that it is worse than any previous god you lost faith in. Selection necessarily involves killing …
Self Esteem
A foundational obstacle to self-esteem which undermines any amount of internal work or external achievement: Asking for permission to exist, thinking that any interaction with another’s existence is an intrusion until proven otherwise. There are a couple of ways this expresses itself: Treating yourself as unwelcome by default in every space and looking around for …
The Virgin Evolved Ape vs The Chad Cosmic
Sharp Dichotomies for Thee, But Not For Me? ☸ I’m going to start by making a seemingly disconnected point: Humans are not “built” for physical fights. All fighting features/instincts are tacked on to a *comically* fragile body, and it remains that way no matter what you do. Learn to fight because you need it or …
Bad Citizen, Good Complainer
Note: this was originally a thread posted by me during the peak of COVID, in 2021 How disgustingly entitled is it to literally *mass delete* a contact tracing app (Aarogya Setu) and not use it for *a whole year* because “it’s a fascist data collection system for bhakts” and then be surprised about surges in …
The “Masculinity Crisis”, Its Vultures and Bleeding Hearts
I keep seeing questions like this: “masculinity is in crisis. what should we do about it?”“who should we give men as examples of healthy masculinity?”“now that we’ve deconstructed/destroyed masculinity, what should take its place?” And the unpleasant answer is:Nothing. Nobody. Just pull the plug. Where is the growth or selection from crisis if you’re supplying …
Toughness and Empathy
If you are/were able to mind-over-matter something, to push your body’s limits, perform some feat of resilience or training, overcome great pain, then your body was always capable of it. You were gifted with it, it’s not something you should take full credit for. Even say you are disabled, and you managed to overcome that …
Nutrition in India
The historical devastation of India has left many Indians believing we’re naturally small-made, injury-prone & needing diets, herbs, medication and monkishness. And that if something in our last 300 years made us evolve this way, then it is our fate to stay this way. We matter-of-factly say things like “Indians have bad knees”. In reality, …
When The Brain Betrays You
This is a difficult article for me to write, because avoiding talking about the fact that my own mind can betray me so terrifyingly helps me cope with the fear of it happening again. I still don’t know where the line is between keeping stories to yourself for your self-preservation vs putting it out there …
We’re Overthinking Health
A Heuristic Approach for the Info-Weary For a TL;DR, scroll down to the bottom of the post. To understand my reasoning, read the article. When it comes to health, it is better to be sane and smart at the cost of not being current, rather than confused and gullible as the cost of being “knowledgeable”. …