Nerds With Porn Machines, Or How We Got Here

Years ago, I blocked "Aella" on Twitter because I was tired of reading her nonsense. To my dismay, I discovered that I also had to block the term "Aella" in order to avoid being exposed to her nonsense by other people on my Twitter feed discussing it... often favorably.

That the things Aella says and does are complete and utter nonsense is perfectly obvious to anyone older than the Millennial generation. It's a banality, not even worthy of an explanation. But people Millennial-aged and younger have lost the tools to discern why her particular brand of "Why shouldn't I completely debase myself to a leering audience?" is objectionable. 

How did we get here? Buckle up, I'm about to explain.

Part One: What Life Used To Be Like

First, we have to travel back in time to the year... oh, say, 1982. Nerds existed in 1982, but nobody wanted to be one. Not even nerds. Maybe especially not nerds. There was no such thing as a "self-described nerd." The term itself, by 1982 standards, would translate roughly to "self-described sick fuck that nobody likes" in today's parlance. Nerds were bullied, and that was sad, but the fact that they were bullied doesn't mean that they were harmless or doing the right thing. They were bullied precisely because they were doing the wrong thing.

See, in 1982, if you wanted to have fun, you had only a few options. We can group all of those options into two basic categories: 1) Going out of the house and socially interacting with other people, or 2) Staying home and not interacting with anyone. Good, popular, well-adjusted people mainly chose option 1. They enjoyed sports, social clubs, shopping at the mall... but even if they were introverts, they'd still have a little group of friends to do quilting with, or to tinker with cars, or to have a drink with their buddies at the bar, or to hang out in a church group, or etc., etc. Having fun just was getting out and doing stuff, usually with other people, but at least in the vicinity of other people.

Except for nerds. Nerds preferred staying home and playing Atari or reading books or otherwise being alone. 

Being able to relate to other people is mainly a function of going out and being with other people, forming a social identity, forming social bonds. It's not about being an extrovert, it's about joining the human race in something, anything. When you self-isolate, as the nerds of 1982 self-isolated, you gradually lose your ability to relate to other people. Eventually, other people can smell your inability to relate like a stench. You become a pariah. No one wants to be around you. Consequently, people hated nerds.

Now, back in 1982, nerds had a path to normalcy. They might still be interested in Ataris and fantasy novels, but if they could find a group of other nerds to actually interact with, to actually join with in the real world, maybe play some D&D, then they could form social attachments and their minds would rehabilitate. They might never be popular "jocks," but they'd be normal. 

Perhaps even more importantly, nerds could acquire romantic partners, girlfriends and boyfriends. They could kiss each other. They could, dare I say it, have sex with each other. This is important because love, romance, and sex are all absolutely crucial for good social development (to a point - stay with me here). It's impossible to be a self-isolating weirdo when you're emotionally invested in the wellbeing and care of another human being. Friendship and romantic partnership extract us from the bottomless pit of our own private thoughts and thrust us into the real-world adventures of another person's mind, body, and emotional care. 

Nerds who acquired healthy romances didn't often remain nerds for very long. You can spot this in old 80s movie tropes: the nerdy guy with glasses has sex with a female vixen character off-screen and suddenly becomes a "real man" again. Or, the nerdy girl has her glasses removed by a good-looking guy who also lets her hair down and gives her a big kiss, revealing that she was a stunningly beautiful woman all along. These tropes existed in movies because they reflected a real social phenomenon. Romance rehabilitated nerds almost completely. Sex and love are powerful forces that melt even the staunchest defenses of a self-isolating weirdo. 

Nonetheless, some nerds never got to experience true romance. Well, humans are sexual creatures, and all that pent-up energy had to go somewhere. In the worst cases then, as now, socially repressed nerds became sexual creeps and perpetrators of real harm. You can see this in some developing countries in which hoards of men who have never been able to experience romance harass, grope, and "Eve-tease" women endlessly. Many of those cases further develop into shocking crimes of rape, acid attacks, honor killings, and so on. 

But of course not all sexually repressed nerds become criminals. Most of them just become gooners, in other words, porn-obsessed perverts. In the 1980s, in order for such people to satisfy their urges, they needed to go to pornography stores. I think Zoomers and Gen Alphas would be quite surprised to know that there used to be physical retail stores, usually on the outskirts of town or on the wrong side of the tracks, that sold pornographic VHS videos, magazines, dildos, and who knows what else. They were one-stop shops for sexual deviants, people who had an under-developed sense of romantic human bonding and an unsatisfied sexual appetite.

I want you to pause and think about this for a moment, because it's important: When a person never develops a healthy sense of romantic attachment to a sexual partner, then sex becomes the mere satisfaction of an urge, rather than a form of loving communication between two equals. It becomes a process rather than a relationship. This is why pornography depicts sex as some kind of anatomical display, with close-ups of genitals and fluids, rather than words and facial expressions and loving care. People don't use pornography to experience a great love story, after all, they use it merely to get off, after which point, they discard the pornography and go about their day.

Pornography and the kinks and fetishes it encourages is not a healthy expression of human sexuality. It's merely the depiction of a sex act. The lone goal is orgasm. There is nothing else to it. By contrast, healthy sexuality involves loving communication between two people who are interested in more about each other than an orgasmic endpoint. It involves the mutual respect and care of another human being. Healthy sexuality doesn't just look different than pornography, it's different in almost every way.

And this was all perfectly obvious to people in the world of 1982. Maladjusted perverts were frowned upon more or less the same way we look at "incels" today. There was no justifying their porn obsession with high-minded explanations about "kink-shaming." Everyone knew that the kinds of guys (usually guys) who skulked off to the adult video store to get their rocks off were to be avoided at all costs. Everyone knew they weren't healthy.  

This was the world circa 1982 and before.

Part Two: The Social Impact Of Pornography And New Computer Technology

Then, computer technology exploded. It gained a lot of ground in the 80s, but it was the 1990s when it really took off, thanks to the proliferation of internet technology. Whole libraries have been written about this topic, so I won't waste too much space here. What's germane to my purposes is the fact that internet technology had a few crucial attributes that changed the social landscape.

First, it made computers a commonplace thing. It was no longer basement-dwellers who were interested in computers. Pretty much everyone needed to get interested in computers in order to produce a good job resume, or to do good schoolwork. It revolutionized the workplace to the point that now even auto mechanics these days are a specialized sort of IT worker. We all use computers now. To some extent, we all love them. So "being a techie" was no longer something that socially isolated people were; we are all techies now.

Second, it created a platform in which socially isolated weirdos could discuss their weirdness with equally weird people in a way that felt "social." It's not social. Posting your thoughts on the internet and having them judged by strangers is not even remotely "social." It's voyeuristic, but because voyeurism requires the participation of an observer, it can be mistaken for "social interaction," especially by people who lack real social experience and emotional maturity. So, pockets of nerds began to clump together like bits of mud.

Third, and probably most dramatically and tragically, the proliferation of internet technology put a PORN MACHINE in the living room of every home in America. Dell came up with a way of marketing home computer sales to the middle class ("Dude, yer gettin' a Dell!"), and so among the more affluent segments of the middle class (or within those households in which there still existed a pre-90s nerdy streak) there was soon a porn machine in the bedroom of a large number of teenagers. To make matters worse, Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and essentially put a porn machine in the pocket of every adult and almost every teenager in America. 

Of these three developments, we can call the first either neutral or good. High productivity is certainly a good thing, as are economic development and increased salaries and wages. Just remember that this was the result of using computers to solve old problems in new ways. In other words, it wasn't merely an increased interest in tech that caused these developments, it was that we had better tools to solve problems. But the other two developments were absolute disasters. 

The rise of "online communities" gave nerds the false impression that they weren't really socially isolated, leading to believe that they were just a different kind of normal. This reduced their incentive to go outside, get into the real world, and interact with real human beings. Thus, it significantly reduced nerds' collective ability to rehabilitate themselves through true social interaction.

Here it bears repeating that interacting with an online community is not a kind of social interaction. Again, it might feel like it, because other people are tangentially involved, but what people are actually doing online is putting their own mind up on a web page and then choosing to either focus on a few approving comments or lashing out at a few disapproving comments. This is nothing like interacting in the real world. In the real world, your friends will support you when you say or do something that warrants support, but if you say something wrong, crazy, or bad, your friends will set you straight. They do this not because they are jerks who hate you, but because they love you and have an obligation to prevent you from falling into some kind of mental trap.

With the rise of internet communities came the rise of "flame wars" and "trolling." Again, this is something that can only happen through online, pretend social interaction. If you walked into a public space and attempted to have a "flame war" with someone you disagreed with, you'd probably end up in a fistfight, which comes with real-world consequences such as black eyes and jail time. Online, however, the socially underdeveloped denizens of the early internet would rally around anyone in a flame war who happened to agree with them about some political issue or something. So what was clearly antisocial behavior became a reason for online communities to grow stronger. Think about that that, stronger through antisocial behavior. That's problematic.

When we add porn machines into the mix, we begin to gain a real sense of what has happened to society since about 1995. Remember, pornography in 1982 was relegated to the outskirts of town and the dregs of the community. It was another type of antisocial behavior, categorized mainly by social underdevelopment and unhealthy expressions of sexuality. By placing pornography into the homes of every American and making it mainstream, we created a situation in which socially stunted nerds would go online to express their sexuality in unhealthy ways. Instead of finding a romantic partner with whom to explore love, romance, and sex all together as one expression of a single pair bond, nerds would go online and search for exactly which kind of kink or fetish they most "identified with."

In short, sexuality quickly devolved from being a biologically and emotionally driven tool to propagate the species into being something like "the collection of images and paraphernalia that are most likely to trigger an orgasm in me while I am alone at home, outside the context of a romantic bond." 

Nowadays, young people scour the internet for which depraved thing is theirs, which fetish they are going to call their own. They're looking for kinks the way people in 1982 used to look for partnership. But there is all the difference in the world between looking for someone to have sex with and looking for which activities to orgasm to.

Rationalism: The Final Nail In The Coffin

Turning the youth of society into socially underdeveloped, self-isolating gooners is bad enough, but it's all just abstract internet stuff until it becomes a modus operandi, until it inflates itself to the point of being a philosophy. Sadly, that is just what happened when "Rationalism" appeared.

Rationalism began as a hobby for particularly bookish nerds. At its core, it's just a bunch of nerds in an online community trying to explain things they don't really know anything about. This kind of thing is completely harmless when it's relegated to little parties where everyone knows they're just having a little fun. If it happened at a dinner party among friends, it would even be a good thing. 

But Rationalism would be Rationalism if it happened in real life among friends at a dinner party. No, Rationalism is precisely what it is because it's an online community of people writing tomes and tomes of complete and utter nonsense in absence of direct connection to the experts who do happen to know about whatever topic the Rationalists have taken aim at today. 

I've written plenty about Rationalism on this blog, and I don't want to repeat myself. Today, it will suffice to say that Rationalism encourages socially isolated nerds to come up with their own ersatz theories about why the world is the way it is, and when socially isolated nerds do this, they tend to engage in an enormous degree of confirmation bias. If I'm all on my own, coming up with any explanation for any phenomenon I happen to be thinking about in absence of real-world expertise and peer review, then I'm going to end up fixating on anything that upholds my existing world view and underestimating the importance of anything that contradicts me. It's human nature.

But it's an aspect of human nature that is severely restricted by real-world interaction. When you cook up some bizarre theory about why hallucinogenic drug use is good, actually, or why bacon will not really clog your arteries (these are real examples from the real Rationalist community, by the way), and you articulate that theory to a real person, face-to-face, that person is going to rightly tell you that you're insane. But if you do this in an "online community" and then channel all of your bookish energy into defending your position, you trick yourself into believing that there is a legitimate debate to be had about any of these things. There isn't, but you're now convinced that there is.

More to the point, the effect of "Rationalism" and Rationalism-like behaviors on social trends has been to smear a thin coat of legitimization on behaviors that, prior to 1995, were clearly and obviously antisocial and aberrant. 

It was precisely these people who rewarded Aella for her complete and utter nonsense. "What's wrong with polyamory?" quickly yields to "Why shouldn't some women become prostitutes?" The fact that Aella had been sexually abused as a child was consciously ignored by the Rationalists as irrelevant. "Plenty of people become consensual polyamorists without suffering sexual abuse!" Really, who? But anyway, the whole purpose of their argument was to willfully engage in confirmation bias in order to avoid thinking about the most obvious thing in the world: Aella wasn't a healthy person, she wasn't doing healthy things, and polyamorist prostitution and "analysis of" (undue consideration of) pedophilia are horrible examples of how people should live their lives. Add a hefty dose of drug use to that, and you've got yourself a perfect demonstration of antisocial behavior from a group of people who are basically socially maladjusted gooners.

In 1982, they would have been ostracized into silence, but in today's world of social isolation and sexual fetishism... well, here we are.

Conclusion

Every now and then, vestiges of the old way still rear their heads. That happens when Aella says something weird about pedophilia or about going on a 200-hour LSD binge that "cured" her of the damage she suffered in childhood. Isn't it wild how the pathologies of her condition magically made her condition disappear? She must be normal, after all! Or, it's confirmation bias again...

But anyway, to normal people, these things are just obviously bad and wrong. There's no question about it. There's no debate. There is no Rationalist community suggesting that maybe, just maybe Aella has the right idea about life after all. There is no survey pool of perverts answering poorly controlled surveys and demonstrating that "See, we're normal after all - 65% of us do these crazy things." To normal people, this whole thing is bizarre. And it is. 

But these are merely vestiges of the old way. For the most part, Gen Y, Gen Z, and younger are all encouraged and incentivized to scour the internet for their own unique brand of bad behavior and throw themselves into it like a labrador retriever throws itself into a mud puddle on a hot day. It's been 30 years since 1995, and social mores have been significantly eroded. Today, thankfully, Aella's behavior is still seen as strange and unusual, but over time, if things keep going this way, it will look increasingly less strange. More and more kids will get into polyamory, drug use, "sex work," and all the rest of it. Anyone who has any kind of rational (lower-case R) objection to any of this behavior will be accused of being "judgemental" and of "kink-shaming," and there will be no one left to raise any objections to this except the most extreme social conservatives who refuse to change with the times.

And that will be bad.

Don't Make Your Hard Days Too Hard

A common refrain in the running and cycling communities these days is, "Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy." Is that good advice? It depends.

It's good advice if you're prone to making the mistake a lot of (especially young) athletes make: keeping too high a pace on your easy days. If, for example, you're supposed to do an easy run on Wednesday between speed and tempo days on Tuesday and Thursday, then that easy run should be kept at a low and very comfortable pace to avoid over-working your muscles. The two risks here are 1) injury from over-training, and 2) tiring your muscles out so much that you can't capitalize on the benefits of your harder training days. 

Point 2) is especially important, because getting faster or better at running or cycling depends on your ability to push really hard during your most difficult training sessions. You're less likely to improve your top speed if you're only ever giving it 75% of your effort. When training, you have to go into the red sometimes. What happens with some athletes is that they don't give themselves ample recovery on their easy days, so their muscles are still tired on Thursday from what they did on Tuesday, and thus they can't push themselves as hard on Thursday as they need to in order to improve.

That's the idea. Unfortunately these days, the "keep your hard days hard" crowd has taken that even further in saying that we should do our hard workouts and our strength training all on our hard days, and do only easy runs and yoga on our easy days. 

The problem with this new point of view is that the human body only has so much energy and ATP and all the rest of it; trying to pack seven different workouts into a single day is still going to subject your body to the same problem described in my Point 2) above. If you blast all your muscles with a hard weight training workout, you won't have as much energy to push hard during your sprint workout or tempo intervals. Also, vice-versa: it's hard to get much hypertrophy going on in your strength workout if you've already tapped your muscles with a hard workout on the bicycle. 

The solution is simple and obvious: weight train on easy days. The reason this works is because your easy run or ride will not really tax your muscles much, so you can afford to push during your strength training, knowing that it won't compromise the integrity of your run (and vice-versa). Moreover, working your core and/or your upper body on today's off day will still give your muscles ample recovery time for tomorrow's speed workout. You'll have about 24 hours to replenish your muscular glycogen, and your core and upper body are primarily playing supporting roles in your running and cycling training.

Naturally, this all assumes that you're training all things on an ongoing basis. As a middle-aged man, that works for me. I'm not training to win anything. If you're training to win something, though, then you're likely better off following a more traditional training cycle, in which you spend some time building muscle mass, then build your endurance base, then do some targeted speed work in support of your goal event, and then go through a period of rest and cross-training. But this is a full year-long training cycle, and if you're the kind of person who needs to do that, you probably already know and didn't need to read it on my blog. 😉

To Live Forever

I watched an interesting movie called "The Devil's Climb." In it, two professional rock climbers scale five impassable summits in twelve hours after completing a 2,000-mile bike ride to base camp. Are these guys badasses, or what. 

One of the climbers happened to be 45 years old. Guess who is also 45 years old. 

It goes without saying that I am nowhere near the athlete that these two guys are. That said, I have never really stopped pushing myself. I've lost a lot of running speed since my early twenties, but I've never stopped pushing. Every week, I get two tempo workouts in, or a tempo workout and a speed workout, in addition to a full week of endurance runs and a long run or a long bike ride. This is serious training for most people.

In fact, when I talk about training with most people my age, the way they speak about it is in terms of what they used to do. Back then, they would train hard. Now, they don't. The reasons are varied, but always unsatisfying. They don't have time. They just stopped doing it for a while and need to get back into it. And this is the minority of people who once trained like I do. The overwhelming majority of people my age never trained like this. At best, some of them want to lose weight and are thinking about going to the gym or getting out for a daily walk. 

I exist in what feels like a completely different world. Not only do I still run hard, and bike hard, daily, but I also do strength training, box jumps, hiking, take my kids on excursions that will build memories for them. There will come a day when I have to stop doing things like this, but I don't ever want that day to come. I love to move my body. I love experiencing the health that I have. I love being able to take my shirt off at the beach and not feel self-conscious. I love knowing that I will wake up tomorrow without a hangover, and without the aches and pains that plague so many of my peers. They laugh at how much time I spend exercising. They have always laughed at how much time I spend exercising. But look what it gets me.

In addition to looking and feeling good, I've seen some amazing places in nature, places that one can only ever see from the seat of a bicycle or from the vantage point of a pair of running shoes. I can't even really describe these sites; mountain peaks, hidden waterfalls, corners of the desert, hieroglyphics, ancient ruins, fossils, mountain springs, so many plants and animals. These are all things most people never get to see. I'm so fortunate to have seen them, and so happy that I had the good health and drive to be able to see them.

At 45 years old, people still refere to me as "young man." I show my I.D. card when buying alcohol, and the cashiers look at me with incredulity. They can't believe I'm as old as I am. Sometimes I can't believe it, either.

I'm realistic. Within a very short period of time, the grey will overtake my head of hair, the wrinkles will get so deep as to be impossible to ignore, my speed will evaporate, and I will become just one more uncool old man in spandex, a laughing stock for the younger generations who see an old fool experiencing a midlife crisis. 

I don't know what I'll feel on that day, but the closer it gets, the more I start to believe that I will feel the same happiness, satisfaction, and sense of fulfillment that I feel today. Good health and physical fitness is such a wonderful blessing. It's worth tenfold the effort you put into it. Beauty fades and coolness, if you ever get to experience it, is fleeting. But the strength of your own two feet driving you forward, or your own two hands driving you upward to the summit of a mountain is something that can never be taken away from you.

Go running, folks. Get a bike. Go to a climbing gym. Do your pull-ups and push-ups. Wake up early and eat your vegetables. It's worth it, I promise.

Blogging Is A Good Habit

Because I have comments enabled on my blog, and because no one actually communicates with each other as real people anymore, I occasionally receive emails notifying me that a spam bot has left a comment on my blog. I don't bother to delete these comments because, who knows, perhaps they somehow drive traffic to me on their way to driving traffic to whatever it is they're selling. (I have no idea what they're selling, because I don't click the links in their comments.)

Against my better judgement, I do still read all the comments I get here, so feel free to post one any time you're moved to communicate to a real person. I'm here, I'm paying attention. It seems crazy, I know, but it's true. 

I take that back. It doesn't seem crazy, it seems antiquated. Remember back at the Turn of the Century, when people wrote blog posts and others commented? Remember when communication was still relatively fun, still something people looked for opportunities to do? Remember when social media wasn't always some combination of broken and infuriating? Or do things just seem better in hindsight.

Anyway, when I receive these spam-bot comments, I sometimes click through to the old blog post upon which they appear and re-read what I wrote. It's a trip down memory lane. Sometimes I've written about something that was going on in my life; sometimes it's just a thought I had; sometimes it's a diatribe. In short, it's a collection of thoughts I really had on real days of my life that I really decided to write about. Reading it back again is actually quite nice. I seldom read a post and think to myself, "Oh God, I was such an asshole/idiot/whatever." It's encouraging to know that the things I spent some time thinking about in the past produced good thoughts that I generally still agree with. 

I'd say I've never kept a journal, but I suppose this is it. I've finally discovered what generations of my forefathers had known: journalling is a worthwhile activity. Indeed, blogging is a good habit. 

Over the years, I've fallen out of practice. Immersed in a daily commitment to blogging can be a little stressful, especially as it was in the early days, when people actually read my blog and responded. I felt a responsibility to write to my audience and provide them with something worth reading. But stress wasn't the only reason I stopped blogging. Like many other former bloggers, I sometimes had the sense that there wasn't any point, that I had "said it all before" and didn't want to repeat myself. And of course, all the other bloggers who actually made money doing this moved on to Medium and then to Substack and now, I can't believe it, people pay a monthly subscription to read stuff like this. And then they use AI graphics and post their stuff on X and it's this whole marketing thing for them. 

When I go back and read someone else's blog, I seldom feel as good about their old blog posts as I feel about mine. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with their posts. I think it speaks to their motivation and authenticity, though. David Henderson's blog never gets old. He writes authentically. But Slate Star Codex guy's posts are stale within a week of having been written. Clearly these two example bloggers are writing different kinds of posts for different reasons.

And then there's me, writing for a third reason, which is mostly that I just like it. There are other potential benefits, such as having a record of my personality for posterity, assuming this blog doesn't end up getting deleted at some point. Writing advice to my kids for when they need to read it and I'm not there to say it to them. I've written about all that before.

Well, anyway, I hope I re-develop the blogging habit. It's good. It's productive for me. I think I'll try to keep it going. 

In closing, I'd like to set down a list of things that have happened to me that readers of this blog may not have been aware of, given that I've been quite out of touch for a while. Here it is:

• My band released an album. Listen to it here and elsewhere.
• I converted to Orthodox Christianity. Long story. Maybe I'll write about it some time.
• I started learning Greek - not really related to the Orthodox thing, but kind of.
• I'm still running and riding bikes like a fiend, so that's not really an update.
• For some reason, I can't think of anything else right now. I'll blog about things as I go.

Anyway, here's hoping I can reestablish this great habit.

Bad Arguments For/About Voting

Because it's Election Day, I would like to respond to a few bad arguments about voting.

Bad Argument #1: "I may not agree with who you choose to vote for, but you should just vote, no matter what."

Response: You should definitely not vote in any election for which you are too ill-informed to vote. If your vote equates to a coin toss, then it is not important at all if you vote, in fact it's better if you leave the vote to people who are actually informed about the issue. You should not make your voice heard if you essentially have no voice or if your voice is so ill-informed that it could sway an otherwise valid election.

Bad Argument #2: "I would vote for a third party, but they have no chance of winning."

Response: Suppose your family votes on what to have for dinner; Choice 1 is something you love, but everyone else hates; Choice 2 is something you hate, but everyone else loves; Choice 3 is something everyone hates. How should you vote? Should you choose something you definitely love, even though you'll "lose the vote," or should you vote for something you definitely hate, just so that you can "win the vote?" It makes no sense to vote for Choice 2 in this case. You'll end up with something you hate, and the only thing you would have gained is the feel-good moment of having cast your vote for the option that ultimately won, even though you didn't want it to. Choice 1 is not a "wasted vote," it's an honest vote. Choice 2 is a wasted vote for sure: You definitely vote for something you don't want, and you gain nothing for doing so. "But at least I didn't end up with Choice 3!" Hmm.

Bad Argument #3: "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain."

Response: The exercise of your right to free speech is not contingent on the exercise of your responsibility to vote. Whether you vote or not, you can always complain. But notice: Those who cast a vote bear the responsibility of the electoral outcome. If successful politicians end up doing things the voters didn't want, they have no right to complain; after all, they voted, and thus must either bear the responsibility of having voted for the politician, or "accept the outcome of the election."

Bad Argument #4: "You must vote for the lesser of two evils."

Response: Suppose I offer you the choice of punching either your son or your daughter; but you also have the choice to abstain, in which case I will make my own choice and punch accordingly. Should you vote and bear responsibility for which one gets punched? Or, should you abstain and force me to bear the full brunt of the moral culpability? I'd say the latter, wouldn't you?

Bad Argument #5: "You can't love someone and vote their rights away."

Response: Yeah, we've all seen that video. Guess what, though: politicians from every party want to take away your rights. Some of them want to take away your reproductive rights; some want to take away your private property rights; some want to take away your gun rights; some want to take away your contract rights; some want to restrict your speech; some want to take away your due process rights; etc. Everyone you plan on voting for in this election and all other elections will ultimately take away some of your rights unless and until you vote libertarian, which most of you won't. So chances are good that you A) Think you love me, and B) Plan on voting some of my rights away. You are either a hypocrite, or your argument isn't valid after all. I'm going with the latter, because I have smart friends and family who aren't often hypocrites.

Bad Argument #6: "Voting might not be perfect, but it's the only way to make your voice heard."

Response: No, there are so many other ways to make your voice heard. And you don't have to wait for a special every-two-years event to make your voice heard. Figure out some other ways to make your voice heard, and do them. True whether your choose to vote, or not.

Bad Argument #7: "Local elections matter a lot more than national elections."

Response: Many of the local elections on my ballot this morning had only one candidate, so there was no real choice there. Those elections essentially didn't matter at all.

Bad Argument #8: "Oh well, at least [bad candidate] didn't win!"

Response: But take a look at who actually did.

Okay, that's all I've got for you for a little while. I hope you voted or not voted according to your conscience and that you can live with your choice! I also hope your ethical system allows enough grace and humility for you to forgive your friends, relatives, and neighbors who made different electoral choices than you. Elections come once every couple of years, but our social and familial bonds are with us every day. Pour your energy into the ones you love - no politician can take that away from you unless you allow them access to your soul.

Treasure Island And Independent Children

My daughter and I were reading Treasure Island last night. I'm certain that I read it when I was young, but I don't seem to remember it much at all anymore. It's obviously a great book, and I really enjoy the prose. 

After she went to bed, I started thinking about what a modern-day equivalent story to Treasure Island might be like. How would it begin? 

I got stuck, though, because I can think of several contemporary analogues to pirates, but I can't think of a situation in which a 13-year-old boy finds himself in charge of running any kind of inn. But that is such a minor detail of the story that most people don't think twice about it. The author, along with the majority of the book's readership over the span of more than a century, took it for granted that a "tween" boy could and should be running an inn while his sick father is on his deathbed upstairs.

Today, most people afford young teenagers so little independence that placing a children's story in the present day results in a literally incredible plot point. And how you do get Treasure Island started without Jim Hawkins running an inn?

"13-year-olds shouldn't be working late!" "Young boys shouldn't serving alcohol!" "Teenagers hanging around with rowdy, alcoholic louses is a problematic environment!" Okay, okay, but how do you get Treasure Island started without Jim Hawkins running an inn?

My Passion

The valedictorian at my high school gave a fiery graduation speech about her belief that life was about achievement. "Achievement is art!" she declared, and that statement has been burned into my memory ever since. Partly, this is because I shared that view with her, and partly because I had a huge crush on her at the time.

You can imagine my surprise when she turned out to have become a stay-at-home mom. What of the passion for achievement, I wondered? She explained later that she simply wasn't passionate about anything. Nothing. She does seem happy nowadays. I wish her well.

There is a good lesson in this for youths and adults everywhere: Passion is about as controllable as the tide at sea. There is no explanation for why some people throw themselves into the various activities they choose to pursue as passions. Some like to dance, others to read; some like to swim, others to learn languages; some love baseball, others gardening. 

Difficult as it is for me to fathom, some people really and truly enjoy being Business Analysts -- they go to all the conferences, pursue all the certifications, they wake up early and crank through JIRA tickets for nine, ten, eleven hours, skipping lunch to have meetings about "roadblocks," and so forth. Well, it's not for me to understand someone else's passion.

But it isn't for them to understand it, either. Few of us as toddlers knew that we would grow up one day to be fascinated by baseball... statistics. Maybe some of us always loved football, but none of us imagined that we'd grow up to be thrilled by fantasy football. Most people don't become avid bird-watchers until later than life and, well, how does that happen? Nobody knows. It does happen, though.

As a youth, I believed that my passion was music. I played a lot of guitar. The truth is, though, that I wasn't a good guitarist until much later, long after I had abandoned music as my passion and had embraced it as a mere hobby. After my passion for music started to wane (at least as the driving force of my direction in life), I threw myself into another passion: economics. I loved it, and I did well in my studies at school, but the higher I went in the economics world, the less it seemed to ignite me as it had in the beginning. I graduated and took on a less high-minded form of economics, office work. I've done it ever since.

I'm good at what I do. I have a somewhat narrow set of expertise that is often in high demand, and I have a complete skill set around that kind of work. This keeps me gainfully employed and assigned to projects that I can safely say I do enjoy, for the most part. But I punch in early and go home after I've worked my hours. I have no interest in overtime, I'd much rather be at home, doing something else. I don't hate my work, but I'm no fan of work in general. I prefer fun.

So, that raises the question: Am I like my valedictorian friend? Do I, too, lack a discernible passion? 

No. I do have a very fervent passion. It might sound cheesy, but my passion is love. From the moment I met my wife, I knew I wanted to love her; and from the moment we became committed to each other, I knew that our love was going to be the greatest project of my life. I have genuinely felt that way ever since. Moreover, upon the birth of my children, they became incorporated into this project as recipients and benefactors of my love, too. My project has expanded to include them.

The way other people describe their passions is how I describe my commitment to loving my family. I don't mean this in a "gosh, I love my family more than anything" sort of way. Everyone (who is sane) feels that. No, what I mean is that I drop everything I'm doing and forego all other aspects of my life for the opportunity to help my wife and children feel loved. They do feel loved, and they know how much I love them; but they also know how to receive love and, I certainly believe, are learning how to love the correct way, too. It's not merely an emotion to me or a stirring of the heart, it's a way of being. It's a way of treating people, a way of reaching out to them, a way of taking on their hardships as my own, and a way of relying on others when we need someone to rely on. It is a modus operandi, a manifesto. 

Well, I don't get paid for this. Some people are lucky enough to be passionate about their work, while others happen to be passionate about an outside interest that means a lot to them. Fortune has assigned me the passion of loving my family over and above what most people understand love to be, and has given me a keen interest in the acts of love and their accoutrement. 

Passion can be for anything, you just have to throw yourself into it. You won't always be paid for your passion; in fact, most of us never will be. But that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't pursue it, and it doesn't mean your life won't be infinitely better for having done so.

The Problem With Heroes

My four-year-old son loves cartoons, superheroes, books, and stories of all kind. If I start telling him stories, he will happily sit on my lap and listen to me for hours. He's never encountered a story he didn't want to hear; and if no one can or will tell him a story, he will make up his own. 

For as long as he's been able to hear stories, he has gravitated toward the villains. He thinks they're cool. He thinks they're tough. He always prefers the villains to the protagonists. As a parent, I would much rather he gravitated toward the heroes and model their behavior, but to my chagrin his interest is always strongly fixated on the villains of the stories.

Why might this be? I decided to find out. I asked him a barrage of questions over the course of many days and weeks to learn why he prefers villains. What he taught me was something we can all learn from.

Fundamentally, the reason is because villains are "cool." They're strong, confident, often witty, often depicted as much more capable than the protagonists. They speak in smooth, deep voices; they command attention and they exude strength and power. Seen from the lens of a four-year-old boy, what's not to like about villains?

The question really isn't why he prefers villains. No, the real question is why doesn't he see the heroes as cool, and from the above paragraph, the answer is obvious. Heroes are none of those things.

Except Batman. My son loves Batman.

In the 1800s, Romanticism was the literary order of the day. Heroes were perfect, villains pure evil, and stories were about heroes defeating evil villains. Eventually, writers began creating more complex stories, in which heroes had weaknesses and flaws that they had to overcome in order to defeat the villain. Every hero needed a "hero's journey." The battle between a hero and a villain became a battle between the hero and the weaker parts of himself.

From there, things just kept getting worse. Heroes weren't men anymore, they were boys, youths. Kids had to save the world from evil villains on their way to growing up. So every heroic story became a story about kids growing up. Eventually, girls wanted in on the action, and most modern tales of heroism are about girls growing up; or, as The Critical Drinker has repeatedly pointed out, girls growing up and learning that they've already been perfect all along. They just really needed to believe in themselves.

From this angle, is it any surprise that four-year-old boys are more interested in villains than heroes? Villains are fully formed characters, true Romanticist gods, ready and able to take what they want and enact their will on the world around them. And all the people who want to stop them are small, coed groups of weak little kids who haven't yet figured out how to be heroes.

God, who wants to be a hero in a story like this?

As a result of all of this, I am going to have to take more of a role in shaping my son's relationship to story time. He needs exposure to more heroes like Batman: Clint Eastwood's "man with no name," Jason Statham's various characters in all of his movies, Schwartzenegger's entire oeuvre, Bruce Lee, Jet Li, John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, and so on. 

My son is desperate for some good, old-fashioned literary Romanticism, and I'm going to give it to him. Shouldn't you do the same for your son?

I Can't Wait To Not See The New Superman Movie

 A social media connection of mine posted this photo:

I can't wait to not see that Superman movie. I'm really tired of Lois Lane being turned into a gritty, hard-hitting investigative journalist.

Time for a rant.

Women writers don't understand the appeal of Superman comics. (Women tend not to understand romance in general, but that is perhaps a topic for another day.) Men understand intuitively what's cool about a man who can perform awe-inspiring feats of strength and who can defeat any foe and overcome any challenge. Men also intuitively understand what it's like to be in love with a woman while, for various reasons, being unable to reveal to her the very best parts of who you are. And there is an instant human appeal to a story in which a person hopes that their personality is enough to win a romantic partner, without having to rely on tricks, fame, super-powers, etc. This is why Superman is a story that people enjoy.

But it's also a male-centric perspective. If a woman falls in love with Clark Kent... what's in it for her? To be sure, it's fun to be WANTED by someone at work, as long as he's not a creep, but if he's not handsome, powerful, and/or a man of great integrity, what exactly is the appeal? So, from the female side, the best part of the story is when Superman falls in love with an ordinary reporter. Not a beauty queen, not a rich debutante, just an ordinary girl who lives in an apartment and works for (what used to be) a humble newspaper. But, gasp, this creates an imbalance of power between the two characters, so now Lois Lane has to somehow "deserve" Superman and be equal to him in some way. She can't be beautiful or a rich debutante, though, or else women are going to hate her. So, she's gotta be a left-wing activist girl-boss. And you know what's really great about this? It proves that not only does Superman like girl-bosses, but he also likes left-wing activism! Now we're talking!

But wait, it gets worse. In this female-centric story, Clark Kent has nothing to reveal about himself to Lois Lane. Why would he want to? He's no longer an all-powerful hero with a vulnerable side he's seeking to share with the love of his life. No, in this story, Lois Lane must be the one who discovers Superman's true identity. So, Clark Kent doesn't seek to be vulnerable in the arms of the woman he loves; instead, the woman robs him of his anonymity by "figuring it all out by herself." Then she decides that he's the man for her. She takes him, and he lets her do it because, how could he not fall head-over-heels for such a girl-boss?

Except now there's nothing in the story that appeals to men. Or rather it only appeals to the kind of men who dream of falling in love with a left-wing activist girl-boss, which is... not very many men. And certainly zero young boys. And also, as it turns out, even most women don't particularly care for a story like this, because there's nothing interesting about it. The whole plot is, "Once upon a time, Lois Lane was awesome." Why was she awesome? Because she was good at being a reporter.

Look! Over there! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's--aw, who gives a fuck? There's a girl-boss over here girl-bossing! Who has time for superheroes?

My Daily Bread

A short while ago, I grew tired of paying in excess of four dollars for a loaf of bread that no one in my household actually enjoyed eating. My wife gave up eating all but the seediest, crumbliest multigrain bread on the shelf, but I was unable to eat that for blood sugar control reasons. Meanwhile, my children enjoyed only the sweetest, most cake-like white bread, and even then would refuse to eat the crusts. You can likewise imagine what impact that bread had on my blood sugar. The bread that did work for me tasted... fine. When I first discovered it, it was about $2.50 per loaf (even then, expensive by my standards), but the price has increased quite a bit over the years.

All this adds up to: bread was a problem at my house. It was expensive, and it didn't taste good. Some people in my position would just give up eating bread at all. I took a different tack: I decided to buy the fanciest, most expensive bread machine I could find and commit to baking my own bread at home.

As I've tried to explain, this was a decision made out of necessity. Baking, and cooking in general, gives me no great pleasure. I don't hate it, but I consider it the same as any other chore I would rather do than not do: I'm glad to do it, but it doesn't make me happy.

Thus, my needs as a home-baked-bread man were as follows: I need the bread to be cheap, good-tasting, easy to make, requiring no great thought, finesse, or strategy on my end for baking it, and I would like it to be consistent. 

After baking a number of the standard recipes that came with the bread machine, I settled into a white bread loaf that met my needs. I have adjusted the recipe to improve its taste more to my liking: not so sweet, and a fair bit saltier. Now, I don't buy bread at the store anymore at all. I bake it exclusively at home.

Here's what I've learned and how I've benefited from this change:

First, I now spend less than half as much money to get a loaf of bread about twice as large. That's a win for home economics.

Second, my bread has no preservatives. It's made only of water, wheat, sugar, salt, butter, milk, and yeast. This matters a lot more to my wife, who has developed a bit of a fear of chemicals. Even so, the bread I bake lasts long enough for us to eat it, so the preservatives aren't necessary.

Third, and possibly as a result of the above, the bread tastes a lot better. It tastes normal, as bread should taste. It tastes so much better than my kids now prefer to eat a slice of bread for a snack to some of the other snack food garbage kids tend to develop a taste for. And they eat the bread crusts; even the heels! My wife happily eats the bread I bake, and she had all but given up eating bread at all. And, of course, it tastes better to me, personally, because I've adjusted the recipe to match my own flavor preferences.

Fourth, it works with my blood sugar. It is admittedly not quite as good on that level as the other bread I was eating, but it's viable. 

Finally, it is incredibly easy to bake - I don't have to think about it, or knead it, or jump through special hoops and techniques to get it to come out correctly. I don't have to add seven thousand special ingredients to make it better in one way or another. It is almost thoughtless. I just add the ingredients to the machine, and in about three hours' time, I have a perfectly baked loaf of bread with great texture.

So, I achieved all my goals and solved my household's "bread problem." I recommend this solution to any of my readers who can afford an expensive bread machine and who have similar issues with store-bought bread. 

My Running (Training) Philosophy

It's been two years. I'd offer an explanation for why I haven't posted in so long, but there is no need to do that since, after all, no one's reading this, anyway.

First, some recent context: I spent last year training very hard and dedicating myself to discovering the ins and outs of "Zone 2 training." This, of course, is very vogue now - and especially so last year - but all it really amounts to is undertaking a large volume of slow training, in pursuit of a higher VO2 max and better "metabolic fitness." I'll say more on that in a moment. What I want to say here is that I found Zone 2 training to be a very useful intervention for me, personally. I needed it, and lots of it. 

Unlike the dogmatists, however, I do not see Zone 2 training as a panacea or a way to unlock secret potential you haven't yet tapped. I see it more or less the same way Dr. Inigo San Millan sees it: as an important intervention for those who require an endurance correction. I needed that, and I got it.

What happened next for me was that I angered the Zone 2 gods (i.e. triathlon gurus on Twitter) by suggesting that too much Zone 2 training is a bad thing, by making note of the fact that many, many fast 5K and 10K runners are successful at much lower training volumes (e.g. Parker Valby winning the NCAA cross-country championship on 30 miles per week), and by emphasizing that quality miles matter far more than an enormous quantity of Zone 2 miles.

No, the gods didn't like that much, and banished me to the outer darkness. So here I am, back on my blog, where I can write whatever I want to, and no one reads it anyway. And today, I'd like to write about how I see training for running, in a sort of philosophical way.

Long-time readers will remember that that's kind of where this blog started, so I've come full circle. Let's begin now.

The Three Axes of Running Development

As I see it, a runner develops along three distinct "axes" as he trains:

1. Muscular development
2. Bio-energetic development, i.e. cardiovascular and metabolic fitness
3. Biomechanical development, i.e. running form

Let me introduce these three concepts in a way that you might have recognized as you yourself have run over the years.

As you train, you may have found that, during some kinds of workouts, you can't go any faster because your muscles are burning and they won't move your body any faster than it's currently moving. Strengthening these muscles and conditioning them through running will address this problem, and over time, you should find that muscular development is no longer the obstacle it once was.

During other workouts, you may have noticed that you can't go any faster because you're gasping for breath, your heart is pounding, or you've spent all your energy already and now you're totally cooked. In this case, you need more "bio-energetic development." In other words, you need a healthier cardiovascular system and/or more Zone 2 training to improve your metabolic efficiency. Once having done this, you'll find that you can almost run forever without getting tired, provided your muscles can do the work (see above).

At other times, you may find that your muscles and your cardiovascular fitness seem fine, but you can't seem to keep up with other runners who are just inexplicably faster than you. They're not just faster in Zone 2 or Zone 4 or in a sprint. They're faster at all levels of effort. No matter how hard you train, you can't seem to access that extra gear that other people seem to have. Why not? Likely because your running form is preventing you from really striding out like you need to. Addressing your running form issues will put you on a level you never thought you would be.

Now that you know what my "running axes" are, let's talk briefly about how to improve along each individual axis.

Improving Your Muscular Development

I'll keep this short.

Improving your "muscular development," or in other words, conditioning your running muscles, typically happens one of two ways: Lifting weights and running fast.

The faster you run, the more the effort shifts away from your calves and quads and into your hamstrings and glutes. You can see this easily by comparing running injuries between distance runners and sprinters. Sprinters more frequently pull their hamstrings, often right there during the race; distance-runners more often pull their calves, hips, Achilles tendons, etc. But even if you're distance-running, the faster you run, the more engaged your glutes and hamstrings will be.

Thus, many runners who are seeking to get faster need to ensure that their glutes and hamstrings are stronger. That is, these muscles must be stronger than they have become merely by Zone 2 jogging around for 100 miles per week. More jogging won't get you this kind of strength. What you need is a direct intervention via training.

Resistance training is infamously under-utilized among runners, but it's probably the best place to start. Just doing some squats, lunges, bridges, and leg curls once or twice a week, progressively increasing the weight until you feel different about your muscles will go a long way toward improving your muscular development. A tremendous benefit of lifting weights is that it doesn't count as "running miles," so you're not over-training in terms of running by adding a strength workout to your training regimen.

While you're at it, don't forget to train the rest of your running muscles, too: quads and calves, especially. You don't want to create muscle or form imbalances by focusing too much on one part of your leg and not training the other part at all.

That said, lifting weights will only work if you put your newly strengthened muscles to good use on the road. That's when we come to running fast, i.e. sprint intervals. Sprint intervals, "anaerobic training," "Zone 5 training," etc., all these terms amount to the same thing. What you want to do is spend a good, solid amount of time running as fast as you possibly can. Think about running 10-20 repetitions of 100-400 meters each. And it will be all the better for your muscles if you do these intervals uphill. 

Sprinting and weight-lifting will also make positive changes to your running form, your metabolic efficiency, and in some cases also your VO2 max. But remember that the primary goal of muscular development is to build your running muscles so that they're strong enough to be faster.

Improving Your Bio-Energetic Profile

If you find yourself gasping for breath when trying to finish a big workout (especially a tempo run), it might be time to improve your bio-energetic profile. If you find that you can't complete an easy long run without your heart rate steadily drifting up into Zone 3 / Zone 4 territory, then it is definitely time to improve your bio-energetic profile. How do you do it?

The easiest and most practical way to improve your cardiovascular system is to just do more running. That's right - more Zone 2 miles. While I do not that "Zone 2 training" is a special, magic thing, I do of course understand that there is no replacement for a good "endurance base," and that's precisely what Zone 2 training is all about.

Ideally, as you craft your training cycle, you will start out with a few months dedicated to improving your endurance base. That will mean focusing mainly on Zone 2 miles for months at a time, with a few threshold runs sprinkled in for good measure. How many miles? As many as you can reasonably tolerate. As many as your schedule allows. As many as you can run without injury. You may even find it highly beneficial to stop running and just do hours of low-impact cycling or swimming to develop your cardiovascular and metabolic fitness.

All these Zone 2 miles do come at a cost, of course. When you're not running fast, you're conditioning your body to run slow. That's why we typically do our base buildup in anticipation of our next big training cycle. If you're in the middle of training cycle and you don't think your base is what it needs to be, I recommend finishing out the cycle and then going back to a buildup phase.

Now, sprint intervals will also help you improve your VO2 max. Additionally, weight training will build peripheral muscles that will be able to process lactate and thus improve your metabolic fitness. So Zone 2 is not the one and only way to improve your bio-energetic profile; it is simply the main, most efficient way to do so, and in my view, represents the most reasonable intervention to use if your goal is better endurance. But all of these training strategies should be used by all runners at some point during their training.

Improving Your Running Form

Bio-mechanical improvements to running are the most difficult to teach. To some extent, I think they have to be observed first, and then internalized, and finally the runner has to do some experimentation to find new comfortable ways to run faster. However, if you've ever read my blog, you know how important I think running form is. To me, it is the great differentiator between a recreational hobbyist and a runner who actually has a chance of winning something.

There are a number of exercises one can do to develop better running form. This now being the "TikTok Age," you've probably seen all of these exercises on short little videos set to music: A-skips, B-skips, butt-kicks, high-knees, cariocas, and various hurdle drills. All of these exercises will help you improve your range of motion, which is necessary for great running form.

...But these exercises won't teach you great running form. For that, I know of no other substitute than looking at great runners like Paul Chelimo or Connor Mantz, observing what their running form looks like, and then trying it out yourself. Go out and try to make your legs look like their legs. Try to do with your arms what you see them do. The more you look like them, the more likely it is that your running form is good. Take video footage of yourself and make notes for possible improvements. Then, start making those improvements.

I have found the best success working on my form during easy runs, where there is no pressure to perform and I can simply direct my thoughts to whatever form issue I think needs to be addressed. Over time, you will start to feel faster, and that's a beautiful feeling.

In Practice

As you train and improve, you will probably go through many (infinitely many) iterations of needing to develop one thing or another. It's not as if every one runner just has to work on one thing. I'll work to address one thing for a month and then notice that something else now feels like the biggest obstacle; so, I'll start tackling that one.

For beginners especially, it's not common to be completely out-of-breath during the first few weeks of running. Then, as your cardiovascular system starts to adjust to the new workload, you'll likely find that your muscles aren't up to the tasks you want to give them. And as you continue to alternate between building better endurance and better legs, you'll start to notice form becoming an issue.

So we just work on things as they come up - especially if you're not engaged in any kind of formal training cycle. As you chip away at one thing, another takes precedence and you chip away at it instead. Forever. This is the running journey. 

Closing Thoughts

The last point I want to make here is that, because these three running axes exist, and often interact with each other, this explains why there is no "magic workout," no "perfect training approach" for all runners everywhere. You can study the Twitter running gurus if you want to, but eventually you will come to realize that although two runners with equal marathon times may both want to improve, one of them might best be served with more tempo runs while the other might best be served with more mileage. One of them might need to lift more weights while the other might need to improve his form.

In short, not only is there no one-size-fits-all intervention to make us all better runners, but even the same intervention won't work for the same runner at different times in his "career." The key to training is understanding which intervention to apply at which time to succeed. Unfortunately, that kind of wisdom only comes from experience.

But you can gain that experience! You just have to get out there, start running, and start chipping away at your biggest weakness until your next biggest weakness reveals itself. And I wish you the best of luck in your pursuit.

Garmin vs Strava (Again)

Good heavens, it’s been nearly three years since I last compared Garmin’s proprietary “Training Status” to Strava’s “Fitness” metrics. Time sure flies when your blog is languishing in obscurity and suffering a long decay from neglect and the absence of anything really interesting to say. Or so I am told. My audience of Russian bots continues to grow exponentially, and many of you South Asian spam-bots seem quite secure in your belief that adding spam-comments to the bottom of my posts will gain you clicks and impressions. It’s not the world’s finest readership, damn it, but it’s my readership. And so, together, we will explore the depths of fitness tracking nerdery that only the likes of us can seem to tolerate.

Having been using these metrics literally for years, I think I have gained a better sense of how they perform with respect to their stated purpose. In my previous post, I compared them along more technical criteria: how are they calculated, what do they mean, etc. In this post, I’d like to instead discuss how it feels to use these metrics qualitatively. As a user – maybe even as a non-technical user – what is it like training every day while referring to these metrics and personally assessing what they mean, compared to how we subjectively feel on a day-to-day basis?

First, let me explain what my training has been like for the last little while. Having acquired an ankle injury, I have spent the past few months focusing on cycling instead of running. I’ve logged a few thousand miles on the bike, on rides ranging from a minimum of 15 miles to a maximum of 50. As I’ve trained, I’ve managed to increase my average speed from the 18mph range to 20-21mph. In December, I received a Peloton Bike as an early Christmas present, and I’ve already logged over 1,000 miles, using Peloton’s “Power Zone” spin classes to increase my FTP from a low and unknown number up to about 320. Not fabulous, but also not bad. On longer days, I use Peloton’s scenic rides to log miles at low aerobic efforts, and occasionally I’ll try to race other cyclists on the leaderboard to give myself an extra push. In short, my training has been a lot like it would have been if I had been running: I do lactate threshold training twice a week, a long day once a week, and aerobic rides the rest of the time. I’ve also taken on a 2-3 times weekly strength training routine to rehabilitate my ankle and increase my muscle mass. Finally, I’ve slowly started attempting to reincorporate running into my daily routine, taking things slowly so that I don’t rush into it and re-injure my ankle. All in all, I’m getting about two solid hours of daily exercise, usually quite vigorous. It’s a lot more hard work than most people do, at least for exercise.

Now let’s take a look at what Garmin’s metrics are telling me about the past 30 days of training:

As you can see, my VO2-max has increased slightly, from 54 to 56. My Training Load started out “high” at the beginning of the 30-day period, dipped down toward the lower end of the optimal range, and then climbed back up to “high” again. Garmin’s “Training Status” metric over this same time period showed that I was “Productive” at the beginning of the period. Then, as my Training Load dipped, my Training Status moved to “Peaking,” which means that I was especially well-rested and ready for a big race or competition. As my Training Load continued to be in the low range, however, my Status flipped to “Unproductive” for a few days. Finally, as my Load returned to normal and my VO2-max kept improving, my Status once again returned to “Productive.”

Subjectively, I must confess that the readings on my Training Status report were very highly reflective of what it was like living through these past 30 days. I felt fit and in shape, and as my Training Load decreased, I had a burst of additional energy. I really did feel as though I was “peaking.” Eventually I knew I had to get back to working hard, and I feel productive again now. Garmin’s metrics seem to be getting it right.

What is Strava saying about my fitness over the same time period?

Well, Strava reports that my fitness is down. And it’s not just “down,” it’s down to a value of 60, which is relatively low, considering that I exercise for two solid hours a day and engage in the same kind of training – at the same level of exertion – that I did when I was running and when I was receiving a much higher fitness score from Strava (more to the tune of 85-90 points). There is no evidence of a decrease in training load, followed by an increase. We see only a steady decrease on Strava’s graph. It is, in short, not reflective at all of my fitness reality.

What could be going on here? Well, I mentioned in my three-year-old post that Strava’s Fitness metric seems to be biased toward time. In short, merely putting in a bunch of miles, no matter how hard you work or whether those miles are doing anything good for your body, will cause your Strava “Fitness” score to increase. Doing two hours of quality work a day will not do the trick. What gets me here, though, is that I have increased my FTP, my muscle mass, my weekly running miles, my estimated VO2-max, my cycling speed, and the number of pounds I lift while strength training. Basically, on every conceivable health metric, my fitness has improved over the last two or three months, and Strava is not only showing no improvement, it’s showing that my fitness level has actually decreased!

In short, Strava couldn’t have possibly gotten it any more wrong. Based on the above experience, and on my qualitative experience using these metrics over the past 3+ years, I have to conclude that Garmin has the better set of metrics. They do a better job of telling the user what is actually happening with his or her body, as it happens, and they seem to reflect genuine increases in fitness. Strava’s metric doesn’t appear to capture much, beyond time spent exercising. This is a significant weakness in their system.

In a day’s time, I hope to take delivery on a new Fenix 7 watch, which will include Garmin’s newest metrics, such as suggested workouts and “Body Battery.” I don’t know how well these metrics will work in practice, but I am hopeful that they will be about as good as what Garmin already offers. And when I find out for certain, I will make sure that all you Russian bots and spammers are the first to know how well it plays out for me. As I always do.

Public, Central Parks Are A Product Of The State

It’s common for non-libertarians to try to point out holes in or problems with libertarian theory. It can also be really annoying.

Less common, and less annoying, is when libertarians attempt to point out possible problems with libertarian theory, and then attempt to fix those problems or reconcile reality with the problems created. As a libertarian, I would like to believe that adopting a laissez-faire approach will always yield the best possible result. As a man committed to logic and evidence, however, I must submit my beliefs to the crucible, and follow the facts wherever they might lead. With some hard work, doing so ought to advance the theory, rather than merely hoping that the world continues to evolve in ways that substantiate classical liberalism.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Bosque de Chapultepec in Ciudad de Mexico. It is simply a gorgeous, breathtaking park that defies description. One must be in Chapultepec to understand its scope and beauty. However, to put it very dumbly, Chapultepec is an enormous city park – the largest in the Western hemisphere – full of trees and greenery, fountains, monuments, sculptures, museums, bicycle and running paths, and so on. On the one hand, Chapultepec is “just like one of those big city parks” of which there are many examples: Central Park, Stanley Park, etc. On the other hand, Chapultepec is something altogether different and remarkable, considering its literal eons of history as a place of respite for the inhabitants of the area around what is now Mexico City.

 In any case, parks like these require something very important and specific. They require that city planners, a hundred or more years ago, make a conscious decision to prevent any kind of commercial or residential development on a specific, contiguous plot of high-value land. And this must be done despite tremendous pressure to develop that high-value land and reap the resulting property taxes, population expansion, and economic growth.

Rare as it is for government to exercise any level of restraint, especially in the face of handsome monetary rewards for the governors, it is equally rare for the dynamic free market to simply leave a beautiful patch of land unutilized and dedicated to free public use. There is, of course, the classic Tragedy of the Commons problem with this, but the predicted outcome of such a thing is that private owners will take better care of this space than will the commons. That is true, provided that some private sector buyer or buyers agree to purchase the land and care for it. Yet, with high-value land located right in the middle of a commercial hub, as parks like Chapultepec tend to be, it is unlikely to the point of irrelevant that any such buyer or buyers would ever set aside such land to remain undeveloped.

The final piece of this problem involves the acknowledgement of a plain fact: Big green spaces in cities make people happy. They are genuinely good for human life. They increase property values. They provide a central gathering place for people who want to exercise. They provide a space for buskers, artisans, and street merchants. They provide clean air and oxygen to the surrounding environment, and a hiding place for local wildlife. It’s healthy to have such places available to city-dwellers, objectively so, and on many different levels.

The question is, how can such spaces be preserved and maintained under a libertarian regime? We cannot simply assume that some eccentric millionaire will buy up the land and keep it nice, maintained by a trust, for all of time. It would be nice to feel confident, as a libertarian, that such beautiful parks might still be possible if the state were not there to mandate their preservation. But how?

In a future post, I will attempt to tackle this question. For now, it suffices to simply articulate what the problem is.

On The Ability To Change Gradually

In The Huffington Post, Pauline Millard writes,

There is something about being a 28-year-old woman, especially in an urban area, that makes them flip the switch from party girl to marriage material that often has nothing to do with a ticking biological clock. Some might call it a cab light turning on. The most obvious reason is that it’s cultural, subtly ingrained into our psyches over years of pop culture.

Millard has correctly identified some kind of phenomenon. It’s true that many young women suddenly become serious about dating and marriage, about settling down and about motherhood, when they reach the age of 28. In my observation, the age the change occurs is actually closer to 27, then it takes a year for the women themselves to figure out what’s going on with them. 28 is when they realize that what they’ve been craving over the course of the past year is marriage, family, and children.

Calling the reason “cultural” is also a correct diagnosis, in my opinion, although it isn’t very specific. Sure, it’s culture, but why doesn’t culture make the change happen earlier or later? Millard’s casual conjecture is that the movies tell us that 28 is the age that women shape up. I don’t think a “cab light turns on” in a woman’s mind merely because they see a lot of movies featuring women who get married at 28.

To help think through this, consider every other big change you’ve made in your life. Granted, there are a few life events that are sudden and cataclysmic, such as when we move out of our parents’ house. For the overwhelming majority of major personal changes, though, things happen gradually. Your music tastes develop slowly over time. Your taste in books gradually goes from being what you used to enjoy as a teenager to whatever you enjoy now, as an adult. The person you are in your romantic relationships usually evolves over the course of those relationships; so, over a period of months and years. There is no “cab light.” You don’t suddenly wake up one day and discover that you are a completely different person.

No one goes to bed a “party girl” on her last day of 27 and wakes up “marriage material” the following morning. Drastic changes occur slowly, over time.

I mentioned exceptions, though. High school graduation occurs pretty suddenly, actually. Two weeks before graduation, you’re the same high school student you always were; then you graduate, and suddenly you think you have to be a fully functioning adult. Or, as I mentioned, moving out of your parents’ house and suddenly becoming responsible for all your shopping and chores. It’s not quite an overnight change, but it is definitely sink-or-swim. Within a few months, you will have become who you are as the master of your own house.

The defining feature of these more sudden changes is that culture has no means of making them happen gradually. It isn’t possible to graduate high school slowly, over the course of months. Once you meet the requirements, you’re finished. Moving out of your parents’ home is binary: either you’re here or you’re there. You can’t be here-and-there. You can’t kind of be there. Our personalities change suddenly during these times because the times themselves are sudden. We don’t have any other choice about it.

Similarly, when I became a type 1 diabetic, it essentially happened overnight. The moment I received my diagnosis, I also received my first shot of insulin. I’ve been diabetic ever since. My body did go through a transition, but that was happening unbeknownst to my mind. My psyche changed because it had to change, because there was no other option.

This is how personal changes occur. In most cases, they happen gradually, over time, unless something major and sweeping happens suddenly.

The question, then, is what happens to women at age 28 that is sudden, major, and sweeping, that doesn’t happen at age 27? Nothing, of course. For most women, age 28 is exactly the same as age 27, at least in terms of cultural drivers of personal growth. So becoming “marriage material” is not at all like becoming a diabetic. It’s not something that happens overnight and outside of a woman’s control.

I would argue that becoming “marriage material” is more like graduating high school. Graduating high school is a major, sudden change because there’s no other way to do it. Becoming “marriage material,” too, is a major, sudden change because there’s no other way to do it. Society doesn’t have a script for women to follow that takes them from being teenage kids to being semi-adult college students, to being young women on their own who are looking to slowly transition into a marriage.

Instead, society’s script is to “enjoy your youth.” And for so many women, “enjoy your youth” means “be a party girl.” The script we hand our young women involves a lot of career work, a lot of partying and dancing, a lot of casual sex. The fact that this can’t go on forever is patently obvious. No one should ever question the fact that it can’t go on forever. It can’t. It won’t. It ends. But there’s no script for winding it down. There’s no socially acceptable way to transition out of dancing and drugs and casual sex and into being the kind of responsible person that is capable of motherhood.

Because there is no script for this kind of change, many women find themselves in a position of having to just stop doing one thing and start doing another. They simply reach a point, around age 28, where the dead-end nature of their current lifestyle becomes obvious to them, and they force themselves to acquire a new lifestyle, one with some staying power. That’s motherhood, wifehood, partnership. So they change.

But notice that, prior to the change, they are essentially living a glorified adolescence. Notice, too, that this glorified adolescence is what people have been criticizing in young men for decades. They’ve been called playboys, and man-children, and “failures to launch,” and all the rest of it. They’ve been mocked and ridiculed and denigrated. This phenomenon is old news for men, though. Men have been drawing out their adolescence for as long as they could, because they knew that as soon as they became “marriage material,” it would be time to put the drumsets away and raise children. And that is precisely the path we men have been walking for decades.

Women, then, have finally discovered a parallel situation in their own lives. Now that we all recognize the problem, perhaps it’s time to start crafting a cultural narrative through which we glorify adolescence, partying, drugs, and casual sex a little less; and glorify the eventual transition to adulthood and parenthood a little more.