Wellness In Conflict
Self care is an absolute must.
There have been a variety of articles here about your need for layered defenses. Regarding Your Ass was about hardening your systems. What Hunts You? was about a reality based assessment of the troubles you might face. Paranoia: Pathological Or Professional? addressed the need to keep your perception of threats grounded in reality. Angoraphobia addressed uncertainty and it contained the first mention of physical care in the context of virtual conflict.
This post has a not intriguing title and some specifics on what to do/not do.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you do not already have some experience and the related discipline in this area you’d best pay attention.
Evolutionary Foundation:
Homo sapiens are a tropical species that evolved in small hunter gatherer bands on open savanna. The next primates that might follow on the path to cognition and speech might just be Gelada baboons.
We shifted from that mobile lifestyle to a sedentary, agricultural one. The jury is still out on the benefit of this move.
And where we’ve ended is a little bit extraordinary. How can you pick out the poor people in our society? They’re the ones that are overweight. Just imagine how completely unbelievable that would be to someone from even just a hundred years ago.
The other thing that would utterly amaze anyone from a hundred years on back is that we’re not just culturally sedentary, planting ourselves in one geographic location, we are also physically sedentary, dangerously so. A twenty year old man in the U.S. may spend as much time sitting as an elderly medieval nobleman. We’re built to be out on the grasslands, constantly moving, not planted on our behinds.
Food Quality:
How is it that the poor people are fat? Due to fertilizers, growth hormones in meat and milk, and the capability to adulterate hyperprocessed foods, there has been a divergence between calories and micronutrients.
I am on the autism spectrum and I have the attendant gluten intolerance. A single crouton effects me like getting the flu, the washing down a couple Norco with vodka would you - I’m unsteady on my feet, disoriented, and physically pained for a solid day until it clears my system. This has been a blessing in disguise - haven’t had Burger King for twenty years.
I caught Lyme disease and with it I acquired an allergy to alpha-galactose. I stopped eating red meat after reading about this in 2012 and things instantly improved. This allergy is transient and blood work in 2019 showed the antibodies were gone from my system. Even so, my consumption is limited to the bacon in the occasional egg bites.
Those two things cut me off from the vast majority of problematic “fast food”. Post Lyme sequelae for me also included a strong need to avoid high fructose corn syrup and anything with emulsifiers like xanthan gum. Adding those two prohibitions whacked the remainder of the fast food menu.
You probably don’t have this raft of “good trouble” that I do, but you’re likely still eating more calories and less nutrients. Pay attention to what works and what doesn’t.
Supplementation:
Those post Lyme sequelae for me include poor absorption of most all the things. I experimented. A LOT. I kept a very detailed notebook. I learned that how I felt and how I actually was were not closely connected - a mindfulness related thing. You gotta do you, but what finally corralled my brain fog involved these:
Time release 5-HTP for serotonin support.
2x RDA of L-tyrosine above dietary norm for dopamine.
Visbiome probiotic.
Noopept neurotrophic.
I’ve written about Post Lyme Recovery and Nootropic Fatigue Success on LinkedIn. if I can save one person some of the misery I faced in this area, that will count as a job well done. You have your own unique set of problems, so your solutions will be different, but the path to hunting down issues is similar.
The Other Hunt:
We’re no longer chasing down ungulates across the savanna, instead we get to hunt for problems created by our sedentary lifestyle. One of the lucky things in my life was getting involved in mindfulness meditation twenty years ago. I got used to paying attention, which became literally a life and death matter for me. If you don’t have such a practice, you might want to check it out. And even if you do, a little instrumentation is a good thing.
I’ve had a Fitbit since the spring of 2018. I got the Nile badge (4,132 miles) on my first account, lost a bunch of stuff to an intrusion, and I just recently passed the Great Barrier Reef (1,600 miles) on my new one. My long term average is 2.3 miles a day, but there were two significant orthopedic problems that ate into my activity level. I have a personal trainer now thanks to the second problem and her making fun of my Fitbit is part of the overall service. There are three Garmin devices in my Amazon shopping cart and I think my Charge 5 is about to give way to a Vivosmart 5.
I’ve owned a blood sugar meter for twenty years, at first a fitness thing, then type 2 diabetes monitor, but that was dispelled by my Noopept treatment(!). I’m old enough to own a blood pressure meter, which was another problem largely dispelled by Noopept. There’s a Muse 2 EEG headband in its storage container in my nightstand. I don’t get as much use out of it as I could.
If you are physically sedentary but cognitively and emotionally wrapped up in conflict that’s triggering your fight or flight hormones, it isn’t a question of IF you’ll have trouble, it’s how SOON and how BAD. I did some real damage to myself back in 2012 by not taking advice about this to heart and it took years for that to subside.
Hardening:
The nature of online conflict is changing. It’s always been a bad deal in terms of physical vs mental/emotional stress, and the “attention economy” is purpose built to keep you engaged. Climate change arrived in an undeniable fashion in 2022 and artificial intelligence came the year after. The first is causing a lot of ground truth issues that are only going to get worse. The second is a black swan that’s just starting to peck through its eggshell.
The twin American fetishes of free speech and free markets leave us incapable of addressing these problems that originate in a grim reality, one that gives no fucks about whatever ideology we believe defines the world. Corporations are de facto psychopaths and their automation is already manipulating us in deeply unhealthy ways. Don’t think social media, instead look at the order in which you encounter foods while walking through your supermarket. Not optimized for good choices, is it?
Your ability to engage is a finite resource. I protect this in myself by shunning mobile device usage for anything other than long form reading, by relentlessly blocking every bit of manipulative ad technology I encounter, and my social media use has fallen to nothing but cultivating a professional presence on LinkedIn.
It is a given that AI is going to further wreck whatever qualified as “social” about social media. What steps can you take to isolate yourself from this, less the amount of observation you must do for whatever tasks you take on?
Conclusion:
I’ve long mocked that certain class of people, the ones who were not around for 2012, but who know all about who supposedly did what when, who else was involved, and with claims of why they were doing it. This is always in the context of some nobody trying to insert themselves into the historical timeline in order to fluff themselves up, and it’s never for the sake of some important current ask.
One of the things that doesn’t come up much is the environmental changes in early 2012. Groups who had been able to find some interesting news and turn it into a viral cascade watched their potency fade in what felt like a tropical storm force wind. Any move was greeted with a solid wall of push, driving the dialog where someone else wanted it to go. I had a Facebook account back then, one I’d added 3,200 friends to, 95% of whom had a Guy Fawkes mask or some other token of Anonymous association. I peaked in on them in 2017 and the 2,400 survivors had mysteriously morphed to being white rural Christian conservatives.
The de facto loss of Twitter as a global common and the ubiquity of AI access makes this oncoming year already appear in many ways worse than the humans vs. machines of 2012. Layer over that real conflicts Russia/Ukraine, Hamas/Israel, Houthis/Red Sea shipping, and the probable conflicts Venezeual/Guyana plus the big one, China/Taiwan, and that’s a recipe for … I’m not even sure what, but it’s not gonna be good for plain ol’ organic humans.
So that’s that. You will need to take excellent care of yourself, because 2024 is gonna start hot, wind up from there, and Trump is doing the footwork to ensure there’s some sort of civil conflict here after our presidential election. Some of the GOP are so scared of what’s brewing they’re actually standing up, which is low key shocking, but I suspect too late. Showing up steadily, even under a load, and not overreacting are going to be primo superpowers to develop for what is ahead of us.