Preface
The following is advice for my 18-year-old daughter and my 15-year-old son. Not all of it is applicable to both of you. It should be noted that both of you are already following the most important principle: you are good people. In many ways, you are better adjusted human beings than I was at your age. Much of what I write here is an admonishment to myself to practice what I pontificate.
Screenshit
The best thing ever in the history of the world was the anticipation I felt when I was a kid on Friday night for watching cartoons the next morning. There was no Saturday – there was only Cartoon Day. It didn’t even matter that all we had was a crappy tiny black and white tube TV – I didn’t fucking know any better. It was just the best – sometimes I got so goddamn excited that I spent Friday night on the floor below that beacon of bliss – in this weird sleeping bag with a tiger head for a pillow.
Now we have a firehose of cartoons available anytime at the touch of a button. Or music – we don’t have to call the DJ at Z104 hundreds of times to request “I love rock n roll,” using a different voice each time to “trick” him, in the naïve hope that he will actually play Joan Jett and we will be ready to record it on our cassette tape. Now music, sports, movies, news, gaming, whatever the fuck we want, are all right there – always. Nothing is exciting anymore. And it sucks.
What have we lost because we never allow boredom to settle in? We never sit in the waiting room at the dentist and actually contemplate, or ruminate, or even stew and stress about our lives. We never sit with ourselves. We sit on our phones while the stress builds in our psyche, transmogrifying into anxiety, depression. And what do we do when we’re anxious and depressed? Grab our phones!
Get off your phone. Get off your Xbox. Get off your TV.
GET OFF YOUR FUCKING SCREEN!
Get off your screen.
Get off your screen.
If you have to do something, read a book, or a magazine. At first it won’t hold your attention, but over time you will learn – you will learn that sometimes there’s much more pleasure, much more value, in slowing that firehose down to a trickle. Or just sit and think – you will begin to learn how to work through your problems, work through life, without letting it crescendo into crisis. Or just sit and don’t think. Just sit and be. How long can you do that?
Foodstuffs
First of all, fuck you. Fuck you because I can’t eat ice cream and cake for breakfast – or a full order of nuggets, a double cheeseburger, large fries, and carbonated sugar water for dinner – and still look like Taylor Swift or Glen Powell. Fuck you because if all I eat all day is a pound of veggies, I still somehow manage to gain five pounds. And maybe it doesn’t help that the little bastard leprechaun from your primary food group, Lucky Charms, is always staring coyly at me from the cereal shelf – fuck!
But I tell ya, even if you’re not gaining weight, you’re not doing yourselves any favors by eating all that sugar and processed food. Surely you would be even more resplendent physical specimens if you ate more healthfully. Your gut microbiota are a sorry little lot, inundated as they constantly are by trisodium phosphate and red dye #40 and God knows what other chemicals. It’s not food. It’s fucking delicious… but it’s not food.
And, along with those damn screens, your shitty food is fucking up your mental health. You know about the gut-brain axis. All that garbage you pour into your stomach is messing with your reward centers, causing inflammation, and ultimately lowering your energy and exacerbating anxiety and depression.
Like Michael Pollan says, eat real food. Can we start with one serving of veggies per month? That’s the recommended amount, right? How about three servings of veggies per day to start, eventually upping that shit to five or more – that’s great fiber, and the bonus is your gut microbiota are going to have a party. And eat more healthy proteins like beans, rice, eggs, nuts, and fish. And healthy fats like olive oil and avocadoes. That’s food!
Oh, and since we’re talking about our health, maybe we should also consider the health of the animals we eat. It’s immoral to eat highly sentient animals who have been tortured their whole lives. At the very least, let’s cut out factory farmed meat.
Move It
I’m no doctor, but it seems to me that if your exercise consists of leaving your bed to walk down the stairs three times each day and get a little food (Lucky Charms!), it may not produce the best physical results. Again, fuck you, because you still look better than I do, even though I work out most every day. But also again, your life will be a hell of a lot better if you move.
Want to build muscle? Move.
Want to reduce inflammation and chronic pain? Move.
Want to feel better mentally? Move.
Baby steps. Let’s start with an easy 5-10 mile jog six days a week, a couple hours of heavy weightlifting every other day, and an hour of high intensity fartlek training three times a week. Then we can ramp it up from there…
Or – or how about we start with walking the dog every day, even if it’s just around the block? And a little PT every day? And just getting outside with friends to walk and play? Disc golf anyone?
Other Shit
Sleep: Try to get eight hours a night. The best way to make this happen? Get off your fucking screen well before bedtime – at least an hour before, preferably two. Keep your phone far away from your bed. Take a warm shower (and cold, and then warm again) before bed. Keep your room cold, and dark. Try to resolve most stresses well before bedtime, and don’t eat right before bed. In other words, take the hour or two before bedtime to be still, and chill.
Breathe: Let’s do a 5-second inhale. No, do it now. One, two, three, four, five. Now a 5-second exhale. One, two, three, four, five. Now repeat this for ten minutes. Do that once a day. Do it while you’re driving. Begin to focus on your breathing more. Breathe through your nose as much as possible. Occasionally, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth rapidly, inflating and deflating your chest and stomach – do it 20-30 times, then hold your breath on the exhale for as long as you comfortably can, and finally inhale and hold it for 15 seconds. Repeat this three times.
Take a cold shower (or plunge): Want to reduce inflammation (and chronic pain, and possibly anxiety and depression)? Take a cold shower… then sit in a steam shower (or sauna or warm shower) for ten minutes and breathe… then take another quick cold shower.
Synergy: Note that there is a synergistic connection among all of these variables. The more you do one of these things, the easier it becomes to do the others. When you eat well, you have more energy to exercise, and when you exercise more, you sleep better, and when you sleep better, you’re less anxious, and when you’re less anxious, you’re less inclined to eat shitty food, etc.
Do nature-y shit: There’s something ineffable about strapping that pack on and taking the first few steps out of the parking lot into the wide world beyond. You are going into the backcountry to live with the trees and the birds and the fish, and maybe even Herman the ermine. For three days you will leave the mess of humanity behind you, all of your belongings on your back. It is pure freedom. But we are also surrounded by nature all the time, if you know where to look for it. Above the din of the garbage trucks and the chattering and hammering on the neighbor’s roof, you can hear something else: birds are everywhere, and insects. Looking down, you see the golden sun percolating through the morning dew on the grass. Above, a primeval turkey vulture alights awkwardly on the dying silver maple. And if you look closely, you can see a tiny, impossibly green metallic bee making its home in a hole we drilled in the fence. To preserve and protect all this nature-y shit, incorporate a land ethic into your moral edifice; live and act in a way that minimizes or even mitigates climate change and environmental degradation.
Dial in the meds: Sometimes even the perfect exercise/nutrition/sleep regimen just doesn’t cut it – there’s real shit going on in our brains that can’t be completely fixed by those alone. Better living through chemistry is the real deal. Balancing the right meds and supplements is important. And that’s something to keep tweaking. But, especially with the meds, if exercise, nutrition, or sleep can do the job, start with those.
Be intentional (sometimes): I’m eating well, I’m exercising, I’m sleeping well, and, damn, I’m just dialing in the meditation and mindfulness – so why do I have so much anxiety? Uh, maybe it’s because the Boulder housewife in the mansion on the hill – the one who practices healing with crystals and laying on of feathers – is apoplectically dropping f-bombs at me over the phone because she’s upset that our painting crew missed a spot in her gargantuan master closet. Despite all your best efforts to control your internal environment – your endogenous stressors – the biggest stresses are often exogenous. No matter what, you will endure stress, and that’s good, but you have some control over the type and amount of external stress you experience. Think about what makes you happy and what doesn’t; try to choose a path that leads to vocations and avocations that are fulfilling, and yes, sometimes stressful, but not overwhelmingly so. Within this broad path you set for yourself, take the time to occasionally saunter.
Work harder, and smarter: The idea that physical labor sucks is ingrained into American culture. We try to find parking spots as close to the store as we can, we push a button instead of opening a door, we take a gilded escalator when there are stairs right there! We drive two blocks when we could get outside and walk. There are opportunities all around us to get little microbursts of exercise, yet we choose lethargy. When it comes to our jobs, we complain about anything that’s difficult (especially if it’s physical), but isn’t that the shit that’s most rewarding? Some of my best days have been getting after a strenuous remodel project for 12+ hours in a day, and then looking back with satisfaction at all I’ve accomplished. If you do things half-assed the quality of the works sucks, but if you do things no-assed, you never get shit done;) be quarter-assed. Work hard now so that your future self has more time for other pursuits (but find a balance that allows plenty of opportunities for your present self to enjoy the present). Don’t cubicleize your job – incorporate at least some physical labor into your work. Do your own home repairs. And manage your money in a way that removes much of the stress of having to worry about it – be prudent, be frugal, but not overly parsimonious.
Do shit for other people: Help around the house, volunteer, do something nice for a neighbor or a friend. Following the sage advice of GranJan, choose a partner that makes you a better person. Choose your friends this way, too – and try to reciprocate their uplifting spirit. Be humble, be thoughtful, be kind, be friendly, be responsible, be magnanimous. There are all too many perverted perpetrators of evil; greedy, mouth-breathing, would-be autocrats; and slavering sycophants who prop them up. But their evil is increasingly outweighed by human goodness. The desire to cooperate is literally in our DNA. Combine this with the inexorable increase in human knowledge – in scientific advancement – and it creates a moral latticework that continues to grow better. The arc of this structure inevitably bends toward justice. In the darkest, loneliest times of your life, you can always take solace in the fact that good trumps evil, and that you are on the side of good. This is the simple key to living a fulfilled life: be good.
Be creative: Find projects and pursuits that make you happy. Make beautiful things. Brush your teeth left-handed. Try new experiences, and don’t wallow too much in the muck of materialism. As Thoreau sexistly said “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” Take reasonable risks. Never stop learning.
Fuck up: Give yourself a break every once in a while. All things in moderation, including moderation? Or maybe it should be All things in moderation, including gluttony. In other words, you don’t have to be perfect – practice a little hedonism every now and again. And if you fuck up, brush the gravel off your trousers and get back up on that bicycle. Mistakes can even lead to new insights – fucking up is the mother of invention.
Listen to your dear old dad: I’m old and I’m wise (probably more of the former than the latter). Even though I’m a sarcastic piece of shit, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try this shit. Do it for a week, then do it for a month, then incorporate whatever shit sticks to the wall. Hopefully most of it sticks – you will begin to thrive as you step out of the dank cave into that broad, bright, beautiful world.
Oh, and yes I did write some of this in the waiting room at the dentist.
Lastly, Alcohol and Drugs
Should we talk about the detrimental effects of alcohol and drugs? Fuck no, that’s how your mom and I cope with you not following all of the above precepts….
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