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elfsToday I realized that I compare myself to the wrong people… or maybe they’re the right people.
There’s an old truth that says, “Inside every sixty year old man is a fourteen year old boy wondering what the hell happened.” While I can personally vouch for this sensation in some ways, in others not so much, and it’s been a few experiences in the past few months that have really opened my eyes as to why my perceptions are so very skewed.
Between my conversation with my step-brother-in-law and his friends, talking to a few people my age at Disney World and other places while visiting Florida, and then discussing my case with the nurses and even another patient while I’ve been hospitalized with COVID, I’ve had a lot of experiences with men my age who aren’t in tech. More than that, I finally opened my eyes at a recent poker night at a friend’s house and took a hard look at men my age.
I’m not my age.
My personally curated newsfeed has a section, “fitness,” which includes lots of articles about diet and exercise. It’s probably a bit masochistic to re-read the same advice over and over, because aside from the somewhat lunatic “Try keto!” or “Try fasting!” articles, they’re all absolutely the same. Diet: “eat food, not to much, mostly plants, cooked at home.” Exercise: “Here are the five exercises you need to do. They’re boring. You can do small doses every day, or big doses every other day. They are: push, pull, hinge, squat, carry. Those will keep you strong. To keep you alive, take a half-hour walk every day. To stay upright, to standing chores like dishwashing, tooth brushing, and clothes folding on one foot.” But it’s good to see that the advice never really changes.
Some of these guys are a bit extreme. They have amazing bodies. And some of the articles are about “What exercises not to do after 40” and “… after 50.” And yeah, I can see that there are exercises I shouldn’t over-do, but for the most part I’m still doing the same exercises I’ve been doing since I was 40, since I hired a personal trainer and told her, “I never want to be that guy who shouts, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!’” She said that was a great goal, and asked if I had any secondary goals. “Well, I’d like to look like I could star in gay porn.” She paused and said, “I think I’ll have to research that over the weekend.”
Now, seven years later, I can move my body around freely, and the nurses are openly surprised. My nurse came in yesterday and said, “One of the other nurses said you were doing squats in the hallway.” I allowed that I was, but I only did a dozen of them.
My body thinks it’s still in my mid-40s. Ever since I took up exercise seriously, my body has slowed aging a lot. As I said in my post about hanging out with my cohort, I’m not done.
One canard I hear over and over is “Evolution doesn’t want you to move. Evolution wants you to save energy as much as possible. Evolution doesn’t want you to exercise.” This is nonsense. Aside from the poor anthropomorphizing of evolution as wanting anything, if we evolved to never move eventually we’d run out of reserves and die. We evolved to hunt and gather. We evolved to move. We evolved to be pursuit predators, to literally follow our prey until it stops running from exhaustion. We human beings aren’t the best swimmers, or the best climbers, or the best runners… but we do all of those things well enough to support our best physical skill, we walk.
I’ve had an eye-opening experience. My doctor tells me that if I had gone with the first ER’s advice and just waited it out, I quite possibly could have died. “Two or three more days and you’d have been critical with dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Your GP probably saved your life telling you to come here.” I’ve spent three weeks (so far) being unable to life.
One of my friends asked me how it’s going to change my perspective. “Are you going to slow down?”
No. I’m going to fucking do more.
There’s an old truth that says, “Inside every sixty year old man is a fourteen year old boy wondering what the hell happened.” While I can personally vouch for this sensation in some ways, in others not so much, and it’s been a few experiences in the past few months that have really opened my eyes as to why my perceptions are so very skewed.
Between my conversation with my step-brother-in-law and his friends, talking to a few people my age at Disney World and other places while visiting Florida, and then discussing my case with the nurses and even another patient while I’ve been hospitalized with COVID, I’ve had a lot of experiences with men my age who aren’t in tech. More than that, I finally opened my eyes at a recent poker night at a friend’s house and took a hard look at men my age.
I’m not my age.
My personally curated newsfeed has a section, “fitness,” which includes lots of articles about diet and exercise. It’s probably a bit masochistic to re-read the same advice over and over, because aside from the somewhat lunatic “Try keto!” or “Try fasting!” articles, they’re all absolutely the same. Diet: “eat food, not to much, mostly plants, cooked at home.” Exercise: “Here are the five exercises you need to do. They’re boring. You can do small doses every day, or big doses every other day. They are: push, pull, hinge, squat, carry. Those will keep you strong. To keep you alive, take a half-hour walk every day. To stay upright, to standing chores like dishwashing, tooth brushing, and clothes folding on one foot.” But it’s good to see that the advice never really changes.
Some of these guys are a bit extreme. They have amazing bodies. And some of the articles are about “What exercises not to do after 40” and “… after 50.” And yeah, I can see that there are exercises I shouldn’t over-do, but for the most part I’m still doing the same exercises I’ve been doing since I was 40, since I hired a personal trainer and told her, “I never want to be that guy who shouts, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!’” She said that was a great goal, and asked if I had any secondary goals. “Well, I’d like to look like I could star in gay porn.” She paused and said, “I think I’ll have to research that over the weekend.”
Now, seven years later, I can move my body around freely, and the nurses are openly surprised. My nurse came in yesterday and said, “One of the other nurses said you were doing squats in the hallway.” I allowed that I was, but I only did a dozen of them.
My body thinks it’s still in my mid-40s. Ever since I took up exercise seriously, my body has slowed aging a lot. As I said in my post about hanging out with my cohort, I’m not done.
One canard I hear over and over is “Evolution doesn’t want you to move. Evolution wants you to save energy as much as possible. Evolution doesn’t want you to exercise.” This is nonsense. Aside from the poor anthropomorphizing of evolution as wanting anything, if we evolved to never move eventually we’d run out of reserves and die. We evolved to hunt and gather. We evolved to move. We evolved to be pursuit predators, to literally follow our prey until it stops running from exhaustion. We human beings aren’t the best swimmers, or the best climbers, or the best runners… but we do all of those things well enough to support our best physical skill, we walk.
I’ve had an eye-opening experience. My doctor tells me that if I had gone with the first ER’s advice and just waited it out, I quite possibly could have died. “Two or three more days and you’d have been critical with dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Your GP probably saved your life telling you to come here.” I’ve spent three weeks (so far) being unable to life.
One of my friends asked me how it’s going to change my perspective. “Are you going to slow down?”
No. I’m going to fucking do more.
