Maggie's Farm

There is nothing healthier than taking on things to dispel our self-esteem despite the ego-protective temptation to hide and avoid them. Into life, outside the comfort zone. Here are some of the things that work well:

- Socializing with high-achieving, highly life-competent witty people
- Taking a calisthenics/fitness class at the gym
- Taking the Great Courses Intro to Calculus or Intro to Immunology Class and discover your IQ limits
- Joining a Bible, or classical music/opera study group and discover your ignorance and lack of insight 
- Accepting the duty of running a small volunteer organization
- Inspecting your naked body carefully in a mirror
- Reflecting on one's mortality and what good one will have left behind
- Taking an advanced yoga class
- Try to get your book published
- Go to a new city or woods without a GPS and make yourself get lost
- Reach out to befriend somebody you feel is smart, fun and interesting, and get the brush-off
- Learn a new sport or skill from scratch
- Go on a job search
- Get into weight-lifting

I welcome your suggestions for deeper humility in the comments - 

From a review of Antonio Damasio's new book on consciousness:

 Damasio does not view consciousness and culture as resulting from some additive ingredient unique to human beings: reason, logic, or language. In this story, a form of awareness appears in all animals equipped with nervous systems. Differences in animal mental life emerge with increasing anatomical complexity. Human beings are sophisticated, feeling, affective, social body-subjects who may speak, write, make art, and build technologies, but we share the homeostatic impulse with all other living things.

This is part of the backlash against the silly "self-esteem" movement of the 1980s.

A new (and valuable) word for me.

A funny-sounding word, almost as if it were the opposite of paranoia (which entails projecting one's bad stuff into the outside world.) Metanoia is usually used for spiritually-based internal changes based on a deep and ruthless personal review, followed by penitence and/or confession.  In fact, tenets of AA are based on the concept of metanoia.

In a more secular context (despite just coming off of Lent), it is never a bad idea, however unpleasant, to fearlessly do an honest review of one's character flaws and weaknesses, covert malevolences, selfishness, evil thoughts, unhelpful impulses, life errors, failures, ignorances, etc. etc.  It's assumed that everybody is a mess or insufficient in some way, or in many ways.  It takes great courage to review one's terrible shortcomings, and not one of us is all we can be.

I generally advise people to appraise their strengths, competencies, potentials, and virtues at the same time.  Still, it's the flaws that need attention.

I learned the term from this wonderful and wide-ranging (including God and Jesus, free speech, and lots of history) conversation between Prof. Peterson and the thoughtful Australian politician John Anderson. An intellectual treat:

At Quillette, The Tyranny of the Subjective.

Most of the world cares about objective reality, not subjective.  One aspect of my day job is to help peoples' subjective experiences align more closely with objective reality. 

 The primacy of subjectivity is by no means limited to politics. It now permeates the framework through which we have traditionally mediated our competing narratives. Journalism, academia, science, and law are all affected. In short, any institution that exists to accommodate competing perspectives is being undermined by a new paradigm that privileges the subjective ‘lived experience.’ And, in the process, the meta-values which have traditionally enabled us to transcend our differing subjective experiences suffer. Foundational principles such as audi alteram partem (listen to the other side), the presumption of innocence, proportionality, empiricism, and even the rule of law now must bow before the sovereignty of the subjective...

This composition of pieces of talks says it better than I could. He is speaking to youth, but could be speaking to anybody.

Facebook has offered "myPersonality" for a decade.  Since they seem to be in the personal information business, your data might be useful to them.

If interested, you can do that myPersonality test here, away from Facebook. Not very illuminating to see I came out as Traditionalist. In fact, probably only interesting to marketing people although it is used for social science research too.

Not impressed. 

Too often, the functionally-impaired abandon families which might offer shelter and support, reject treatment which might help if only a little, and refuse government assistance either out of pride or misunderstanding.  People often write about "more services" and more "help for addicts," etc., but these things are commonly rejected.

I see no future for help-rejecting mentally-dysfunctional. 

Currently, jails are said to be the largest mental health facilities in the US. Have we have returned to Bedlam?  More likely, family homes are the largest, jails second, and the streets third. Rightly or wrongly, government-coerced "help" was politically and morally abandoned. 

If you are a parent or relative of an impaired person, and have some assets, best thing is to make a trust for them with a good trustee. The low-functioning relative might reject all that, but it's all one can do. Once upon a time, there were permanent "retreats" and "homes" for such people, but when government got in the game they became hellholes.

I have no solution. Functioning at a high level is challenging enough for all of us even without tragic difficulties.

Wherever men and women are in routine contact (and I suppose, any place where gays are in routine contact),  biology requires that there will be some sex and/or romance in the air.  Office romance and attraction is, and historically has been, so common as to be a cliche.

With far more women in the workplace than a generation or two ago, what are the rules for men and for women? And what about dress and make-up? And why do most discussions ignore women's sexual and romantic interests? How is it different from college, or high school for that matter?

Peterson is an expert at saying "I don't know."  We can all learn from that. 

Yes, fear can be a liar. Getting outside our comfort zones is what life is all about. Good basic life advice like your Dad taught you, or maybe forgot to.

The universality and popularity of general fitness programs is partly because they have nothing to do with physical talent. 

Your genetics do determine many of your physical capabilities at advanced levels, but rarely at ordinary levels. Short people can be fine basketball players, for example - but not at a college level. Long-limbed people can do good bench presses and deadlifts, although not as readily as compact people. Everybody can run, swim, and do bench presses. Most people are physically effective but not blessed with special talents. That is why general fitness is popular - anybody can engage in it.

Besides your physique/physical structure, genes determine your ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fibers, your neuromuscular connections, your brain-neuromuscular responses, eye-hand coordination, your aggressiveness and energy, lung volume, etc.

Not to mention non-genetic factors like drive, training, and practice.

The point I wish to make is that, as with musical talent or intellectual horsepower, everybody has a level at which they can best perform, and few people ever reach those levels. In fitness, your only competitor needs to be yourself from last month.

Of course, we all have varying degrees of competitiveness, but that should never be any obstacle. Not one of our readers will play in the NFL, the NBA, or in the US Open. Or, for that matter, perform in the NYC Ballet. 

My advice, to be able to engage in the fullness of life, is to get out and move hard every day with weights, calisthenics, cardio, etc - and to do a lousy job of it if need be because there are no grades. Giving it your all is all that is required. 

From Megan McArdle on her 45th birthday

Want to be fit and trim, attractive, high-energy, light on your feet, and signaling that you have your act together? 

You know the popular approaches:

- Low-carb Atkins-like plan. This means fats, protein, and non-root vegetables and greens, with nuts and berries to complete the nutrition. This makes physiologic sense because it trains your body to burn your fat for energy instead of the carbs you shovel into it normally.

- Small but ordinary meals. Eg, a hard-boiled egg and coffee for breakfast, half a sandwich for lunch, a couple of slices of cheese for a snack, and a half-portion of supper.  This is a sustainable approach for most people, but it still might not work for you. It works great as a maintenance program for me, but I do not need to lose any fat and I do not have a voracious appetite. By the way, eating "until full" is disgusting and has nothing to do with nutrition. It's just a measure of how much you have stretched your stomach or ignore satiety signals. Normal people eat until satisfied, not until full. "Stuffed" is for the Thanksgiving turkey, or on Thanksgiving.

- Keep a nutrition calendar. Write down everything you put in your mouth. It's even more effective if you include Why you ate that donut. Bored? Tempted by flavor? Anxious? etc. Best idea: When those things happen, do something else as a diversion. If you are overweight, your subjective appetite is a liar because your body is lazy and doesn't want the hassle of burning your fat. 

- Exercise is basically useless for fat-burning in any ordinary time frame unless combined with a nutrition program of caloric or carb restriction. However, this is not an argument for a sedentary life. Furthermore, intense exercisers should have a small dose of carbs/sugar before a session to be most effective at pushing the effort.

I have written about the "False Hunger" of the overweight in the past. Paradoxically, the people who least need food experience hunger more than fit people, and consume food more avidly. I think it's usually an effect of being overweight, not a cause, but everybody is different.

Often forgotten: Fruit and fruit juices do not really belong on any fat-burning program. A glass of OJ or apple juice is the same as a Coke. The Big Fruit industry somehow convinced people that there was something "healthy" about fruit.  There is not. Fruit is dessert, a treat. Neither do cereals or grains, except minimally, belong on a fat-burning plan.

Let's say you are pudgy or fat and want to commit to a 6-7 day per week serious fitness program (something like the programs we recommend on Maggie's - not simply walking, aerobic swimming, or an hour trudging on a treadmill) to both lose fat and to get into fighting shape in general - high-energy, strong, trim, athletic, and fully-functional for life.

You have competing goals, fat loss and strength-building, which makes it complicated.  So what sort of nutritional plan do you need for our programs of weights, calisthenics, HIIT, etc? 

As readers know, fat loss is 90% nutritional under ordinary conditions. For sedentary people (less than 5-8 hrs/wk of strenuous physical activity), we recommend a low carb diet - lots of filler vegetables and greens, meat and fat. But if you are committing to an arduous daily exercise program too, you will need some amount of daily carbs and extra protein to sustain your exercise and to build/repair muscles happily damaged by exertion.

Nobody writes about this, but I have the correct advice.

For overweight serious exercisers only, use the scale as your guide. If you lose 2-4 lbs/month in your program, that's fine.  If you lose much more than that, up your carbs and dietary volume a bit.  If you lose less, lower your carbs and volume.  

The reason is that too-rapid weight loss will interfere with your fitness and strength-building goals. If you want both, you have to balance these goals. You have to consider that, if you are doing weight training (which everybody ought to do), a male can actually gain 1/4 lb/month in muscle in the beginning months while losing fat at the same time.

I'd recommend as a starting point for overweight daily hard-exercisers a carb intake of mostly one fruit and a bowl of oatmeal daily, and allow for one or two light beers too, or a glass of wine, for sanity. No dessert, bread, potato, pasta, rice, etc. Then get on the scale after one month of the program and feed yourself accordingly. Never get on the scale more often than twice a month - preferably once monthly. And always at the same time of day.

nb: For relatively in-shape exercisers, the recommendations would be entirely different.

From the need to be popular, deliver us, O Lord!

I get the idea of that, but don't most of us wish to be admired, valued, appreciated, loved, or at least wanted? Isolation and loneliness are the saddest things to see. Heart-breaking.

As an ex-nerdy science and sports gal who did not sit at the Cool Kids' Table,  I am happy to be a relatively sought-after and popular figure in adulthood. People enjoy my company! Yay!

A history of a concept: How an autism diagnosis became both a clinical label and an identity; a stigma to be challenged and a status to be embraced.

"Autism" is not a unitary thing. That's part of the issue. 

It remains a mystery why sleep is necessary: Why Do We Need to Sleep? At a shiny new lab in Japan, an international team of scientists is trying to figure out what puts us under.

Your path to destiny? The call for adventure and the courage to be stupid. "You have to be a fool before you can be a master." Prof. Peterson uses Exodus as a metaphor for life change. He rightly emphasizes the difficulties of change, and the wandering in the desert. He also rightly praises taking life risks to develop oneself, risks of abandoning stale and stupid axioms, risks to fail, and risks to start out stupid.

Two quotes from Ace: 

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

― Neil Gaiman

 "The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective."

- G. K. Chesterton

From How Augustine Invented Sex:

Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin.

This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy—but not before decades of dispute... 

Again, a Christmas book only for those who wish to continue or to update their secondary or college educations:  Campbell's Biology.  

It is the current basic text, and it guarantees a thorough grounding in the basics. If you shop around on line, you can find it for much less than the list price. 

A magnificent book, clear and easy to read if you recall some basic biochem.  If you took college bio ten years ago, you know almost nothing.

I don't want to write another one of those routine "How to deal with holiday stress" posts. 

However, I will say this about my profession. When I evaluate a new patient, part of my diagnostic job is to assess their level of functioning in all areas of life, and to make a guess about their potential levels of functioning. What things do we consider?  Social functioning and friendships, home management and organization of personal finances, family relationships, ability to work and at what level, hobbies and avocational interests/activities, conscientiousness, stress tolerance, emotional continence, functional fragility, impulsivity, intelligence, and so forth.

These are personal characteristics which may or may not have anything to do with any DSM diagnosis.

Making a functional life is not easy. While every single day tests those capacities in some ways, I have no doubt that this time of year can require us all to stretch our life-management skills.

Yes, it really does help.

Best study method I ever used:  Read a paragraph, and explain its content back out loud in your own words. That method got me through med school. 

Life has its vales of tears, but also its hills of delights and, very rarely, its mountaintops of joy. Sometimes I wonder whether the mandarins of my profession seek to pathologize all negative emotions.

Nobody promised you a rose garden. That was Eden. Learning to bear emotional pain, like bearing some physical pain, is part of life. It never hurts, of course, to have somebody or something accompanying you with that. 

An essay:  Bad chemistry. It’s impossible to love life when sorrow is treated as little more than garbage that needs to be disposed of by way of a ‘happiness pill’

Happiness pills are everywhere. Alcohol. Cocaine. Heroin. Meth. Fentanyl. Marijuana. They are widely used.