Tag: philosophy

The Morality of Fat – Levels of Misconception

Tiers of the Morality of Fat:

1) Being fat does not always mean you’re unhealthy.

2) Being healthy is not always ethical.

People use their physical and mental stamina in order to oppress others, and the pleasure that they can experience can make them apathetic and ignorant to the ills of the world and other people in it.

3) Being ethical is not just about being prosocial; it’s also about living the good life.

4) Being prosocial is not always possible.

Claims that fat people over-consume at the expense of lower income people across the world, or at the expense of the environment, may have some validity. But on the whole, everybody in the middle class who live in developed nations use a great deal of energy in their daily lives, such that any additional costs from eating more food and requirements of supplementary healthcare are unlikely to be proportionally significant. More importantly, most middle and lower class people in developed nations face systemic barriers to having affordable healthy food and time for exercise, as well as mental healthcare for disorders like addiction and anxiety. Asking people to simply put in more effort toward eliminating their need for consumption cannot be enough.

5) Living the good life is subjective.

For some people, living a longer life or having lots of physically demanding experiences is important. But they’re not the only keys to a happy life, and some goods that come from being alive actually come at the expense of a longer life or being able to have lots of physical experiences, irrespective of how fat you are or how much you eat. You can’t have it all. It’s important to some people spend a majority of their time making art, solving puzzles, or enjoying lots of food. You can’t just assume that these things are less valuable. Though it can be argued that changing your diet and activity level can boost your performance and enjoyment of these experiences as well, that is true only to a point. Specializing in anything you enjoy still requires some sacrifice, and being human is about more than just being in tune with your biology.

6) Living the life you want is not always possible.

The majority of people who go on some kind of diet program do not experience sustainable weight loss. Exercise burns significantly fewer calories than people think. Fat loss may be possible in the near future for significant segments of the population, but not unless there are substantial changes in food access, job security, healthcare access, education, and media advertising. For now at least, most of us will have to accept the fact that we are going to get fatter, or stay fat, for a while. Exercise is still beneficial in a lot of ways other than simply losing fat, but it’s also something that is difficult for many people to do consistently. Moreover, people are naturally unlucky about all sorts of things, not just in the realm of fat. Some people respond to calorie restriction better than others; some people have more resources to support them than others. Some people grow up with physical activities and healthy eating as positive and reliable parts of their lives. Many do not. People have impairments, deformities, or injuries that they are born with or acquire later in life – cancers, blindness, missing limbs – that carve out life paths with very different outcomes. For these people, joy and achievement cannot look the same as it does for average people. That’s not necessarily a negative thing, but oftentimes people with disabilities have to be more creative and tenacious when society does not give them a simple blueprint for what experiences will make them happy, much less what actions they can take to make them happen.

Worst of all, depression can make this entire journey not seem worth it. Life is inherently full of suffering, confusion, grief, and regret. Sometimes this is downright intolerable. Everyone deserves the opportunity to change their circumstances so they can have new experiences and respond differently to life’s challenges, and even when people have depression… a new job, a new friend, or a new home may be all it takes to begin to make that happen. You could be like me, a person whose anxiety is frequently so bad that I overestimate the risks of physical harm and social embarrassment for trying new things, and I underestimate my worth, my capabilities, and my capacity to handle setbacks, such that I rarely enjoy the benefits of change. But there are those people for whom these resources are out of sight or out of reach for a long, long time. And there are also people who may never respond positively to these changes even when they occur. Human life is messy, and in this very fundamental way people can have vastly different inner worlds, and some people are more different than others. I can only offer this: you can never be fully sure that you are one of the people that can never benefit from a change in your life. But I would not harass even a loved one to stay alive and look for new possibilities no matter what. To do such a thing is not only presumptuous; it is selfish. And above all, it is cruel.

What Can We Really Learn From Dragon Ball?

On the philosophy and legacy of Dragon Ball and the shonen genre.

As Wisecrack illustrates, Dragon Ball is not just a high-action brawler modeled after Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies; in essence, Dragon Ball aimed to teach Buddhist lessons of compassion and open-mindedness through its emulation of Journey to the West. Though a lot of people are getting buff at the gym, the aesthetic and ethics of Dragon Ball and the shonen titles heavily inspired by it (namely One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach) lie not in becoming the “very best” at something so you can beat an overpowered villain who’s vaguely trying to conquer or destroy the world. It’s not about being singularly focused on your goal. It’s about all the sidetracks along the way. It’s about the people you meet and learn about and helping them to solve their problems. It’s about relating your strife to the world around you. It’s about having new and surprising experiences that make you question your place in the world. In my opinion, people who use shonen to prop up their missions to excel at physical training or self-defense techniques in order to achieve a specific body type or become popular are not just shallow. Their super-controlled, super-individualist mindset is antithetical to Eastern philosophy and plays exactly into the hands of Western media values. They live in a space where flexibility, doubt, wonder, and diversity are undervalued or non-existent. Here, your unique talents shouldn’t be valued and put to good use in reciprocity with others – instead, you need to mold yourself into what the social structure deems to be the most valuable asset, because you know that achieving social dominance is the only thing that matters when you can’t trust anyone else to have your back.

Thanks for reading.

Is It More Natural to Distance Yourself From Feelings, or Live In Them?

I’m doing some initial work in cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve been tasked with starting to notice automatic thoughts and reflect on them. It reminds me of a concept in Eastern philosophy called third… something (someone help me out here): basically, that you should learn to not just react to an event, but take a step back and analyze your initial reaction, and then evaluate that feeling and make a choice.

One of my primary motivations for delving into this is to examine the self. Are my emotions me? Is it more “authentic” to trust my feelings to make decisions? BigThink has a good video on this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3-dxHavRe8 – So many of our initial impressions of new things that happen to us come from learned patterns of thought that were by chance and out of our control. They hardly constitute a truthful representation of reality. So then why are we so defensive of these feelings?

I remember seeing a video explaining how in society we are not given tools to understand how to pilot our brains. We assume they work just fine on their own. What I wonder is, is it natural for humans to balance automatic thinking with a culture of self-regulatory habits and teachings – a skill many of us have forgotten, a missing piece – or is this a relatively new step in human evolution, a step toward ailing the inherent suffering that comes with learned patterns of behavior from childhood?

Studying Neurodiversity

The hope, when it comes to investigating people’s differences, is to: a) better accommodate and integrate them into a more inclusive and diverse system, or b) give a reason to extricate people from the system and absolve them of responsibility to that system. There are good reasons to assume that no social system can ever be good for the individual – they could be ignorant, oppressive, and presumptuous by design. Social systems may necessarily benefit some members at the expense of others, fostering greater inequality than there would be in the absence of such systems. Libertarians may argue that, even with good intentions, accidental harm done by society to individuals is more unethical than allowing individuals to suffer without intervention.

Naruto – Goals and Philosophy

Naruto is driven less by a need for glory than a desire to be accepted. He works diligently and learns as much as he can about his world so he can make as many connections as possible. He is very sympathetic toward people who feel alone. Naruto strives to convince others that unity can overcome any suffering. He derives his power from the connections he makes with others, through senjutsu, his relationships with the tailed beasts, and his relationships with his friends. He is stubborn and hyper-focused on his goals. He is so possessive of his bonds with others that he will chase people down and sacrifice his body, especially for Sasuke. Besides unity, Naruto focuses on the future rather than the past, and is more existentialist than essentialist. He believes that everyone has the power to choose who they want to be, and that no matter what mistakes you’ve made in the past, there’s always a way to change yourself. As such, Naruto doesn’t accept fatalist or essentialist logic as excuses for not changing, leading to clashes with such people as Neji, Gaara, and Obito. Despite his parents’ death and the deaths of mentors and friends, Naruto shoulders the memory of the people he’s lost and goes on to foster new relationships

Sasuke focuses more on the past, and is more essentialist in nature. From the beginning of the story, Sasuke falls back on his innate Uchiha abilities and prides himself on his heritage. He is so distraught by the pain of losing his family that revenge becomes more important to him than protecting the bonds of the friends and mentors he’s come to know. Like most other Uchiha, Sasuke tries to take everything on himself without acknowledging anyone else. This escalates to the point that he would rather appoint himself dictator who oppresses everyone equally than strive for cooperation on an even footing. Obito, Itachi, and Madara are also examples of Uchiha who tried to take on too much by themselves.