Tag: self-care

Daily Life, Diet, Health, Motivation

How Old Are You?

I’m a sucker for a good quote. While on a hike yesterday I was listening to a podcast and heard this:

”The greatest predictor of age is how old you think you are”

Time to rewind a bit. It’s been an… odd summer. To be honest, probably longer than that. Weight has been slowly piling on. Motivation has dwindled. Life events, real and imagined, got in the way. There were a couple of unexpected surgeries (my first!). One of which left me with foot pain that has been pretty significant. For a while I was sure that I would not be able to ever mountain bike or ski again. The result was me sitting in a chair for most of the summer, feeling sorry for myself. And eating. And more eating.

If you had asked me in August how old I felt, I would have given you a number ten years older than my actual age. Fat. None of my clothes fit. Everything hurt. Tired all the time. Zero interest in doing anything to actually improve my situation. I played zero golf all summer. Did not ride my mountain bike or the motorcycle. A few walks in the interest of rehabbing the foot was the sum total of my activity. In short, I was in the express lane to becoming an old man.

It’s interesting, that quote above is not a new idea. I keep a running list of quotes, sayings, and thoughts that I think might be something interesting to write about. I went through my list a few days ago and found this one I wrote down a year ago:

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”

That quote is from the 1920’s. This concept of your perceived age is not new. Why that first quote resonated with me is that several years ago if you’d asked me how old I felt I would have given a number ten years younger than my age. A twenty year swing in perceived age. That hits hard.

The good news is that a little bit ago I started the process of reclaiming my health. That process sucks. It hurts. It’s demotivating because you see no progress. You’re basically just hungry and sore all the time. And then all of a sudden, the number on the scale starts trending down. Cardio starts improving. I found a way to ride my bike without pain. Energy improves. I’m able to do long backcountry hikes again.

And the best part… when I heard that quote while listening to that podcast, I can honestly say I now feel my actual age rather than older. I have an impedance scale that calculates your metabolic age based on a bunch of factors. This morning it reported my metabolic age matched my actual age for the first time in a while.

The takeaway is that the pithy quote is true. You really are as old as you feel you are. The important part is that it’s up to you. Your age feeling can go both ways. Would you rather feel older or younger? Making a noticeable change takes less time than you think it will. You just have to start. Granted, the motivation to get started is easier said than done. If I had the secret sauce to making that happen, I’d be a very rich social media influencer.

I think it’s worth honestly asking yourself – how old do you feel? If you’re not happy with your answer, make a change.

My goal these days is no longer a weight target or to achieve some physical sport or endurance goal. It’s to get back to feeling ten years younger than my actual age. Because if I feel younger, I’ll act younger and do things like a younger man. The rest will take care of itself.

Daily Life, Government

Is Privacy Important?

If you’ve been following along at home, I recently went on a conspiracy theory reading binge (is it still conspiracy if it’s true?). But that’s nothing new as I’ve been espousing about our security state for quite some time now. Lately it seems like daily you find out something new that either the government or big tech is doing to spy on you. 99% of us just shrug our shoulders. Meh, it’s the price of having the fancy new iPhone so we can FaceTime and share all our data between devices via the cloud, right?

This morning I listened to an interview with Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater private security company. Fascinating guy for many reasons, but one of them is that he’s just recently created a smart phone that’s “unplugged”. In theory it can’t be traced by the government and it allows you to use most common apps without the tech companies (or government) scooping up all your usage and location data. While we probably all have a sense of what’s happening, it’s still shocking to hear the degree of spying that’s being done on us via our phones.

As is usually the case when I see or hear things like this I immediately vow to get off all social media platforms, wipe everything off my phone, and switch to using cash for all transactions. But then the more I think about it I realize “they” already have everything there is to know about me. I’m sure I have a very well established profile filed away somewhere. So what good would unplugging do at this point? If, as Mr Prince alleges (and I believe to be true), multiple apps, Google, and Apple can turn on/off your phone camera and microphone at will… and that data is recorded and stored for all eternity, then a hostile actor could already blackmail, embarrass, or threaten me. What good would shutting it off now do?

I suppose the only reason to have an unplugged phone would be if I planned on someday communicating with others or researching things that the government would like to know about and track. I don’t see that happening. I guess it’s accepting the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” mentality. It would take effort and sacrifice to try and unplug from our tech overlords. Is it really worth it?

But here’s the thing – it makes me mad that we even have to contemplate this. How did we let this happen? As Mr Prince says, it’s the frog in the slowly boiling water phenomenon. Little by little, with promises about how cool it will be when every device in your world is interconnected. I’m just as guilty as everyone else. I have Alexa, Siri, a smart refrigerator, online cameras and heating systems. On top of everything else that our phones do, I share my location online for Mrs Troutdog when riding the motorcycle and happily post photos everywhere I go embedded with location data. Like I said, I bought into the whole interconnected thing. Hell, I even worked for the evil empire (Microsoft back when Google’s slogan was still “don’t be evil“) and was part of their data collection division via your TV and set top box way back in the day. We collected everything about your viewing habits – what channels you watched, how long, and how you surfed through the guide. All so we could sell that data to advertisers. Well, technically not us but the cable providers who used our system. So I suppose I was part of the problem way back then.

But now… now the genie is out of the box and I’m not sure we’ll be able to put it back. The Borg has metastasized and has grown out of control. I don’t think the vast majority of people grasp the fact that we live in a full on police/security state. Monitored at all times. What our government and the tech companies currently do would be the envy of the old East German Stasi. Take a close look at how China monitors and controls its population, because that is our future very soon.

It makes me angry that we gave up everything for the convenience of some fancy tech and the promise of keeping us secure from terrorists and stopping the drug cartels. We did it to ourselves and there’s no going back – without drastic measures. I’m not sure we have the will as a nation to push back anymore.

The funny thing is that just the other day I agreed with Mrs Troutdog that I’d fully switch over to the Apple ecosystem and get an iPhone so we could more easily share calendars and FaceTime. Now I’m not so sure I want to. Maybe I should get an unplugged phone and start purging all the data collection apps and social media I use. Maybe I should start using cash for everything so my purchase habits and locations can’t be tracked.

Maybe.

But then again, that’s inconvenient. And I like fancy new technology. Besides, I’m not doing anything wrong. At the end of the day why do I care if someone’s watching me?

Man I hate being a lazy conspiracy theorist.

Daily Life, Motivation

It Really Is A Drug

This is going to be a little embarrassing. But I suppose, like any good twelve step program, the first step is admitting you are powerless over your addiction. My morning routine every morning, day in and day out, 365 days a year is as follows; Up at 4:30-6, make coffee, surf news sites and X/Twitter until 8-9:30am. At that point I start my day. Why is this embarrassing? That routine means that I average 1,095 hours a year mindlessly scrolling through news sites. I give up six and a half weeks of my life every year to an algorithm designed to keep me scrolling.

But it’s worse than that. I’ve noticed lately that I can’t stop checking in on my phone. Sit down for a few minutes and I compulsively find myself quickly scrolling through X/Twitter to see if anything new happened. During commercial breaks or pausing a TV show to let the dog out, I’m instantly on the phone flipping through stupid Instagram reels of funny animals, car crashes, and people doing stupid shit. Waiting in line at the grocery store, boom, out comes the phone. It truly is a drug.

What a waste. I suppose on the other hand, it’s not like I was going to invent an amazing new chemical compound that solves the problem of plastics in our landfills during that extra six weeks a year. But still, there must be something more productive I could be doing with that time. Watching cat videos and reading three sentence “news” blurbs is not exactly making me more informed. Sure, I can chat casually with someone at a cocktail party about current events (if I was to actually go to a cocktail party) but that doesn’t mean I actually know anything about the subject. X/Twitter has given me the back of the milk carton condensed version of the news. Which is usually just enough to make me angry and/or to start a fight at the holiday dinner table.

I believe it’s time for a detox. We’ll start with the phone. First step, put it away. I’m going to keep it on my dresser in the bedroom all day. Sure I’ll make a point of glancing at it occasionally to see if there was a missed call or text message, but I don’t need to obsessively carry it around with me in the house. I’m not a doctor on call 24×7 who needs instant access. There is literally nothing so important that it couldn’t wait the 45 minutes I was in the backyard working on the garden. Sure I might miss out on that hilarious meme I came across during a commercial break while watching Seinfeld reruns, but I’m sure I’ll survive.

Now for the harder one – the morning computer screen time. I’m not changing my wake up time or the time I start my day. I’m a slug, I admit it. I need several hours before I can get moving. The question is, what to do with those hours? I’m not going to give up the news entirely. I am a news junkie after all. I think the recovery approach will be twofold. First, limit the amount of scrolling through X/Twitter. Anything major or newsworthy that’s happened will show up in the feed within about five minutes. So let give ourselves a thirty minute budget to flip through some news sites and scroll through tweets. Done, I know now roughly what’s happening in the world. Now what?

I think the remaining time will be spent on reading long-form essays. Probably going to have to be subscription based. In reality anything worth reading takes a writer days to weeks to compose. A banger tweet, or paragraph posted on CNN.com, probably didn’t have a whole lot of thought put behind it. I’m at the age where I’m better off reading quality over quantity.

I’d also be much better served by spending my morning time working on creative pursuits than reading speculation about the latest celebrity gossip. Writing, maybe editing a photo or video. Anything to get the brain juices flowing. At my age I don’t have many brain cells left so I may as well exercise them.

So there you go. The confession of a news/phone/Twitter junkie. The first step is to admit you have a problem. Now let’s make a change. If you see more frequent posts here, you know it’s working. If I’m radio silent, you’ll know that I’m still mired in the addictive world of Russian dash-cam crash videos and reading pithy one-liners about how evil the other political party is.

Wish me luck. The algorithms are powerful, fueled by AI, and designed to prevent you from breaking out of the matrix. It’s time to take that red pill.