After years of floundering, I think I'm finally getting it: You get energy by spending it. The fuel tank metaphor is completely misleading. The body supplies energy to meet demand. The tank *expands* if you use a lot of fuel. In other words, biology is fundamentally antifragile
Placing heavy demands on a machine grinds it down. Biology, on the other hand, grows and strengthens in response to challenges, as long as they're not completely overwhelming
The machine metaphor has many good uses, but on the subject of bodily and mental energy, it's actively harmful: it makes you conclude from a lack of energy that you need to save what little you have; from tiredness that you need to rest. This leads into a shrinking feedback loop
Spending energy on something is like submitting a request to your biology to make that kind of thing a little easier next time. Correspondingly, not spending energy on anything is effectively like a request to make life in general harder
Ofc, you need to replenish with sleep and moments of rest, but the latter need only be a few minutes to catch your breath, and different parts of the bodymind gets to rest in different activities, e.g. the mind can rest during physical exercise, muscles during meditation, etc
So in theory, if you have a well developed energy system, from having gradually increased your level of activity over time (so as not to overwhelm a bodymind that may or may not be addicted to rest and recreation), you shouldn't need much downtime besides sleep
"What does not kill me makes me stronger" is one way to express this antifragility point, but it is phrased too dramatically: it makes me think of passively befallen illness and accidents, rather than active effort. Perhaps better: "What does not overwhelm me makes me stronger"
This is not a big issue for most people, bc they have a lot of external demands and responsibilities, like work and kids. I have more free time than most, and I've spent it on rest, thinking it would help me get my strength back. Instead, it got me stuck in the shrinking loop
In other words, my depression seems to have been caused or at least seriously exacerbated by a misleading metaphor
Save your strength if you want to lose it
It's certainly true on the scale of days and months, but at least sometimes, I find that activity can build felt energy capacity in a matter of minutes
This makes me think I could really use a morning ritual designed specifically to work like a kind of energetic on-ramp. The morning walk that was so popular around these parts on Twitter a few months ago might serve this purpose in addition to the circadian rhythm anchoring one
Without life or death necessity to spur us into action, we have to hold our feet to an artificial fire: a conceptual conjuring; a motivational imagination, believed deeply enough to affect us, but not so deep as to make us overzealous or possessed
Giving up produces reasons to give up. This is the mechanism by which depression can trap you
Hopelessness makes you withdraw and distract yourself with escapism, which over time drains your energy capacity and makes your life circumstances worse, giving you more reasons to feel hopeless
The way out is through optimism, hope and courage, but this gets harder and harder to find as you fall deeper into depression and your life falls apart around you. Still, as long as you live, there's an ember of hope left that you can breathe back into a fire
An amoeba-like moving and extending blob of dilute awareness, in physical space and abstract areas of interest, within which a more concentrated core of attentional focus can move. Using this visualization as a language to describe features and effects.
2. Building Gaia
Following the direction of biological transitions up levels of integration, from multicellularity via superorganisms to 'planetarity' as its conclusion. Humanity's role in taking this last leap toward a planetary level of consciousness and homeostatic concern
I really love beans btw. No idea why I never ate them before I had to after going vegetarian. I'm not a strict vegetarian any more, but I still eat ~90% plant-based, largely because I just love kidney beans
If you're worried about gas, in my experience that's only a problem when your microbiome isn't quite used to beans. I eat them every day and have no issue
I've tried to make a first rambling youtube video for a few days now. I keep doing dry runs where I come up with great ways to phrase things, which I forget when I hit record, making me all frustrated and brain freezy. Learnt my lesson: No more dry runs. We'll do it live!
The struggle has been constructive though! I'm trying to summarize my core beliefs in ~10 minutes, and this exercise in compression has been yielding some nice new broad strokes to my worldview canvas
Inflate your awareness from the inside of your body to the surface of your skin. Feel all of your skin at once.
Close your eyes and unfold skin space into a blanket.
Wrap the world in the blanket. Feel it breathing.
Awareness is a gargantuan, ethereal gelatinous cube, enveloping things to digest them (informationally).
Look out on a panoramic landscape. Expand awareness to envelop it. Seep into all the nooks and crannies like an enormous invisible Blob. Experience is a rich meal. Eat it up!