An imperfect child of God 🌟 attempting to become an empath🧎🏾 who cannot possibly ever communicate how GRATEFUL he is to our Creator for every moment of his existence! Philippians 4:8-9

I will spend $5000 in 2024 on fitness/health CONTENT

Maybe I should spend more. I will definitely invest much more in terms of my time … my TIME is what actually matters … and it’s also the limiting constraint, ie I can’t take in more than $5000 worth of content, especially since there’s such a huge amount of high quality content available for little or no money. The big constraint is TIME.

I have been MORE aggressively spending on health/fitness content since I retired, because I have deliberately CHOSEN TO have more time to invest doing things that actually matter, like thinking about my life.

My health/fitness sort of matters to my life … because of how how being at least mentally/emotionally healthy sorta drives my whole agenda for everthing … including the WORK that I still do in AI and deep learning, advanced mfg and technical continuous improvement, and knowledge engineering. My physical, mental and emotional health are sort of important, but not THAT important to me … I have some legit experience in being seriously probably-gonna-die-within-a-few-hours unhealthy … so I know why those things ESPECIALLY matter because of how they impact my spiritual health.

I am still alive even though I was told I would die of sepsis in early March 2007 … the sepsis was caused my an adverse reaction to prescribed painkillers, which was complicated by a prolonged power outage while I was sick which lead to me becoming severely dehydrated. So after I somehow miraculously recovered from my organs shutting down and decided to leave the ICU, I was told that it was more than likely that I would be rehospitalized within days or weeks and that rehospitalization sometime within 3-6 months was a near certainty. I was informed upon leaving the hospital that I should expect to deal with side-effects of my bout of sepsis for the rest of my life [which would be shortened without regular doctor visits and medical care].

Since I no longer ever get sick and generally feel better than I ever felt in my 40s, as long as my program keeps working out, I will keep spending on content and education for myself … and I will avoid wasting any money on healthcare insurance, regular visits to medical professional or any prescription pharma.

This whole enterprise is all about Joshua 1.9 … I am commanded to make myself stronger, more courageous, to be less afraid … of course, I look forward to dying … BUT I do actually worry a little bit about ever becoming worried about my health and healthcare.

I am not now sick … I have gotten significantly healthier over the last fifteen years, ever since retiring when I was 49 in 2009 … in late 2014 or early 2015, I could justifiably say that I was much healthier than five years 2009, but my health was not that perfect then. In 2014/2015, I still came down with pretty severe case of influenza – not something that would have kept me home from work, but it was one of those noticeable and lasting bouts with the flu that kinda threatened to get worse. But I got better and didn’t really ever get sick any more – so that by 2019 or 2020, I could say that I had gone five years without ever being sick … now, in 2024 I’m quite a bit healthier than I was five years ago in 2019. But I am still nowhere close to being as fit as I will need to be for the next 50 years [or however long it takes for me to die] … the POINT is that I really want to die quickly, as a healthy man dies, not after circling the drain for years … so I will need to work harder make myself stronger, more courageous, and less afraid.

I do not spend a dime on healthcare insurance or doctors visits. NOT ONE DIME.

That’s because I actually AM much stronger, more courageous, less afraid than the TYPICAL 64 year old … although I am far from being as fit as need to be. I just barely fit enough that I can realistically think about getting tougher … some do not have luxury of being able to contemplate an ascent from where they are, ie their health is as bad and precariously unhealthy as mine was fifteen years ago … since I know that this will not happen with out effort, I will spend $5000/year on fitness/health CONTENT in 2024 in order to improve the targeting of my efforts.

It is TYPICAL for others my age might spend north of $25,000 or $50,000 on health insurance, doctor’s appointments/treatments, prescription medicines … they might not think they spend that much; many do not realize the FULL cost of everything … but there are big hidden expenses of being a healthcare patient, such as the cost of the vehicle which is a healthcare NEED because it might be unnecessary for other things, people are convinced they NEED a decent vehicle to get reliably to and from the doctor’s office … but the REAL biggie of healthcare expense is cost of making room in schedules for appointments, including for the time that will be necessary commuting to visits and maybe stress-buying extra stuff at the store after/before the visit AND the multiplicative time-waste of extra stress as patients in waiting rooms are terrorized after listening to other patients like them who are scared shitless about their health and not being able to afford their healthcare insurance.

Stronger, more courageous, less afraid

HOPEFULLY, the value of my time in this exercise is worth a million times or 1000X or at least a few times more than what I spend on content, but if it isn’t, then I need to use every trick, every cheat, every advantage that I can buy to be better at planning … so that I can become stronger, more courageous, less afraid.

Maybe I should spend even more … I don’t know if I can actually put MORE to use, but I do know that my content spend is strictly for better, more informed planning … a more informed plan is all about more reliable EXECUTION, with more dependable results and less collateral damage or negative side-effects and less wasted time.

The point of content is NOT for relaxing, edification or any sort of entertainment value – it’s not just the ideas, but how the ideas translate into what ones DOES with the content … how does the content result in a better plan and better means more effectively implemented? Knowledge is completely USELESS, even dangerous or delusional if it does not DRIVE implementation of a BETTER PLAN.

This kind of content is not content design to soothe idiots and zombies, like Netflix or NFL or some form of news or movie channel which is about herding an audience toward an outcome. The point of this content is to advance the general plan of making me stronger, more courageous, less afraid … the content for this year is like any years plan that has been about investing in my WHY and increasingly targeting what kinds of things have worked best for me healthwise and financially.

Hopefully this explains why I will spend $5000 in 2024 on fitness/health CONTENT. I used to allocate more of annual spend to physical seminars, martial arts trainers and the cost of traveling to those things … sometimes, I would a spend little bit on gym or dojo memberships … but, NOW, I spend it primarily on virtual content, because … Automotive cultures fundamentally WEAKEN and IMPOVERISH.

Sharpening the axe

In order to be more efficient with my time, I have to sharpen the axe before I wonder off into the forest of content … sharpening the axe means that I look at content with the intention of developing something better.

THIS YEAR, I spent $2500/year on Peter Attia’s EarlyMedical program which entail three major areas: (1) RE-identifying my WHY; realigning my goals with that WHY, (2) more precisely and accurately understanding my health risks, and (3) using PA’s strategic framework to better re-formulate my lifestyle tactics to get stronger.

For right NOW, I just intend to use one year of PA’s program … I don’t see a reason to re-subscribe once I have been through the program … but I expect that next year, I will look around for similar programs. I may revisit the program after five years, but the point in consuming the content is to develop and implement something better FOR MY OWN NEEDS, ie I don’t expect that what I implement FOR MY OWN NEEDS will be better for others but it’ll be in this repository and they will be free to use it if they want …

I will also spend about $1500/year for a VARIETY of other content, predominantly martial arts/yoga training … things like Rickson Gracie’s Academy … Ryron / Rener Gracie University … but also other items like Dr. Joe Dispenza Unlimited Course or Dr William Davis’s Undoctored Inner Circle … and others. As an example of those others, I have found an absolutely a perfect FitnessCoach app … which I have taught myself to HARD IGNORE just to show anyone reading this that this content-driven self-programming happy horseshit of mine doesn’t all STICK in my brain.

My BIG reason for switching to VIRTUAL content is that I have had the lesson pounded into me DRIVING IS FOR RETARDS. In other words,it is NOT DRIVING that furnishs me with HUGELY beneficial impacts on health and fitness, especially on my mindfulness and general awareness of my level of FITNESS … because I have to carry my body weight.

NOT Driving is right up there with NOT DRINKING … I have not had any alcoholic beverages since 2020 – I should have started tapering my annual alcohol consumption off forty years before that and then quitting entirely by the time I was 23 or so. It took me a lot longer to understand how alcohol or even a beverage like coffee works as a regular ritual or SOCIALLY-ENCOURAGED habit, eg getting together with a friend for a few beers / coffee … I accepted the SOCIAL part of it, but I should have been much creative.

My main impetus for FINALLY quitting on alcohol was that I noticed many people IN THE ISOLATION OF THE PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN who I know were talking [on social media] about how much they tended to drink during the pandemic … AND THEY JUSTIFIED IT!!! In order to cope with the pandemic!!! … and the drinking alone part REALLY bugged me.

The thought of ever needing a drink to cope just flat out pisses me off … whining about the pandemic moving your cheese and now you need to use that disruption as an excuse to have another drink is the kind of DISGUSTING behavior that I do not EVER want to have anything to do with. Drinking for the sake of coping is ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC AND DISGUSTING to me.

I was not about to set myself up to fall into that trap – so I stopped EVER buying any kind of beverage with any alcohol content in July 2020 … and, my life got better … slowly, because I have not really drank all that much in a year, ie I tended to have a few beers with friends and sometimes overdo it in that manner – but generally, I have not really drank all that much for decades. But still, since alcohol is water-soluble and fat-soluble neurotoxin, it’s depressive effects PERSIST. It took about three years or so, but I finally can say that the neurotoxin is out of my system almost entirely and I don’t see the upside of putting even a taste of alcohol back into my brain.

The most affordable part of my content spend is the additional $1000 that I spend just READING … on Pubmed and the pre-print archives … but the pre-prints really require something like ConnectedPapers ($36/yr) … and I like to have CURRENT texts, so I throw a little bit of money at Perlego ($120/yr) and OCCASIONALLY, maybe two months/year, I will opt for a month of O’Reilly at $49/month … and I give Wikipedia some money every month … a maybe five hundred dollars or so worth of USED books/year. So, I READ a lot … but the text version of my content is just less than $1000/year.

{NOTE on old text and hard-copy books: I am more than well aware that electronic texts are conveninetly searchable, but I am OLD and I still enjoy relaxing by paging through an old texts, eg martial arts/yoga texts, med school texts on neuroscience, nutrition, gastrointestinal health, hepatology as well as the basics in biochem/biophys and MCAT exam guides to get familiar with keywords [to be able to ask Bard a decent question] … old texts are like the “comfort food” of content, because I still enjoy scribbling some notes and just doodling up things like protein molecules. I get it … but I am old and I’m not going to apologize for the fact that I still enjoy paging through old books … and being surround by stacks of books that I could have never afforded that many books back in the day when I hung out in bookstores or University libraries because owning books was way too expensive.}

The point of consuming content is to develop and implement A BETTER PLAN.

It’s all about what you DO with the content … knowledge is USELESS if it does not drive implementation of a BETTER PLAN.

My WHY is not going to be close to Peter Attia’s WHY … of course; I respect his WHY, EVEN MORE than $2500 worth of respect I spent on his content [and hopefully, some people get that joke … but I do need to emphasize it’s a joke] … but PA’s WHY is not that applicable to others … in my example, I do NOT especially want longevity; I DO want to live well and not need any care as long as I live – but I do really look forward to dying and whatever comes thereafter as much as I look forward to figuring out more things about this life and being in more control of my health.

Implementing a BETTER PLAN to hopefully never need any care is about using the consumption of content to program, re-program and re-re-program myself to be significantly more disciplined about my health and fitness … and mentally disciplined about strengthening that discipline.

There’s just no other way to attain the FREEDOM from worry that I need than the DISCIPLINE of improving DISCIPLINE of implementing a better plan. The content is a tool to help me push me to get there.