What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger

The new mantra of people who feel something is off about the world – and humans:

Who are those people who want to prolong life by dieting, not drinking, taking exercise and other hardships? I have never understood them.

The years we gain, as we creak towards our 100th birthday, are hardly the years we want. If only life could be frozen in time at, say, 25, before baldness, cataracts, ex-wives, mortgages and false teeth appear on the horizon to spoil the fun — then you’d be talking.

Instead we find these stringy and bad-tempered characters in late-middle-age who go in for long solitary bike rides, competitive squash and, if you are Scott Carney, invigorating runs up Kilimanjaro wearing nothing but a bathing cap.

Having learned how to defy altitude sickness and convulsions by adopting the breathing techniques taught by a Dutch guru called Wim Hof, Carney ascended the 19,341 ft mountain in 28 hours. Most ordinary people take a week. I stay at home and look at the photographs.

Carney’s beef is that modern life has made us sluggish. We are ‘fat, lazy, and increasingly in ill health’. We go from the house to the office and never breathe in fresh air. ‘The humans of this millennium are overstuffed, overheated and understimulated.’

Where our Neanderthal ancestors had predators to outwit, famine to endure and ‘species-ending cataclysms to evade’, we have air-conditioning, abundant food, warm clothes, soap and hot showers.

Instead of being grateful for civilisation, Carney is indignant. Having ironed out the environmental stresses and strains of the caveman, we have let our nervous systems grow lazy. Carney thinks that if only we could become cold, wet and hungry, turn our backs on skyscrapers, plastics and cosy beds and ‘crack into our inner biology’, we’d be more fulfilled.

Everything from rheumatoid arthritis, mental illness, Parkinson’s and asthma is apparently the result of this big breach between the primordial creatures we once were (and deep down allegedly still are) and the namby-pamby articles we have become: ‘Even though our nervous systems crave connection to the world they evolved in, the tendency in the modern era is to think of humanity as fundamentally different than anything else.’

If everything started to go wrong when cavemen harnessed fire to do the cooking, used stone tools and wore fur skins, by the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century ‘our technological prowess became so powerful’ it broke the last links with our fundamental origins. Electric light, indoor plumbing, motor cars, and so forth — in Carney’s view, ‘the things we have made to keep us comfortable are making us weak’.

So let’s start suffering again! To ‘recreate the sorts of harsh experiences our ancestors would have faced’, Carney fell in with Wim Hof, who believes a person can be trained ‘to tap into unconscious processes and control their autonomic nervous system’ by meditation and stripping off in the woods.

There are a lot of ways to turn on the amygdala – pain, fear, rage, confusion, frustration, the unknown, loss, death, and on and on.

Our brain evolved to deal with all of them on a regular basis, and to be developed by them. When you take them away, your brain fails to develop fully, and you lose a piece of the machine that connects you to the world. As a result, I will bet some of the richness of the world is lost to you, like a colorblind person who sees in black and white, but doesn’t know they are missing anything because they never saw in color, and can’t even imagine it. Here is another article on the same guy:

Carney has kept up his regime. “I had a cold shower this morning, did my 70 push-ups and 15 minutes of breathing exercise with my wife” (who is also a convert). But it is the understanding of the connection between his health and his environment that has changed his life. “I am much more comfortable with being uncomfortable now,” he says. The understanding of extremes provides, he believes, a sense of “physical perspective”. He feels not only healthier, but part of the natural scheme of things. While our fight or flight responses are as likely to be triggered these days by worrying about the mortgage or getting outraged by the internet, he says, contact with the elements reminds us both of our frailty and our strength…

It is celebrating what our bodies can do. You don’t have to do it all day every day. You can wear a coat sometimes if you want. I am not suggesting you become a cavemen and ditch the internet and forget modern medicine. It is about balance,” he pauses. “But I guess it certainly shows there can be a joy in pain.”

They key to using amygdala and hacking your brain is analyzing yourself and your amygdala responses, to learn what amygdala feels like. Once you learn what it feels like, make a point to stop when you feel it, focus on the feeling, and embrace it by telling yourself that it is the feeling of your amygdala getting stronger. View it like the burn of a muscle reaching failure at the end of a weightlifting set. No matter how bad the circumstances creating the amygdala, reinforce in your brain the knowledge that your brain is getting stronger, and better adapted, and this will make your life better in the long run.

That is, in part what this guy is doing. Wim Hof figured out a way to adapt the body to function better. But the method requires enduring pain. Still, as this guy saw his embrace of the pain yield physical improvements, he learned to embrace the pain and welcome it, rather than run from it.

The worst thing you can do when you feel amygdala – from any cause, is to wish it would stop and go away. Never cement its strength by allowing yourself to fear it, or hate its feeling. The moment you make that jump, the amygdala controls you. You either have to be forced to accept the amygdala as you try to resolve it, as everyone will be in the Apocalypse, or you have to train yourself to embrace it now.

Since the body is integrated with the brain, I will bet a lot of illnesses these days, from allergies, to autoimmune diseases, to even some cancers will diminish radically once the Apocalypse begins. At the same time, I’ll bet the world will become more pleasurable and a richer experience, as we come to feel more immersed in it’s beauty, and begin to enjoy our moments without stress and pain all the more.

Don’t fear the Apocalypse. When it comes, embrace all of it.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because leftists need the amygdala-stimulation