The Cyborg Complex (Fitness Related)

Coming around to this realization myself. I just dropped Twitter over the weekend. It’s one loud angry echo chamber after echo chamber.

Good example of why social media is a cancer.

Fitting that the person highlighted would be a flat earther.

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Fixed.

Social media has just made it easier for us to understand how many truly awful people live among us everyday. They go to the same places we eat, train in the same gyms, go to the same schools, watch the same movies, etc etc.

They just have enough sense when they’re out in public to keep quiet, but left to their own devices, these thoughts come out. And they can find pockets to radicalize with as well.

It’s more eye opening than anything else.

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That’s a good point.

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All the best kinds of people are…

I can’t even bring myself to do this online. Sometimes I’m really tempted to just go nuts on people when they really piss me off but some sort of internal self-filtering system kicks in and I start holding myself back. I seriously cannot imagine what kind of loser a person has to be to act like those guys.

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My governor is my own lack of motivation to engage. I see stupid stuff, I know it’s stupid, it frustrates me how stupid it is, but I know that if I try to point it out, I’ll then be tasked with having to explain to a stupid person how and WHY they are stupid.

Which, of course, they won’t understand, because they are too stupid to understand how they’re stupid. And according to their own stupidity, they are in fact quite smart and I am in fact the stupid one.

And as I’m trying to bridge their lacking education on the spot, I find myself making references that they don’t understand due to their stupidity, so then I have to explain my own references for the analogies to make sense and try to give them a full K-12 education within the span of an online argument, JUST for this ONE person to understand that they are stupid.

And then what did I gain from it?

This is why I am such a fan of the phrase “I feel we will have to agree to disagree”. I make liberal use of it.

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You explained it better than I have heard before. From a psychology standpoint, the stupidity cycle you described has been termed the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Basically, people of low ability/competence tend to grossly overestimate their ability while those of high competence understand how little they actually know.

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I don’t quote philosophy, because I don’t want to be a pretender, but when I do…

“Against stupidity, The Gods themselves contend in vain.”

(Isaac Asimov won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best scifi novel, The Gods Themselves, using that quote.)

p.s. also, “Sic transit gloria mundi.” (my “contribution” to the topic of this thread)

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And from Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

The more things “change”, the more they stay the same?

A leftist article, but some good points:

Technology has made it possible for everyone to see everything as an opportunity for productivity. You can measure your sleep, sex and steps with a Fitbit, your attractiveness with Tinder, your wittiness with Twitter, your popularity with Facebook. You can transform your personality into a dashboard of data streams that can be monitored, analyzed and optimized with the precision of an industrial process. You can turn your life into a factory – and not just metaphorically. In producing yourself, you produce economic value for others. The hours you spend on these platforms may be unwaged, but they generate real revenue for the companies that own them.

This is the genius of conspicuous production. It not only promotes a culture of overwork, it makes our dwindling amount of leisure time economically productive. There is no escape: either we’re working for the company or we’re working on ourselves, but we’re always working. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours of what we will” was the anthem of the workers who first demanded the eight-hour-day more than a century ago. Those distinctions don’t make sense any more. Even our sleep is factored into our productivity score – the entrepreneur of the self never gets to clock out.

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“Cook is approximately 500,000% richer than the average American – but he wakes up at 3.45 in the morning. This is the hallmark of conspicuous production: it justifies the existence of an imperial class by showcasing their superhuman levels of industry.”

Uh, no. He wakes up at 3:45 because he runs one of the largest companies on earth in a super competitive space, he needs to be on his game or he won’t be CEO anymore.

The tilt of this article is annoying (you warned me). I don’t want to hear the guy that works 20 hours complain about his lack of means. Nor do I want to hear the guy that works 120 hours complain about lack of family time or exhaustion. Everybody has to make their choices.

The use of phrases like “imperial class” are straight out of Das Kapital. Like Tim Cook is some sort of blue blood that makes big money because of who his parents were, not because he runs the second biggest cash cow on earth.

To the point of this thread, shouldn’t we celebrate that some people are willing to work really hard so we can all benefit? I don’t think CEOs bragging about hard work is the societal ill they’re making ot out to be. Unless it hurts some guy’s feels to know someone out there is “better” than him. I’ve accepted that I’m not special lol.

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You’re slightly missing the point here - the author of the article besides many total misses is making a good point that Cook and his fellow CEOs are promoting the culture of ludicrous overwork (Elon Musk cough cough) as a status symbol, implying causality. If you wake up at 3:45 you’ll be successful. Not necessarily, as can be attested by all those taxi drivers in third world countries that do wake up at those times.

CEOs do not have to wake at 3:45am. Sure, they have to dedicate most of their waking hours to their work aka obsession but 3:45 is pretentious bullshit. Marissa Meyer ran Yahoo into the ground with her scheduled bathroom trips and all nighters.

Also, those people @BrickHead is referring to the original post are extremely tiresome. I’ve had the misfortune to spent some time with two such individuals (admittedly they were wildly successful) but holy crap I wanted to beat them over the head with a shovel.

They’re obsessively optimizing every waking second - if they’re not doing something “productive” they’re losing. So every annoying conversation is either an opportunity to “learn” or to “forge new business opportunities” or “network”. It feels like their life is one big checklist someone gave to them that they’re mindlessly ticking off.

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damn, that cuts deep. Mainly, cause this is how I currently manage my work life. But, I promise no one would ever know!

When I’m home (2-3 days a week), not working, I’m a lazy bastard. The rest of the week, I start early and end late.

Again, social media, my co-workers, Family, etc. wouldn’t know because I talk about it. I do it so I can build a certain level of freedom. I also love what I do.

You beat me to saying this. And as I said before, they’re “always on”, and I don’t think this is anything to be envied or liked. A friend of mine and I were speaking in our cars on the way home from work about such people, especially those on the net showcasing their lives, and promoting their “consulting” services. We both agreed that their sort of behavior strikes us as pathological and possibly sociopathic. I mean, can we cut the crap here! When such caricatures–and yes, some come across as cartoonish–talk about maximizing their lives, as in the case show above, they’re simply talking about monetary gain, nothing else! All that talk about maximizing every component strikes me as phony. Everything is agenda-based with the main agenda being making money. That is what strikes me as crass, not the practice of making large sums of money in itself. Well, they care about money, image too. Ever been around one of these types of men in a room full of people?

As lopper states, such men do everything on an agenda-driven basis and it says it all over their face, in their affect, and in their tone. The goon Grant Cardone was once shown wearing a sweatshirt in a picture on IG and FB with the word’s “F— Middle Class”. Now, I get what the shirt meant. It did not mean f— the middle class, but rather f— being middle class.

As I said before, if a man can utilize his talent and ability and grow rich, that’s great, especially if he is providing opportunities for others in the process, which is usually how it works in our system. And as said several times, of the men I know personally, the affluent ones are good guys. Plus I have deep admiration for many of the entrepreneurs and industrialists both present and past.

But what I don’t like is goofuses wearing sweatshirts saying F— Middle Class and pushing such notions onto people who will try to implement his teachings and never attain yacht money anyway! And it’s done as if the middle class people are a bunch of suckers, while at the same time providing the infrastructure that a goon like Grant Cardone can flourish in!

Anyway, there is still plenty of money flowing through America, and millions of McJobs. So solely money-driven people, and this goes for poor people who are coming here, see America as a “shining star on a hill”, or whatever the term is. Yet America is a degenerating country in the decadence phase that all empires go through. If America was in a healthy state, and not suffering so many societal and mental and moral pathologies, we wouldn’t see so many confused, self-deprecating men of ordinary ability and temperament flocking to gurus and charmers of all sorts to get a “more assertive personality” and attain some sort of jet-set lifestyle. This is where the likes of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and many of his guests, especially Dan Bilzerian and those like him, Anthony Robbins, Ben Shapiro, the various PUA’s, manosphere personalities, and Brian Tracy, and the like, come into the scene. Granted some of what has been said by them is alright, but in healthier times many of them would have to get that J-O-B.

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Totally different than the cyborgs discussed.

Wasn’t this guy recently sleeping at the factory? He told a reporter he is doing so because no one fits the bill to properly take over some of his hours. Because no one else around isn’t highly talented, intelligent, and hard driven, I suppose. (Yawn!)

I just wanted to add that it would be reasonable to manage a high-stress job like this. What is unreasonable is acting like this in the company of people outside of work!

Along the same vein- I’ve been helping out at some friends of mines business. It’s fishing related, so when we head out on Saturday morning we’re really working our asses off.

It’s tough. There’s no getting away from it.

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