Alf

"I feel like this guy is making an identity of masculinity and trying to protect his "masculinity"." I think this is spot on. I understand and don't even disagree with some of the foundation of his argument, which I already saw elsewhere (it's hard to avoid), but this dude is just playing the identity game. He seems to desperately need to attach himself to a group identity and feel reassured in his own belief by decrying anyone else who doesn't strictly conform to his beliefs as being in the out-group, in this case 'unmanly'. It's like going around shouting 'Communist' at people who aren't even remotely communist just because they deviate a little bit from your beliefs. It's just an attempt to avoid critical thinking by attaching a target to a previously defined negative category, regardless of the truth of the accusation. Always be wary of black and white thinking.

Well, for starters, there's not a single thought in that video that is his. Why bother creating a video which is just a copy of youtube trends? You might just as well make a 15 second one saying 'I liked this video, go check it out', rather than regurgitating the same stuff you saw elsewhere. Second, men in general aren't stoic and never were. If that were the case, there would have never existed any need for a philosophy and tradition of Stoicism. The typical man is overly emotional and irrational, and this isn't a new development either. Third, he speaks of 'the grandfathers' in a very irrational and romanticised manner. Fuck buddies? Fatherless boys? He ascribes these behaviours to modernity clearly with no clue of the utter debauchery of previous centuries. One needs not go further than Victorian Britain for as many Oliver Twists as you are capable of counting. He speaks of abortion shortly after speaking of 'Stoics' and showing an image of a Greek warrior, showing he didn't even bother to check on the attitudes towards abortion of the ancient western cultures, which was mostly 'meh..'. Fourth, this is just pure dichotomisation, which is a strategy weak minded people often employ. Essentially you create two categories, then you put your own behaviour into the category of positives and anything you do not approve of in the negative category. Then make sure you oversimplify everything as much as you can and define the entire world as revolving around those two categories. Here is a scene from Donnie Darko as an example: ----- Overall, way too much whinging and victimisation for my taste. I wouldn't trust a man who decries such behaviour but then proceeds to make entire videos behaving like a victim.

Ah! No, the workout bit is only about 1 to 1.5 hours :P. The rest is mostly warm up and cool down at the start and end. I won't be sharing the creative writing bits. The report is only on whether I achieved what I proposed myself to do, or to what extent there were negative or positive deviations from the plan. I'll grade my general performance from 1 to 5, and upload a picture of the tracker for each of the indicators. It's less than 100kb, so it will take ages before it reaches the 48mb limit. Edit: The '1' in creative output doesn't mean my skill is at '1'. How good or bad I am is irrelevant. Those numbers represent only whether I have been dedicating time to them or not. I have a '1' in creative output because I haven't done anything in that department in over 2 weeks

SATURDAY, 30TH MARCH Plan: Morning (8 to 12): Wake up at 8.00 (Dis.) Full Breakfast (Dis.) At the Library (by 10.00) (Dis.) Watch Lectures (10.00 to 12.00) (Knw.) Afternoon (12 to 18): Lower Body workout (12.00 - 14.00) (Fit.) Write Essay (15.00 - 17.00) (Knw.) Read Bjornstad and Korean Duolingo Lesson (17.00 - 18.00) (Skill) Evening (18 to 24): Creative Writing (30 min) (Cre.) Read Inventing the Individual (30 min) (Knw.) Dinner / Watch I, Tonya (20.00 - 22.00) (Cul.) Update Trackers, Report & Plan Day (Dis.) Read Pillars of the Earth (23.00 - 00.00) (Cul.) Indicators Ignored: Social Expected Performance: 3 out of 5 ========== Report: Notes:

29TH MARCH Plan: Morning (8 to 12): Wake up at 8.00 (Dis.) Full Breakfast (Dis.) Haircut (by 11.00) (Care P.) Afternoon (12 to 18): Upper Body workout (12.00 - 14.00) (Fit.) Watch Lectures (15.00 - 17.00) (Knw.) Evening (18 to 24): Read Bjornstad (30 min) (Skill) Korean Duolingo (30 min) (Skill) Dinner & Movie (?) (20.00 - 22.00) (Cul.) Clean Room before Bed (Dis.) Update Trackers, Report & Plan Day (Dis.) Read Pillars of the Earth (23.00 - 00.00) (Cul.) Indicators Ignored: Critical Output, Creative Output, Social Expected Performance: 3 out of 5 ========== Report: Had trouble falling asleep and ended up waking up at 9.00 rather than sacrificing performance at the gym. I'll have a day off from the gym in two days so I'll just wake up earlier then. I'll wake up tomorrow at 8.30 instead of 8.00 as planned to cut a manageable amount of sleep without negatively impacting performance during the day. I did not get a haircut, that will have to be delayed until the 31st but I did get some study time prior to the gym instead, which is of higher priority anyway. The workout was average, probably due to not getting as much sleep as I should and not eating enough calories the night before and in the morning. Have already reached my caloric target for today. I studied about 45 min of Swedish and 1 hour of Korean, but will not be watching any quality films today. Trackers have already been updated. Will now play Football Manager until 22.00. Did not waste any time online today, other than about 15 min in this forum. Only thing left to do tonight is clean my room and do some light reading. Both are well established routines and I do not expect any resistance. Tomorrow has already been planned. PERFORMANCE: 2 out of 5. In honesty I did alright, but I feel it was just a tad short of a 3, so I'd rather round down. I don't do decimals :P.

Good day. This is a daily report. There's no end goal. Approach and Personality: I'm not goal driven, and over-rationalising my life has in the past led to undesired effects such as depression and demotivation. Rather than using habits as a tool towards achieving ultimate goals, I've found the most success when focusing on habits as an end in themselves while rationalising goals only when they require it due to their complexity. Realising that the question 'why?' was about the most soul crushing action I could unleash upon myself was quite liberating. I have since decided to follow my intuition instead. 'Why do I exercise? ' , I'd ask. A cascade of reasons would follow and soon the realisation that I didn't actually care about any of them. And how could I remain motivated towards results which deep down I didn't care about? At a bookshop I find a laymen's book on astrophysics with a nice cover. I want to pick it up and read it. But wait, I must give it justification. How will this improve my chances of achieving my ultimate goals? Time is short, I must be ruthless managing it: 'It will...' and 'I'll be able to...' and this and that. Oh, never mind. Put it back where you found it. I'm bored just thinking it through. Man I really just want to give it a read, too bad that's just not quite smart enough. Sigh... no! I exercise because I must. Because it is the morally right thing to do. Because others my age can't due to one illness or another. Because soon I won't be able either. I went back and picked that book up because I wanted to. Because curiosity and wonder require no justification. 'But that is not precise enough. What is it that you want to achieve and by what date?' I want to be the man I must be, and that I can only achieve today. 'That is vague' , Yes. 'What are your dreams and how will this help you achieve them?' , I don't have any and I don't care. ============= Tracker: The indicators I use. They are cumulative. Poor performance will reduce the value by some points, while good performance will increase them. Anything below 2.5 needs to be looked into. A value of 3 is pretty good. (Going from 3 to 4 is really slow, whereas going from 1 to 2 can be achieved in one day.) The value next to each indicator represents how dedicated I have been to that part of my life. It is not a rating of the quality of the performance. (E.g. the value next to Knowledge doesn't mean how knowledgeable I am, just how dedicated I have been in acquiring new knowledge.) ========== Daily Performance: Besides changes in each indicator, I'll grade my overall daily performance as follows, 1 - Atrocious. Got out of bed, did a few things. Mostly unfocused and undisciplined. 2 - Insufficient. It simply wasn't good enough. 3 - Solid. What we're aiming at. Be like this every day and you're good. 4 - Outperform. Push yourself past your usual limits. 5 - Obsessive Workaholic. Be like this every day and you'll be death soon. Optimally we'd get loads of 3s with some 4s and the occasional 5. The numbers aren't static and are instead dependent on the perceived difficulty of my tasks. By pushing myself some activities become easier and routinised, so a performance of 4 at one point might be equivalent to a 3 in the future. This is a good thing. Equally, a period of depression would make it easier to achieve a 3. So the grading is always dependent on how difficult my brain perceives those tasks to be. E.g. Exercising for me is at the moment very easy. If all I do on a given day is get out of bed, eat, and go to the gym, I'll only achieve a 1. However, if I had just returned from holiday, then doing this might be enough to achieve a 2, since restarting a training routine after stopping for a couple of weeks is difficult. And if I were going through depression, as I have in the past, then this might be enough for a 3, since walking all the way to the gym would be extremely demanding (more even than exercising itself). ========== THURSDAY, 28TH MARCH First entry, and I didn't plan ahead for it, so I'll keep it short. It was my off day, which is generally a day when I just chill. It is still important to avoid negative influences on such days, such as dwelling on youtube or using social media. Of the latter I haven't had any problems with for months, ever since I deleted my facebook account, but youtube can be trickier and it's easy to fall down that rabbit hole if one isn't alert. In any case I had no issues today. As expected it wasn't a very productive day, and I dedicated it mostly to fiction reading, some non-fiction which isn't part of my coursework, learning Swedish, cleaning and setting up this thread. Positives: I wasn't planning on exercising today, yet the thought hit me at around 20.00 to go for a run. Immediately I absolutely dreaded the idea. Going out in the cold without even preparing myself mentally, on a day I wasn't supposed to exercise. But the more I resisted it the more resolute I became. That feeling of not being in control is even more uncomfortable than the cold outside, and so I went for the sake of reasserting it. +0.2 Discipline, +0.2 Cardio. Furthermore I really did not want to cook dinner today, so I did it anyway. +0.2 Discipline. Negatives: I struggled to achieve my caloric intake and fell short by about 200Kcal. -0.2 Discipline. PERFORMANCE: 2 out of 5. Despite being my day off, I feel I slacked a bit and could nevertheless have applied my time a bit better.