I listened to a good chunk of music this year. Heres a quick little blurb about the albums, what I rated them, and what genre they are, alongside a couple of songs I liked from each one. This is limited to albums released this year, but in my life I did a lot of listening to older albums too, which made me take breaks in listening to new albums here and there.

My rating scale more or less looks like this:

0 – really bad: Approximately no redeeming qualities. 1 – not good: Overall an album I did not like. 2 – neutral: Completely fine, more or less inoffensive for the entire listen. Background music tier. 3 – has some songs I like: Most of the album is bad to inoffensive, but there are some great songs in there too. 4 – has a good chunk of songs I like: A solid amount of this music is stuff I like, there might be a couple of bad songs and more inoffensive songs, but at this point I would start saying the album was good. 5 – I like most of it: Broadly speaking this is where we get into albums that are full of great songs. It has its flaws for me, but there's a lot of good here. 6 – I like just about all of it: Just about every single song on here is great, though maybe there's some thematic inconsistencies, parts that are outdone by other parts, or something like that. This can also often mean this is as good as an album can be for what it is. A generic sounding trap album without much in terms of deeper themes can land here if every song is just great, despite the album lacking that something more to elevate it. 7 – I really like all of it: just a fantastic album from start to back. 8 – Everything here is compelling: Creative, exciting, interesting, complex, compelling. The best of the best, the type of shit I'd put on a satellite to send our best to the aliens.

SOTY: Song of the year, but really just a marker for some of the absolute best songs I listened to this year

Naturally it's my opinion, and my mood at the time of listening almost certainly has some impact. If something scores higher I'm more likely to know more about the album as I've likely listened to it more. Not only because I enjoy it more, thus making me more likely to listen to it, but also, I care to rate it more accurately when it's an album I respect. An album I don't respect isn't getting much listening time, and an album think has mostly bad songs I can just chuck in one of the two bad categories based on just how terrible it seemed in the moment. This didn't happen much last year, and no albums got a 0.

Note: One thing that absolutely kills me is when guys hate on female rappers by default, and its everywhere. The amount of guys I know that just happen to have every least favourite song on every album be one where a woman has a feature and hates on the woman in question without actually listening to any albums drives me insane. I have included a tag for Women in hip hop, which is the type of thing I usually wouldn't do, letting my reviews stand for themselves, but knowing the sheer amount of misogyny in rap and rap fans, I figure it's good to throw something out there. That being said, it has been a very interesting time for women in hip hop, because it seems like women make up the vast majority of new rap stars these days. The 2010s era has left a ton of men as the biggest selling acts, but since then, very few men have been able to come up in the same way. In their place, there are many women getting a ton of play. It's something I've been keeping an eye on as I broadly see the zeitgeist moving from rap to country. Also, more discourse these days seems to shut down men who don't like the female rappers pretty quickly. Maybe it's the world changing, or maybe it's just young fans of hip hop growing up. I sure as hell don't know, but I'm glad to finally see it.

Also note: I didn't proofread this at all.

My Story Got Stories – Bruiser Wolf: 4 (with love)

Old School hip hop / Rap

I first heard of Bruiser Wold through YBP from Danny Brown's album Quaranta. Bruiser completely captured my attention with his very specific modern yet somehow very old school hip hop flow, with one of my favourite lines “It's hard to fit in to the murder mitten like OJ's glove”. I heard his album was releasing soon, and put it in my calendar to check out as soon as possible. This album was a ton of fun, and even had me laughing out loud more than a couple times. Bruiser Wolf raps with so much energy, his delivery is constantly exciting, and the amount of quips and jokes through this album made it an absolute blast to listen to. I went to see a performance live, and it elevated the experience with how good a performer he is. He falls into my favourite category of rap these days which is old rappers who decided to have fun or do something interesting with their experience instead of falling off and getting angry.

Dope Boy

2 Bad

Silence is Loud – NIA Archives: 5

Jungle / Drum & Bass

This is another one I was really excited for. I found NIA Archive after looking for new jungle music visiting the hospital one day, and holy there's a lot of good music in here despite her being such a young artist. The music is fun, interesting, fast paced yet smooth, and really puts me in a good place. I also went to see this concert live and it was my first experience with dancing in maybe 10 years, which was fun. I loved this album and listened to it a ton, and it's still a go-to if I get the aux and want to play music no-one will recognize.

Cards On The Table SOTY

Forbidden Feelingz SOTY

American Dream – 21 Savage: 3

Trap / Rap

21 Savage is back with another album after Her Loss which was a collab album with drake. 21 has fallen into what I generally have as the peak of hip hop sales, blowing up in the mid 2010s and having major commercial success. It seems that the rappers around this time, including Drake, Future, Kendrick, Cole, Young Thug, Gunna, and Carti are the main hip hop artists who seem to be able to drive sales no matter what they do. Unfortunately for many of these artists, that has led to just doing the same thing with the same sound, just rehashing some slang and switching things up just enough to be different. 21 was interesting because despite being probably one of the most boring rappers, he kept evolving and switching up the scope and sound of his production just enough to keep him actually as one of the most interesting prospects. Unfortunately, I consider this album to be one of his 2 mis-steps into just doing something extremely basic for an album. It isn't bad, but most of it is just fairly background spare a few real highlights.

Redrum

Blue Lips – ScHoolboy Q: 5

Grimy / Rap

Schoolboy Q was a major name when Kendrick was blowing up alongside everyone in their label, Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE). He had some absolutely incredible, creative, and grimy music that I would comfortably say belongs in a list of all time classics. He decided to make a change and do some more personal music, but unfortunately ended up making an album in 2019 called Crash Talk that was very bland, and despite a few highlights, I thought fell completely flat, after which he disappeared for a long time. This album is an incredible return to form, where while it may not reach the all time music highs of Blank Face or Oxymoron, blends more creative music sounds, more grimy beats and flows, yet still retains more of the personal reality that I think he was trying to go for in Crash Talk.

Blueslides

Back n Love

Everybody Can't Go – Benny The Butcher: 3

Griselda / Rap

Benny The Butcher of Griselda was generally seen as the best and most hype more mainstream sounding of the group. It seems that with this album, there was a bigger rollout, different features from usual, and a big push to make it a more commercial breakout record. It was a solid enough album, but the lead single pushed the most was also one of my least enjoyed from the album and constantly shoved into my recommendations, which didn't help. That being said, it still had some solid highlights and Benny, while releasing something not as great as previous collab albums like, he still put out something solid enough.

Jermanie's Graduation

Big Dog

No Quarter – Vino La Mano: 4

Griselda / Rap

This is a guy signed to Benny The Butcher's label who Benny has helped platform. While the album doesn't vary too much in sound or fully distinguish itself sonically, it is just really good and consistently so.

238 on Cal

All My Heart

We Don't Trust You – Future, Metro Boomin: 3

Trap / Rap

This album is a collab album between Future and Metro Boomin, which broadly means that it will sound good in the club, but generally not be for those searching for depth. The most notable part of this album for me was kicking off the Kendrick v Drake been with 'Like That', even if I think Kendrick doesn't even sound that great on it. The album doesn't really do that much to stand out, though Future and Metro being club hits guys were bound to make big club hits. Special shoutout to them both looking uncomfortable as hell posing on the album cover.

Type Shit

Like That

We Still Don't Trust You – Future, Metro Boomon: 3

Trap / Rap

Back to back huh, I have to listen to another pile of mainstream trap rap. Same things apply, it's all fine, but rarely stands out enough to really engage me. I did like this one more on release, but on re-listens it ended up coming around to about the same. Music I can put on in the background and the bass will sound good enough.

SFK – Conway The Machine: 2

Griselda / Rap

Oh Conway. This guy has easily the best and most intense raps of anyone on Griselda, but this one just didn't land at all for me. It seems that without doing collab albums with proficient producers, he really tends to underdo his beats. It is probably intended to give his lyrics more space, but I think he's better when he just has something that sounds better. It seems as he shifted away from straight rapping towards trying to make a label, his artists haven't thrived and neither has he. I'm hoping his next albums he can capture more of that lyrical charm he has had up to this point, because I felt like while this wasnt really bad, hearing one of the best rappers drop an album of bars that didn't land with beats that didn't stand out is tough.

Ninja Man

Please Don’t Cry – Rapsody: 5

Women in hip hop / Rap

Rapsody seems to carve herself out of this space, being a respected rapper's rapper, but at the same time, it does seem to carve her out of the mainstream. Laylas Wisdom had some immaculate highs, Eve was a good followup focused on female inspirations. This one turns to a more personal attempt, with the overarching story line of a therapy session, which seems to be becoming a common trend, but Rapsody is able to really navigate it with incredible rapping and personal storytelling. I know some people were not very into some of the more commercial angled hits, but I think they're fine, and it makes sense given her position in the industry.

Marlanna

Faith

RICHAXXHATIAN – Mach-Hommy: 8

AOTY / Rap

Well holy shit is this ever a step up. I have never heard beats like this before. I have never hear rapping like this before, and I've listened to like 6 Mach-Hommy albums. He was already an artist I loved, and I would chuck this into one of the greatest albums of all time territory. The lyrical chops in this are insane, and you have to pay attention because there are no published lyrics anywhere. I still find new things in this album and I've been listening to it since it came out. The production is also so different from just about anything out there, really taking on its own creative space blending styles of a few of my favourite producers to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. It is a hard listen because spare one song, it really isn't commercially viable at all, but god is it so worth it to get into. Watching some people talk about this has even changed much of my life philosophy, learning about Edouard Glissant and the right to opacity, saying that other cultures don't need to be understood or measured by colonial nations who will measure them in colonial ways and harm them (here I am giving it a rating), and similarly, you may wish for certain things not to be perceived, or only be perceived on your terms. Mach obscured his lyrics and identity, and I find it to be something that I respect and absolutely love about him. This album still gets frequent front to back listens from me, and I still love every single song.

#RICHAXXHATIAN SOTY

SUR LE PONT d'AVIGNON SOTY

Note: Almost every song on here I could probably put somewhere around SOTY

Marciology – Roc Marciano: 7

Coke Rap

Roc Marciano is an artist I truly respect for having his own style of rapping and his own style of production, and rapping over his own production. The benefit of this is it creates an incredibly distinct sound and style, but the downside is that it can get kind of same-y sometimes. When that happens, it really is just up to the straight quality to shine. This is probably the best work he has put out, and the quality really does shine. When I listened to this I really felt like I might be seeing an artist I already love hit their peak, and I hope he can maintain this or evolve in the future. I even bought a ticket off of Nana to go see it, but after some confusion and me accidentally seeming like I was trying to scam him, we decided to do something else instead.

Gold Crossbow

Killin Spree

Samurai – Lupe Fiasco: 6

Lyrical Rap

Lupe these days has been in the game for quite a while, and while not and old old head through his keeping it fresh, he's hit a definite older rap unc status. He has taken probably the best path from being a superstar to creating some insane creative highs, and now a lot of his rap is a lyrical exercise, all stages interesting. He is really aging gracefully and thriving in a lane that he defines for himself. This album is inspired by Amy Winehouse, and much of the lyrics draw symmetries between his life and career and Amy's, or Amy becoming a battle rapper. It really is creative, fun, and done delicately so to not be insensitive to the legacy of Amy Winehouse as many others could have easily done if attempting to do the same. It is a pretty easy listen, can be very engaging if you focus on the lyrics, and all around pleasure to listen to.

Samurai

Cake

Why Lawd? – Nx Worries: 5

RNB / Hip Hop

This is a collab between PAAK and Knxwledge, PAAK being huge and Knxwledge being a respected yet not massive producer who has an undeniable finesse to the samples and sound he uses. My expectations for this was a very nicely sampled sexy album, and that is what I got. Despite the amazing samples and undeniable synergy between the duo, I can't help but feel like it either needed to be just a bit shorter or a bit more sonically varied to keep it more interesting over the entire run time in the album. The songs are great, but there were times where I barely noticed that songs had changed, not in a creative transition way, but in a too many songs sounding too close kind of way.

MoveOn

Battlefield

King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2 – Denzel Curry: 6

Southern Rap / Memphis Rap

Denzel Curry has really made a name for himself in being hard hitting, creative, and incredibly consistent. I remember after our house flooded, finally getting the sound system set back up, seeing this release, and getting instantly hit with banger after banger for all the work I'd completed. It was a great reward. Despite being an album of hard hitting bangers in a very mixtape-y way, there was definitely a charm and creativity that went into every one, with enough variation in samples and musicality to really distinguish the songs. Another great album in the long list of great albums from Denzel, and I'm excited to see where he goes next.

ULTRA SHXT

HOT ONE

Songs For Saints and Sinners – Killer Mike: 4

Southern Rap

Killer Mike returns after my last billion word music themed article where I did a whole background on my listening to music bringing me up to him dropping landlord bars. This seems like it's just a re-up, adding more to some of the songs on his last album, and having some new tracks. I've warmed up again to Mike after the landlord bars because the music was great and I'm a life enjoyer, but I'm still suspicious. Not bad, but it doesn't really have great legs as a standalone project. The highs are, still, insanely high in terms of flow, lyrics, and production.

Nobody Knows

SLUMMER 4 JUNKIES

Johann Sebastian Bachlava The Doctor – Action Bronson: 5

Goofy Ah White Boy / Rap

Action Bronson is always a funny character, and he seems to return to an old form for this album, with tracks that sound much closer to a fan favourite Mr Wonderful than his recent string of animal themed projects, one of which I loved, but one of which I thought just had some very high highlights. This is much more consistent with some incredible highs. Though he does seem to reuse some lyrics across songs, he is still incredibly charismatic, funny, and the production is just fantastic.

SALVAJE

DOCTOR SOTY

Across The Tracks – Boldy James, Conductor Williams: 6

Coke Rap

Boldy James is absolutely one of my favourites, dropping album after album I love for years at a rate unlike anyone else I know. Sure, the topics are always almost exactly the same. Sure, Boldy manages to never manage to hit more than a single note with his extremely detached sounding voice. Somehow, he still manages to come through with such creative stories and wordplay, doing collab albums with some of the best producers in the game to deliver a project that is way ahead of most, in my opinion. He still puts his son on for a mediocre verse though.

Terms and Conditions

St Juliana SOTY

The Death of Slim Shady – Eminem: 1

Rap, Old Coot, Fell off, edgy 50 year old

Eminem needs to figure his life out or just shut up already. In one interview he said all he does is sit and watch the news. We can tell. Go outside. I love old rappers who have something to say and appreciate the world around them and spit their wisdom and experience, yet this fucker who used to be so good is easily one of the worst rappers in the game right now. The beats are a bit better but fuck man it's not enough. Just listen to the JID verse that opens this song and turn it off when JID is done. Opening a song with “Fuck blind people” was kind of funny though.

FUEL

Antichrist Worst song of the year contender, and I will drop the lyrics of the first verse in a code block just to drive it home

Oh, shit, fuck  
Fuckin' PC police  
Fuck

Gen Z, here they come now (now), 'bout to unload rounds (brrt)  
Pronouns (shit), got me like, "Whoa now" (whoa)  
Homie, let's slow down (chill), no need to get so wound (man)  
Ready to throw down (yo), if I mispronounce (thee, them)  
Whoops (sorry), oh wow  
Got heterosexuals crammin' 'em down our throats now (he, she, they, them)  
Like I'm gettin' snow-plowed, my humor's too low-brow (yup)  
Yeah, so there's no doubt (nope), you 'bout to get grossed out (ugh)

But fuck it though, somebody needs to come and hit the reset button  
Back to 2003 'cause how did we get stuck in  
This woke BS? I'm tryna make it regress, fuck 'em

Just RE'd Up 3 – YG: 2

West Coast / 2000s

YG returns to his roots after a string of albums not getting the critical acclaim he once had. It sounds fairly well like his earlier mixtapes, but that style is kind of dated, and it is clear that his lyrical content sits somewhere between not evolving to devolving from his 2014-2016 My Krazy Life and Still Brazy highs.

Right Now

Summertime Butch – Benny The Butcher & Black Soprano Family: 5

Griselda / Rap

Benny The Butcher again, this time with in my opinion a little less aim for commercial success, which seems to help him with his creative choices on hooks and production. His rapping is solid, his coke bars land a little bit more again, and all around, I had a much better experience.

Summer '24

The Blue Building

brat – Charli xcx: 7

Hyperpop / EDM

I don't know as much pop as I do hip hop, so I can't talk so much about Charli's story on the way here. I wrote a review about this album with a lower score, but this list is mine and thus fairly dynamic as I go, and the quality of this album is not only unreal, but I found more in some of the tracks I wasn't as big a fan of, including going through like a third SOPHIE phase from listening to 'So I'. I still don't care for 'talk talk' or 'club classics' much, but I think it's pretty undeniable after listening to this album daily for months that it is just that good. Hard hitting, personal, fun, and just an adventure and experience to listen to.

B2b SOTY

365

Note: There are many songs here that I could have as SOTY contenders

No Hands – Joey Valence and Brae: 4 (with love)

Goody Ah White Boy / Alt Hip Hop

This one caught me off guard. I wasn't listening to too much music at the time and wanted to listen to something different, clicked on a Fantano great music, saw this, and ended up finding a rather refreshing listening experience. Packed with high energy bangers from guys that seem to just like having fun, what can I say, I had a lot of fun. It comes in, is fun, then goes. Funny punch lines, fun beats, and just enough creativity to stand out. I think it could have been slightly shorter, maybe leaving a few songs for a short re-up to keep the runtime a bit more concise and fresh, but who's to really complain about something fun. Super excited to see where these fellas go next.

BUSSIT

NO HANDS

Short n' Sweet – Sabrina Carpenter: 4

Pop

Sabrina Carpenter was really everywhere, she had a big year. I listened to the album and enjoyed it, every song was broadly really good, but I still ahve trouble telling you what half of them were. I feel like it was a little too same-y, but if this is what you want, it's probably really fucking good. For me, I felt I could just pick out my favourite 2 or 3 and readily ignore most of the rest without worrying about missing too much. Still, and enjoyable listen with some great catchy songs.

Taste

Espresso

GLORIOUS – GloRilla: 5

Memphis Rap / Women in hip hop

It was pretty undeniably Glorilla's year, she was on like a 2Chains 2012 type run where she has been everywhere putting out really high quality music and features left and right. This album is packed with bangers, attitude, songs for the girlies, and overall just great music from the south. I think I've written before that the south usually symbolizes a bunch of things not that I hate, but that I would generally find less appealing than other styles through lyrical and production choices, but the south has really been on top. GLO has been doing this exact thing, but it's been super exciting the whole time. I have found so much great music through following her features, and she's good enough that she might be able to evolve and put out more projects with some creative evolution, though only time will tell. Can't wait to hear more from her.

WATCHU KNO ABOUT ME SOTY

I LUV HER

Chromakopia – Tyler, The Creator: 5

Artsy Hip Hop

Tyler has had a very interesting career evolution and this is a new spin. His last album, Call Me If You Get Lost, was a return to rapping inspired by Westside Gunn after the one before, a very artsy Igor, which could hardly be called a rap album at all. I don't know how I can really box Tyler into genres, and I broadly like that about him. He's on his creative journey, and he's clearly very talented and creative. This new album seems to blend much of the artistic styling from Igor and blend it with the harder rapping, while bringing a new sound forward. I think it's a good album, and I think it has some really touching stories, and yes, that includes 'Judge Judy'. What I do find with the album is that it sometimes strikes me as being sonically in-between. At certain moments, hard hitting stuff seems to hold back to maintain the artsiness, and the artsiness seems to hold back a bit to accommodate the harder stuff. An example of this is that the emotional peaks are often immediately followed by a bar flexing. This might be a deliberate creative choice, deliberately putting up a wall at those intimate moments, but it still does do exactly that. Additionally, when Igor dropped I really felt like Tyler was the best music possible for someone going through a high school break-up, which I personally just didn't care for thematically. This album does deal with similar themes but does also deal with more hard hitting angles of it, like exes / flings dying. Maybe this slowly does indicate him moving towards a new phase. I think this album is good enough to put Tyler in a spot of being one of the most consistent and interesting musicians we have right now.

Rah Tah Tah

Tomorrow

Megan Act 2 – Megan Thee Stallion: 5

Note: This stands as a total review for both acts, I don't care to put the effort in to separate them

Southern Rap / Women in hip hop

I have really enjoyed Megan's music for quite a long time, first discovering her when she dropped 'Realer' in the lead-up to Fever, and that song stayed on repeat for a long time. She has continued to be a great rapper, and now seems to be in an era where shes starting to just go and do what she wants, with more releases coming as collabs with RM from South Korea, Spiritbox for a rap metal song, and using samples like 'Like a G6' for 'Like a Freak' and 'Goodies' by Ciara for 'Roc Steady'. It makes for an interesting and varied selection still based on her usual hard hitting raps that I know and love her for. I had a lot of fun with this album, and for being the length it is (because it is just 2 albums), I stayed way more entertained for the runtime than I expected.

Roc Steady

TYG

Alligator Bites Never Heal: Doechii: 4

Women in hip hop / Alt Rap

Doechii is interesting because all I know is that she apparently was a kind of tik tok / social media rapper, but I'm not plugged into that scene enough to know anything about it. All I know is that this is her breakout album and it's really impressive. I can see some of the roots in that I do find some of the songs to be a little sound-bitey and quirky, but still, her rapping is on point, it is fun, creative, and has the energy and confidence of someone that knows what they're doing. My only complaint is that through some of the quirkiness I find when I listen to one song I love it, but the album as a whole feels like it comes out as being a bit less than the sum of all its parts. She's still early in her career, though, and has a lot of time and clearly more than enough talent and creativity to evolve in whatever way she decides.

STANKA POOH

NISSAN ALTIMA

You Only Live 1nce – Freddie Gibbs: 4

Coke Rap

Freddie has had an interesting journey to get where he is, having multiple absolutely incredibly collab albums through Pinata, Alfredo, and Bandana. From here, he signed a label deal to expand on his image and started working with groups of producers, but it seems that when he gets to pick his own production, similar to Benny The Butcher, the result comes out as far less interesting. Soul Sold Separately still had some incredible peaks through songs like 'Dark Hearted' that just cut through to the soul as good as any coke rap song can, so I was interested in seeing what he would do with another album in the same vein, which came as a surprise drop. This one came out, named as a followup to his 2017 album You Only Live 2wice and was thematically overall very similar to Soul Sold Separately , but seemed to just miss out on the amount of highs. Freddie is still an incredible rapper and explores a lot of personal discovery and his interactions with fame, but he could have surely used some more interesting production to make the project as a while shine more.

Origami

On The Set

Soul Burger – Ab-Soul: 2

Hip Hop / Rap

I can't lie to you, I have listened to this album 3 times, and I always like it until I realize I can't remember a thing about it. Being anti-memetic surely isn't a good sign for an album, especially with its producer and feature list, but I at least know it has one song that has the same sample as 'How Much a Dollar Cost' by Kendrick Lamar (They are both from Top Dawg Entertainment) that is a really good listen.

Righteous Man

Still Praying – Westside Gunn: 6

Griselda / Coke Rap

Westside Gunn back at it again, one of the main 3 Griselda members and probably the one with the best connections and ear for beats, which he uses to his advantage by making albums that sound bright and luxurious, and he generally packs them with features to make up for some of his inconsistent rapping. This album does put him more center, but it is him doing what he does at his best. The beats are interesting, he raps well, and puts together a project that maintains being interesting the entire time. DJ Drama can shut up on all these album but I've gotten better at tuning it out.

Runway Pieces at the Last Supper

Still Praying <– Griselda Posse Cut

300 Worms – JAEGER: 4

IDK the genre mang

This was a fun one because despite having a solid handful of friends release music, this might be the most complete feeling album release. It's incredibly angsty and muddy, but hits a really nice spot and keeps its quality throughout the entire album. This was a really refreshing switchup and got me out of a rut where I was getting sick of listening to new albums for a bit, which was also a nice feeling. Seeing it live twice, it really changes the effect of listening to it, it gives the atmosphere much more air and lets you physically feel the music. For digital listening, I tend to like the songs that have more higher pitched melody.

300 Worms

Gut

GNX – Kendrick Lamar: 5

West Coast Hip Hop / Rap

Kendrick Lamar is back after the Drake Beef with a new surprise drop. Hearing the snippet at the start of the 'Not Like Us' music video had me really excited for a really west coast banger Kendrick album, because god that hook was stuck in my head. A song leaked (likely released to generate hype because samples couldn't clear or something) called 'Let The Party Die' and it was also incredible. The album came out and naturally took the world by storm. The album for me is a near perfect split down the middle between tracks that are absolutely incredible and tracks that left me wanting more for one reason or another, but we got some real west coast bangers from Kendrick which is an absolute blast. To me, the album feels much like a mixtape of Kendrick exploring west coast music, with 'Reincarnated' being a 2Pac song in flow and production and Hey Now being a clear Drakeo The Ruler type song. I think a lot of my opinion on this album will be dictated by how long it takes for him to drop another. This is an insane mixtape to tide fans over for another release, but if it is a full album that will take years to follow up on, I think I can say it was an inconsistent album.

Heart Part 6 SOTY

Reincarnated SOTY

The Bricktionary – Boldy James, Harry Fraud: 4

Coke Rap

Boldy back at it again, this time with an album that I didn't exactly feel at first. Part of the magic of Boldy is that he has these bright and elegant beats that contrast with his extremely low-key delivery, yet match his storytelling. This is an album that plays things slower, which can really make things seem like they slow to a crawl. Match that with how Harry Fraud is more trap inspired and can be inconsistent, and I was worried going in. Eventually hit it with a more out loud sound system and really got into it. Despite the slower pace, the beats are luxurious though a bit darker than usual, and spare a couple songs where Boldy seems like he's half asleep, it's another great joint.

Pressin' My Bunk

Fish Grease

Access All Areas – FLO: 6

Pop

I don't dive into pop much, but discovered this one because it had a Glorilla feature and decided to give it a spin. I got really into this one through the whole listen. These songs are slick, sexy, catchy and punchy in a way that got almost all of these songs stuck in my head at one point or another. I think some of the more hip hop inspired verses could use a little more work, and I'd say there are a couple songs where I would have made them bonus tracks or something to keep the specific feel of the album consistent through the entire record.

Walk Like This

Caught Up SOTY

Trustworthy Interlude I generally don't include 3 but I wanted to include this as not a full song. Being a fella who's parents are divorced and has been cheated on this song really hits in an incredibly personal way. SOTY

Personification – Maxo Kream: 5

Southern Rap / The Guy Loves Being A Crip

Maxo has had a pretty interesting career to say the least with the cases and the like, but always emerges as a particularly interesting rapper with a big personality that always drops some quality music. He gets personal at times, then will say some of the most in your face hilarious criminal shit in the next song, but he always comes in with energy. He seems to just have a knack for it.

Cracc Era

Walk By Faith

Take Care – BigXThaPlug: 4

Texas Rap

I knew of BigX because he had a very distinct voice and some snippets that popped up in memes, and I rather enjoyed it. Voices that stand out in a good way are always good and refreshing. The production is upbeat and fun, as well as pretty distinct in a way that works well. I think that BigX is a solid rapper, but his lyrical content is pretty same-y, which doesn't help when the production, albeit fun, is the same. Song to song I really do feel like you can pick your favourite few and then not have to worry much about the rest. Only time will tell if he's able to evolve past this, because he does have a big wave right now and for his voice and attitude alone I know he can do more.

Law & Order

The Largest

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Top Albums:

1. RICHAXXHATIAN – Mach-Hommy
2. brat – Charli xcx
3. Marciology – Roc Marciano
4. Across The Tracks – Boldy James, Conductor Williams
5. Access All Areas – FLO

Changes for next year

• Make a minimally more data entry focused outline
  • Allow sorting by date, score
  • I plan on using a Dataview plugin for this
• Keep track of best songs
  • I want to keep a list of all my favourite songs of the year
• Listen to more genres
  • Listening to new genres kept it exciting
  • I want to listen to more music that friends recommend too

Last year's summer was not amazing for me. I was forced out of university before it was done, and where I was excited to spend one more summer in Kingston, it all vanished with my dad getting brain cancer and later dying. The separation caused a final rift in my relationship and I got broken up with. There were some people I saw here and there but with the move I felt I lost my consistent social life. On top of that, moving to the big city from Kingston, I had no idea how navigate meeting people. Everyone was so good at shutting everyone out and I had no clue how to get in. To add to this, I got an injury that caused a nerve shock, creating a ton of pain shooting through my left arm, destroying my sleep and ability to exercise. I was working all the time, because I felt I had to be there, but I wasn't doing much or accomplishing anything.

After a week of every day feeling more vulnerable, weak, and isolated than the last, I remember going to my home gym, trying to lift some weights, and being unable to lift 2 pounds with my left shoulder, and I mentally collapsed. This collapse lasted several hours, and because it became so late, when I reached out for help, I didn't get much response from anyone. Not really to fault them, even at rock bottom I knew it was 1 30 AM on a work night. Getting no responses I started to reach out to more people, including my ex, who had called me multiple times since the breakup due to her mental health reasons. I knew I was in a bad spot, and knew it was my time where I needed help. Her response was “Don't come to me about this” which is somewhere close to as bad as you can be when replying to someone in a mental health crisis asking for help. She had also recently gotten an award that was offered to me. Queen's Athletics shut me out as the recipient because I dropped a semester to be with my sister in the hospital. The award represents supporting the cheer team in memory of a teammate and dear friend of mine who had helped me in the past, but ended up taking her own life some years back. The person with the award now turning me away in my time of need was another layer to the crisis. This whole everything was pretty brutal. Luckily, a bit later, Elisa got back to me and we chatted for a while.

When talking to Elisa I expressed that I felt like everything had collapsed. My friends groups, my support systems, my family, my prospects for further education, really just all of it. It felt like every aspect of my life was measurably worse, and things were not improving. She expressed that loneliness in Toronto is pretty tough and had been struggled with it a lot over her life too. Maybe it was just the fact that both of us understood how hard it is to be long-distance with Bennet, but we decided that we could tackle this head-on. We set up some plans to hang out, she had some ideas, and we got to work. Plan one was a Fall time event at Square One. This was October 2nd, 2023.

Naturally, we called it operation friendsmaxxing. We decided that to tackle this loneliness thing we would come up with more plans, and I made a goal of hanging out with someone every day. Liam, Elisa, and I started hanging out in some capacity very frequently, sometimes doing cool and interesting things, sometimes watching movies that weren't even the most interesting with nothing to say to each other (since we last saw each other a day or two before). I grabbed some food with some old family friends, and in particular, I remember going to Joey's with Rob, the dad of a family friend who knew my dad but they fell out near the end. We talked. He asked about my dad and said his side of things and wanted to know mine. We talked about his life and times when he thought it was truly over for him. We talked about my life and how it seemed like my life was truly done for. My old coach Shaver called me a couple days later (I had called her that fateful night too) and we chatted about everything, including the award which was weighing on my mind. Dumping everything on everyone else helped a bit, and hanging out a lot helped a bit. Things were brutal, but something had kind of started, and it was time to make it what it could be.

I don't really remember it much. Maybe my mind was just in overdrive simmering in everything that was so overwhelming. I realized that there were indeed people around before this. There were the vampire nights, which require a shout-out to Eddie and Tetyana for those costumes, they seem to be the best at dressing up and I need to get better. These were a blast, but in my head, I had been so isolated and out of it that I felt like I was grasping at straws to make something happen. From now on, plans would be the default state unless they fell through.

There were a ton of plans for the next while, and after hanging out with people so much, I realized that socializing was, as I still say, like a muscle. Like hitting the gym, going once or twice makes you super sore and tired, and it's kind of foreign, and it's easy to just forget to do. Like going to the gym, if you do it all the time, make space for it, and make it happen, it starts to become natural, it keeps happening, and it makes you feel better. We had a book club back in Kingston (Vgh) that I missed, but I needed to appreciate that it was here too! Not only that, but the people in the book club tended to have lots of cool ideas for things to do. I decided I didn't have to do something every day, but would focus on making higher-quality plans. Where before I felt like I was grasping at straws to hang out, my social life started to become more regular and more successful.

I remember Pattycom. I remember getting my first coffee by accident, taking Nick's order that they got wrong, and feeling like I was glowing. While I was still glowing, we would be chatted up by a random table saying it was international talk to a stranger day, and a guy started talking about his security work and helping a woman recover her sex tapes from her porn recording room at her ex's house. I remember missing the first giant Pattycom visit where 10+ people could make it and being a little angry. I remember the next week there being even more people and feeling so relieved that it wasn't going to be a one-off thing. The small weeks where it was two or three of us. The big weeks where we took up half the place. As someone who was always scared of caffeine after watching my mom go through caffeine withdrawal, coffee became a big player in my new social life.

Things were looking well up, but the terrible events continued to pile up. Losing more friends and family was the default state. My grandpa had a stroke and lost his memory. He slowly started to recover, then had a heart attack and died. Both of these hit me very hard. An old family friend who I hadn't seen in a while, but went to Queen's, died of an infection. My capstone project mate who did most of our project and still happily helped me out with my section when he heard about my dad also died in a car crash. I am very familiar with death, but you still can only handle so much at once. It affected me heavily, but this time, I had friends. I was on a cheer team that I didn't like that was going pretty terribly, and while that team didn't help, I had friends there behind me to air out my frustrations who I knew I could be excited to see no matter what. Worst case scenario, I just had to stick it out till Saturday. Frankly, there was so much happening and I was so stressed that I can barely remember when things happened, or sometimes even much of what happened. I don't even remember it being winter at all. On one hand, it's strange, but on the other hand, maybe that meant that the winter didn't make me miserable like it has in many different years.

I remember writing my Father's Day article where I let myself be vulnerable, which as someone with a solid dose of PTSD, doesn't happen very often. This allowed an introspective and emotional outlet in the Printhouse, and my friends were supportive and not just freaked out by me, which was cool. The Muggies happened! I proposed to my now ex-wife, the drama surrounding the slap, the delicious food and drink, the award for my Father's Day article, and the cigarette in the taxi on the way home was a night of living the high life. We truly could not get much higher.

We made plans for the summer in Edna's backyard, and there were so many ideas from everyone. We did even more than we could have planned for, and I think probably half the plans haven't even been crossed off. I can't even remember when this summer started. So much has been happening so often with so many people that it has just been the best. People say time speeds up as you get older, and I think it's partially true. Having so many plans that are so diverse changes that. Week by week and month by month can go so fast if you do the same thing every day, but we did everything. This summer feels like it has lasted years. Looking back, I can't even recount all the amazing things I did with so many amazing people. I would think I would dread winter because it means this summer is winding down, but I know I'm going to be looking around for even more plans and things to do, and with the right people, it can happen.

We read Dune. We read Dungeon Meshi. Now, we are more than halfway through Fred Hampton. All of these books have been amazing experiences. Dune was the first sci-fi that I really enjoyed as an adult. I didn't know they made them like that. Dungeon Meshi was this weird readable anime that you read backwards? It was funny reading a comic like a kid again, but I loved the adventure and the inspiration it gave me to cook more. It was a great experience. Fred Hampton is my recommendation and it's great seeing how people understand and interact with so many of the concepts in our discussions. We talk about the injustices and the learning what the movement was like and what they were about. I love when people are curious about the same things as me. I love reading.

I think I learned that doing things and socializing is not optional. You can't just wake up and not go to your job for a while. You shouldn't be able to with your own time, but you technically can. You should be doing things by default, and occasionally booking a rest. I would rather meet up with people and fall asleep by accident over not meet up with people. Schedule things ahead of time, book them into your calendar, and try to book more things later. If you have a night of nothing, try to make two plans. If you can make something happen, book it in and make it happen. You can show up and be tired or out of it, I've fallen asleep at a couple of coffee meetups, but I was there, which was better than not being there. It's also restful. If you go home from work and lie down to recover for the next day, you will be tired. If you socialize or do something cool, you will not only have done something but have something to look forward to to do again. This is a way better state to be in. There are little things everywhere, shows, deals, diners, fairs, festivals, trails, clubs, sports, etc. There is always something.

Last night, I went out for dinner with Rob again. We went to Joey's and I told him that it had been around a year since the time we went out, when I was down and out, and he had helped me a ton. We had an amazing time, and it was a nice full-circle moment for me. A year ago, I thought it was just misery from here on out. I thought the fun part of my life was over, and it would just be slowly rotting from then on. It turns out, a lot can change in a year. A place that I thought was leaving me isolated, as it turns out, had some more life in it. With a lot of effort, that turned into more than I could have possibly imagined.

Things aren't perfect, I still have a lot of unresolved issues simmering in my head from the struggles I've been through over the years, but I've found something that really is pretty nice.

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You can't stop the rain The friends that come around To talk about the highs and lows, the ups and downs

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Oncle

Spencer's Health and Fitness Part 2

Well, a few people have asked for it, so here is part 2. I think the first while learning fitness should be pretty freeform. Do whatever you want as long as it's exercise. Try out a little bit of everything if you can. Some weights, a bit of cardio, just messing about really. After a little while, it's good to come up with a proper plan. It can help with scheduling, it can help with recovery for your body, and it can help you actually reach some long-term goals more realistically.

The goal of this article is to come up with some basic fitness plans to help move people to their goals, with a focus on working out in a gym as well as diet. These are where I have the most experience, but I will ensure that I touch on mobility, cardio, and flexibility in a way that can generally apply.

What to Look For in a Program

Completeness

To start this section, I will group and borrow some info from Spencer's Basics Of Health and Fitness 1:

Broadly speaking, your body's basic patterns are somewhere around:
- Squatting: Crouching position -> Standing position
	- Legs, hips, lower back
- Pushing: Close to torso -> far from torso
	- Chest, shoulders, triceps
- Pulling: Far from torso -> close to torso
	- Upper back, lats, biceps
- Twisting: Asymmetric forces on the body
	- Abs, obliques, some back muscles
- Carrying: Holding and moving with something
	- Forearms, traps, core muscles in general

Aspects of Movement
- Strength: the amount of weight you can lift
- Cardio: Ability to do aerobic movement for a duration
- Flexibility: Ability to bend
- Conditioning: Ability to lift weight for a duration
- Explosiveness: Ability to move fast
- Mobility: The ability to functionally use your full range of motion
	- I referred to this as endpoint strength, which is a better description, but I will refer to it as mobility from now on

A complete program should have all of this. Any program you actually do almost certainly won't. Why? It's a lot. If you have hours to work out all the time and a good work ethic, you can make it all happen. If you're in a pinch or have goals that put more demand on some of these than others, you will focus on some aspects and put less effort into, or ignore altogether other aspects. Let us look at powerlifting, for example. Note that I won't assign a score because being more complete is not necessarily better.

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Powerlifters do 3 things: Squat, Bench Press, and Deadlift. Anything else they do is to ensure that they can do these “big 3” better. Furthermore, they optimize themselves to do the highest single rep weight they can do. What does this mean? Let's take a beginner program and use it as an example:

(You would use an app to get the weights you would use for each lift, we will get back to that later)

Stronglifts 5x5 Workout 1: – Squats 5x5 – Bench Press 5x5 – Rows 5x5 Workout 2: – Squats 5x5 – Overhead Press 5x5 – Deadlifts 1x5 Work out every other day, 3 or 4 times a week

Now let's put it through the checklist:

Movement patterns: – Squatting: Yes, all the time – Pushing: Yes, all the time – Pulling: Yes, minimal deadlifts (because of all the squatting using the same muscles), and some rows – Twisting: No – Carrying: Barely. A deadlift is a pick-up, but there is no movement with it.

Aspects of movement: – Strength: Absolutely. All in. – Cardio: No – Flexibility: No. In fact, usually, powerlifting makes flexibility worse, which I will explain later – Conditioning: Not much. People will cycle higher and lower reps, but very rarely do they do very high rep – Explosiveness: Maybe. No throwing or anything, but bar speed could be taken into account – Mobility: No

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This makes powerlifting look pretty incomplete as a structure. Why, then, is it so popular? For starters, it is very simple in every way. It is beginner-friendly, easily adaptable, and also easy to hit the gym, do, and get out quickly. For people who want to get stronger, they can almost certainly find a simple, quick, and easy-to-understand program that they can make work for them in mere minutes. Different people have different goals, and for many people, simply getting stronger and moving some weight is their goal.

The funny thing about powerlifting is that it provides the bedrock for almost all other programs too. You can take 3 or 4 movements you want to get stronger at, put them into a powerlifting program, and then add to it to make it more complete based on your goals. For example, if you did the above program but had a bunch of mobility drills beforehand, it would include mobility. If you did 3 days of this program and had a 4th day for conditioning and cardio, you could incorporate more movements as well as more aspects of movement. Suddenly, you have a pretty damn complete program! So let's for a second see what this would look like if I wanted to buff up the program. Let's say I recommended this program to a friend learning the ropes, what would I change?

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Everyone

Overall Structure – 3 workouts per week – Core movements will be done with a programming app – Accessory work will be done with higher reps (3 sets of 12-20 reps) and should be tough, but based on feel – A set is how many times you do a bunch of reps. If I do 20 squats right now, I have done 1 set of 20 squats. If I do it again, it is now 2 sets of 20 reps. – One of the benefits of 5x5 is it is simple, one of the downsides is that it makes a bunch of people confuse sets and reps – the first number is sets, second is reps. 3x5 would be 3 sets of 5 reps, ie, you do 5 squats, rest, do 5 squats, rest, then do 5 squats.

Warmup: – 20 minutes moderate intensity cardio (seated bike is my personal go-to) – YTWI with some very light weights

Men:

Workout 1: Core movements – Squats 5x5 – Bench Press 5x5 – Rows 5x5 Accessory movements: – Dumbbell incline bench – Dumbbell row – Pec Fly – Rear Dely Fly – Curls Workout 2: Core movements – Squats 5x5 – Overhead Press 5x5 – Deadlifts 1x5 Accessory movements: – Arnold press – Pulldowns (or chin ups) – Rear delt fly – Pullovers – Rotator cuff strengthening – Tricep kickbacks

Women:

Workout 1: Core movements – Squats 5x5 – Overhead Press 5x5 – Deadlifts 1x5 Accessory movements: – Arnold press – Pulldowns (or chin ups) – Rear delt fly – Pullovers – Bad girls – Tricep kickbacks Workout 2: Core movements – Squats 5x5 – Bench Press 5x5 – Rows 5x5 Accessory movements: – Dumbbell Romanian deadlifts – Dumbbell row – Donkey kicks – Rear Dely Fly – Curls

Everyone again

Workout 3 – 20 jump lunges – 10 push ups (can use knees) – 3 swimmers (slow) – 15 crunches – a few banded neck extensions (front, side back) repeat the above three times – Farmer Carries – (when forearms tired) Hugging carries – (when tired) Plan your feet wide and start rotating your body to bring the weight side to side – Pre-hab mobility work – Based on specific personal weaknesses to prevent injury

Cooldown: maybe 2x20 seconds each? keep it casual – Neck stretches – tricep stretch – rhomboid stretch – touch toes – kneeling lunge, lean foreward and back – calf stretch

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That just got a little more complicated, didn't it? Yes, but we did also just go from something very basic to a program that I would feel confident running myself. I have made adjustments for some common separation of goals where men have a greater focus on the upper body, women have a greater focus on the lower body. But I digress, let's run it through that gauntlet again:

Movement patterns: – Squatting: Yes, all the time – Pushing: Yes, all the time – Pulling: Yes – Twisting: A bit at the end of the big carry – Carrying: Yes, a bit

Aspects of movement: – Strength: Core work – Cardio: Warmups, Third day – Flexibility: Some stretching – Conditioning: Accessory work – Explosiveness: Jump lunges provide a bit – Mobility: YTWI + pre-hab

The increased complexity takes this beginner powerlifting program and turns it into a still beginner-friendly relatively complete program! If you were to stick to this program, frankly, it could take you pretty far on only 3 workouts per week, with one workout taking minimal equipment. You should be stronger, faster, and more injury-resilient. That being said, Stronglifts 5x5 is a program that isn't really best done forever, it's just a bit basic in the way the weight progresses (I will explain in 2 paragraphs). While great for people new to weights, longer-term gym-goers will find that eventually, they stop making progress with this scheme. What to do now? Well, Stronglifts 5x5 is the very core of this program, so what you can do instead is take another powerlifting program, replace Stronglifts 5x5 with that, and make some adjustments to the rest of the work to make sure you cover the bases you want to, and you're off to the races.

But let's pause here for a second. I said the way Stronglifts 5x5 progresses is a bit basic so it won't last forever. I put its progression off earlier too, so it's time to address that.

Progression

If you're fine just having some fun in the gym and making progress a bit here and there, by all means, you can just hit the gym and increase the weight a bit when it feels easy. This will work to some extent, but generally, it is good to not only be pushed a bit but have structure. There are a few common ways routines will progress.

Linear: This tells you to increase the weight by a certain amount every week or every workout. This is what Stronglifts 5x5 uses. Every week, if you can hit the numbers, you will increase the weight by 10 pounds for major compounds, or 5 pounds for smaller compounds. This can find your limits pretty fast but is not a great strategy for long-term progression once you have gotten past the initial strength you get from starting to train. It simply progresses very fast, and after lifting for more than a short while, our body does not get stronger as fast as the program increases the weight. This is why people recommend it for newer gym-goers: it gives people some time to learn with lighter weights, then fairly quickly find out how strong they are, which allows them to properly utilize a plan that will help them out in the long run. It has a role, and it does an amazing job at that. You will be progressing week to week.

Non-Linear Progression: This is for everything else, but for the sake of simplicity, I will place here programs that generally increase weight based on performance. For example, let's say you finished off your 5x5 but it was super easy, you could increase by 10 pounds. If it was hard but doable, increase by 5 pounds. If it is very hard, keep it the same. If you are stuck at the same for a few weeks, decrease by x pounds or y% of max weight to try to break through that barrier. This is great when you are still fairly new, but have hit your linear progression wall. It allows you to progress as your body gets stronger but still assumes that you are generally making consistent upward strength progress across all movements. This can be done effectively forever if you keep being able to increase the weights, but if you find yourself hitting the same ceilings again and again after dropping the weight a few times, it might be time to look into something more complicated. You will generally be progressing at a scale of maybe month to month.

Undulating Periodization: These generally use some freak math to decide how much to increase your estimated maximum weights by, but those increases happen pretty infrequently. In between these increases, you will likely have multiple steps where you alter the movement to attempt to squeeze more juice out of your main lift. These alterations could be changing how you do the exercise, like doing high volume, then speed, then strength and assessing how you have done, or it could even swap out exercises, like replacing squats with front squats for a week, which can help work muscles in a specific way or even just different from the usual at all. Things here become complicated, and you will be progressing over longer periods, maybe testing every 3 months to see how things feel. At this point, you may also be perfectly happy with losing strength or looks in certain areas to help reach your goals in others.

Please note that undulating periodization is non-linear periodization. I just have these separated a bit because I think it's worth it for the sake of understanding.

Reverse Periodization: Weights decrease as volume increases. This can help with endurance, and I would use it as I would dial into cheer competitions. It would help my conditioning and reduce risk of injury, as well as increase the energy I would put into my sport. You can use this if you want to dial in for a more cardio or aerobic-based activity, but broadly speaking, more of your time will be spent doing the above. You only need to reduce the weights if the weights are high enough to demand reduction.

Progression is a major part of what makes a routine the difficulty it is broadly considered. Linear progression is considered for beginners not because only a beginner would do that, but rather because this will get a beginner farther faster. It is the right tool for the job and should be used. Doing undulating periodization as a beginner would suck because the weight increases are so slow that your body would simply out-progress the program. You could do it and increase overall strain in other ways, but that would still mean the core of your program isn't doing its job. Beginners will progress better with a beginner program.

And on the point of progressing with a program, stick to your programs!!! If you are content with doing your program, keep running it. constantly swapping programs will never let the program dial in where you are and you will constantly be in the adjustment period of a program, which will slow your progress. If you are pushed by a program and are making consistent progress, stick with it! If it is boring you, try swapping up the accessory work first. Needless fiddling only serves to waste your time and energy, as programs take time to reach their potential. Only change your program if:

1. You are making no more progress with your current program
2. Your program feels too easy and does not push you at all (most programs will be like this for a month while the weights adjust to your strength from beginning estimates)
3. You have a change in the overall goal. Not just “I want to do x exercise a bit more”, but maybe you signed up for a competition, started a new sport, or are preparing for a larger lifestyle change.
4. You genuinely dread your program. You avoid the gym because the program sucks so much

Level of Program

Even I would not necessarily use an advanced program right now. No one else reading this should even really look at them at this point, but it would be incomplete to not include them. If you are fairly new, pick a beginner program. It is the right tool for the right job. If you have been consistent and have hit a plateau with your strength on your starting program, look at intermediate. Many of these intermediate programs have built world records. If you are a high-level athlete at a sport or want to dial in and have run the intermediate ones consistently for >3 years, look to advanced.

Many of these programs are just the building blocks of something more complex. If they don't seem complete to the point of achieving your goals add some accessories that do that. Also, make sure to fill them out a bit to hit every movement pattern at least once a week, ideally twice. After you have done what the core program insists, do some accessories you make up after to fill it out. You can have fun with these but still work hard. I find 2 accessories per body part I want to work on is a solid starting point. Over 4 and you are either not going hard enough, or are doing way more than you need to, maybe to a detriment. A good rule of thumb is 3 sets per accessory.

Beginner

All of these are pretty simple linear progression programs to help you find your groove

Stronglifts 5x5 (I did this one) – has a really easy free app GZCL Starting Strength

Intermediate

These take you out of linear progression and you can run them for years, different ones may work better at different times in your life

Madcow 5x5 (if you like the 5x5) – Like SL 5x5 but with slower progression 5/3/1 (crowd favourite) – Dead simple, works, tried and true – lots of accessory work recommendations – only focuses on 1 body part per workout, may underutilize your capacity – This helps it be well-balanced – this may not be a bad thing for you Cube method (a personal fave) – Beats the soul out of a major compound every workout PPL (More bodybuilding focused) – Push, pull legs (often repeated twice or with 1 more day for conditioning/cardio) – More of a genre of program than a specific one – Less focused on strength – more focused on looks PHAT – Made for athletes – does strength and looks PHUL – Separates upper and lower body days

Advanced / Sport Specific

Juggernaut 2.0 (a personal fave) – Spreadsheets on spreadsheets on spreadsheets – requires reading a book Fullsterkur (strongman) – costs actual money – requires some space and equipment – related to cube method, actually I might try this GUTS – a more complex and complete bodybuilding program

Some people will tell you that you need to record the weights of every exercise, how it felt, how your day was going into it, etc. You can, and it will help, but just trying to do your program consistently is like 50% of the picture. Pushing yourself is another 10%, good sleep is another like 10%, eating well is another 10% paying attention to aches and pains is like 10%, and all those other little details make up the rest. Will it matter? Yeah for sure, but the main part is just focusing on putting in good work, and with your life, do you really need to try to optimize your entire life around being a perfect athlete?

Diet

This won't be a review or ranking of specific diets, but rather I will keep it to dieting as a whole. With that, we must start at the core of dieting.

Calories.

There are calorie reductionists who say just eat less and just eat more, but that denies some of the human experience and relationship with food. Some people say calories don't matter, but that is a reactionary anti-the-first stance and is broadly not going to hold up well in practice. The answer lies somewhere between, and when I say somewhere between, I mean calorie reductionism is more or less correct, but Jesus some people need to stop being such pricks about it. The manosphere has done immense damage to effective diet advice because I think they care far less about dieting and far more about the assault on their ego that happens when they learn that women don't exist purely for their gaze. Anyway, I digress.

A calorie is a unit of energy. Our body is effectively storage for energy. Our bodies are also built to survive. If you eat a surplus of energy, the body says “Hey, times are plentiful, I should store some of this energy for later” and makes fat. If you eat a deficit of energy, the body says “shit, I can't get what I need from food, lets use some of that stored energy from earlier to make up for it.” But the body burns its fat.

If you eat a bunch of food, your body will adapt to it and need yet more food to grow. Be it that your body realizes it doesn't need to be as efficient, or maybe that it just doesn't absorb as many nutrients because there is so much food, I don't know. If you want to gain weight, you will start by needing to eat a bit more, and over time, that amount will creep slowly up to maintain the same weight gain pace. The same happens with the opposite. When people go on a diet, they usually can start pretty easily. You eat a bit less. Suddenly, you are down 1.5 pounds eating that same amount less that should have dropped you 10 pounds and you're not losing any weight. Your body has adapted, you need to go lower, and as you keep going, that little bit less you were eating is suddenly a lot less, and you're hungry all the time, which also means you're in a bad mood all the time.

This is where I think a lot of the distinction of the disagreement above comes from. Calorie reductionists have all of this cycle pretty much built in. Do you now need less calories? Just eat even less. The focus is still on calories, just the numbers need to be played with. Other people try to invite that complexity and mental condition into it. It's an honourable venture, I think it is often done in good faith. Most people want their body to be their body and not a scientific venture, but, in my opinion, change is easiest done when you make it a bit of a scientific venture.

Keeping Count

So how do you know how much to eat and how much to adjust to gain/lose weight? Well, the calculators that take lifestyle, weight, and that into account suck. Everyone's body is different, including yours from itself a few years ago. If you really want to know and do things based on the numbers, you have to pay for MacroFactor, the only app I know that does a good job with all of this. It automatically adjusts your numbers for you so you don't have to hyperfocus on it, and you input all the food you eat and your weight every day or so. It finds the trends and adjusts accordingly. It isn't a lot of work, and it is effective, but I can see it not being for everybody.

It does one thing you don't need the app for: writing down everything you eat. This is a good strategy. You can end the day, look at your list, and say “That extra thing I got? I didn't need that, and it didn't affect the rest of my day at all.” Alan Thrall, a now old-head strongman Youtuber said his best diet advice was to get rid of “ands.” When you grab a burger, don't get a burger and fries, just grab the burger. A breakfast sandwich and a donut? Just get a breakfast sandwich. A burger, fries, and a coke? Just grab a burger and fries with water. Getting rid of one “and” here and there makes a big difference over the span of a week, and still lets you retain your lifestyle. Writing everything down and getting rid of a thing or two here and there is a fantastic way to start.

This stems from my overall best diet advice: The diet for you is the diet that works.

I have seen so many people go on diets. So often, it is no diet to vegetarian or vegan, and after a month, it is back to no diet. This is what causes the research that “1 year after starting a diet most people have gained weight.” It isn't the diet so to speak, it is the fact that people try to do a diet that they will inevitably fail at, fail at it, go back to their old habits with an unhealthy dose of failure, and continue on their previous trend that they wanted to change, with a bonus of feeling now worse, which promotes stress eating, which is more failure, and it can spiral. This is not good. I would go as far as to say that this sounds pretty bad. The lesson is: when you start a diet, you need to already have your reflexes primed. Do you know what's vegan? An entire bag of chips. Do you know what wasn't intended when you came up with your diet? Eating an entire bag of chips every night. But why is eating a bag of chips every night not good for you?

We need to go over just a couple more things before we reach our main goal here. First: Macros and micros. Macros are your fats, carbs, and proteins. Micros are your vitamins, minerals, sodium, etc. Carbohydrates are a fast source of energy for the body, your body can easily break them down into sugar, which can be a good fast fuel source. Proteins are good for building and maintaining muscle, and fats are good for not only getting you a large volume of calories but also things like hormone production and joint health. Micros are smaller things that are important, but if you generally eat healthy, you shouldn't have to worry about them. What I will say here is make sure you get your vitamin D, if you are diabetic or have another health condition, ask your doctor about what to look out for, and also all women are iron deficient. If you get a blood test and are unhealthily short in something, look into taking vitamins to fix it, it may make you feel better.

Lastly: Just moderately not great foods. There are a lot of foods out there which aren't great, but aren't so bad that we do anything about it. For example, Mcdonald's has shockingly good macronutrient balance on a lot of its items. Why do I feel so bad after eating even just a moderate amount? Well, there's a lot of canola oil, high fructose corn syrup, and sodium. These are all pretty much fine if there's a bit, but altogether in that quantity combines a sugar spike from the corn syrup, water retention and bloat from the sodium, dehydration from the lack of actual water, and just broadly the impact canola oil has on some people, which may be part of all the processing. There is also a lack of something: it is a lot of calories, but not a lot of micronutrients. The combination of this means that while there isn't anything truly wrong with it at its core, some Maccas won't kill you or anything, it may leave you off feeling not so great, and you can certainly do better. In a pinch here and there it's all good, but if it's all the time, it might be time to look for something healthier or make your backup food.

What to Know Before A Diet

There are a bunch of different things you need to know to be prepared for a diet if you want it to succeed outside of how much you want to eat. You should have a handful of:

Breakfasts: Quick, easy, and can be grab-and-go in a pinch. A breakfast that takes 10 ingredients and 40 minutes to make is surely delicious and nutritious, but when you need to get to work and need to go fast, you don't want everything to fall apart right at the start of the day, as you will be thinking about how to make it up for the whole day, and that's stressful.

Lunches: These can be spots near you that support your diet, quick re-ups that can be done halfway through the day, or something that reheats easily in a container. Many people don't have access to a full kitchen halfway through the day, and if that is the case, you need a plan and a backup plan.

Dinners: Bigger and likely your most complete meals. These can take a little bit longer and have some more prep work to them, but they should be really tasty and leave you feeling good.

Snacks: Something you can grab and eat in 2 seconds that tastes good and is healthy. Want to eat a bag of chips? Well now you have to go to the store and get them, but a bag of trail mix is much better and also right there.

Soups and stews: Very important. These will take more time, but leave you with a mountain of delicious and extremely healthy food. If you have a Sunday afternoon off, you can easily have a soup bubbling in the background and end up with 2 weeks of lunches that freeze and reheat well.

Quick and Simple: Recipes that take like 15 minutes and 4 ingredients to make that are healthy and taste good. It doesn't have to be brilliant, but it can be pretty damn good, healthy, and it'll do on a weeknight.

Emergency Backups: This is not meal prep, but you should always have at least 2 healthy reheatable meals, maybe a soup or stew, in the freezer. Sometimes things happen. Maybe you are exhausted, maybe something popped up and you are out of time and in a huge hurry with no time to cook. No need for fast food, you have a backup in the freezer. Again? You're still good. On the extremely rare case that 3 unforeseen things happen, sure fuck it grab some Maccas, but also check what's happened here. When there are too many emergencies, it might be good to revisit how you got there and plan for if it may happen again. I try to keep at least 5 of these, usually from my soups and stews, because I know I can run through a whole week on exhaustion emergency meals if need be. The only time I have ever found this important is in cases of mental health and burnout. Have I ever run out of all my emergency meals? No. There is always something good at home, and that is very reassuring to me. Funnily enough, that helps my mental and makes it less likely to be necessary.

Smoothies: Smoothies are a very easy food, both to make and consume. It is good to have a good smoothie that you know you like, plus smoothies fit into almost every diet.

Flexes: Big dishes that you can make for friends that are absolutely delicious. Not just good for the diet, but will kill the game with anyone. Dinner party shit.

Desserts: Made to either prove to people that you aren't a big stickler or add to a potluck or something where you want to have fun. It will go a little outside the core values of your diet, but add your own personal flair to it, and make sure it lets loose a little.

Friends: Please don't eat them. Friends who have dieted likely know good recipes and tips and tricks that helped them succeed. Get some insight on what worked for them, what they do in a pinch, and how they handle a night out. All of that is going to happen to you eventually, and their insight might give you good ideas for how you want to handle them as well.

You should have a handful of ideas for all of these, and for things like quick and simple, breakfasts, lunches, and snacks, you should have a lot of experience with them before you start your diet.

What Diet Should I Pick?

Every diet claims it is oh-so-good for you, and generally, they are right. There are so many news articles on so many trending diets claiming that they are the best, will extend your lifespan, will help your gut health, whatever. What matters is that you aren't eating like shit. Almost any diet will accomplish that. If you are new to dieting, don't jump into anything restrictive right away. Restriction can bring creativity, but if you don't have much experience, can also pin you into a bad habit of doing something that is technically a part of the diet, like a bag of chips while on a vegan diet, because someone made a pork freekeh and you thought it was going to be a salad, and now you can't eat pork. When you've been paying attention to dieting for years, you will see fads and trends show up and melt away. Vegan, Keto, Mediterranean, even that piece of shit carnivore diet that barely arrived spare dumbass manosphere types is a diet I guess. In 5 years it won't matter if what you picked was trendy or not, what will matter is if you ate delicious food, enjoyed food with friends, stuck to it, and reached your goals. Hell, you can even mix and match. Intermittent fasting, Mediterranean lunches, keto dinners? Sounds delicious!

Also, there's a beautiful concept called cheat meals. Allow yourself to just dig in now and then. You've been healthy for 2 weeks, digging into some pizza for a meal won't be bad. Having no fun and giving up on your diet will. Your body takes time to adjust, one big overshoot or one big undershoot here and there won't do much in the long run. Also, you can do cheat meals that adhere to your diet somewhat. Maybe you shouldn't eat pizza, but it's the Superbowl and you skipped lunch for this, you can have a slice and some saucy wings. Going out that night? Skipping lunch not only means more calories for alcohol but starving yourself also means alcohol hits harder! (I am not liable for your terrible decisions)

The best diet is just generally trying to eat healthier. Your friends made unhealthy food? Give in here and there (putting up a bit of resistance can even get you some extra attention), because friends are the most important. Try the food that they make even if it isn't part of your diet. Those times are called good memories.

Starting

Well, you have an idea for a diet, you have a bunch of recipes planned, you've tested some dishes, you like them, and you have a couple of backups in the fridge. NOW is the time to start the diet, not 2 months ago when you barely touched your side of salad and decided to become a vegan in 1 day. You can do that and succeed? Godspeed, but I sure as hell can't.

My approach tends to look like this: 1. Change my snacks 2. change my breakfast 3. change my lunch 4. change my dinner

I don't snack much, so that just means finishing my current snacks and replacing them with new ones for when I crave them. I also don't eat many sweets at all, so I find this to be the lowest barrier. I can swap it out without thinking too much or changing my lifestyle at all. Breakfast is next because I usually either do something extremely quick and simple or skip breakfast altogether. This is a change that I will experience every day, but I generally will have planned this out and found something that I know will work. I am also happy eating the same breakfast every day, so it doesn't take much thought. My lunch comes next. I usually have tested some quick and simple meals, and if I'm not sure about something for some reason, I have my emergency meals ready as a backup. This is starting to take a bit more effort, but I have a backup plan, and I have some of the common ingredients in the fridge so I can swap plans fast if I need to. Last is dinner. This is something that takes some proper cooking and planning most of the time. This is the biggest jump, but I'm already almost completely there, so it's OK if it doesn't work out like I imagined, most of my meals are already there! I had one time when I wasn't yet vegetarian, but only my dinners had meat. Turns out, I rather liked being in that spot, and I didn't even want to go any further. In trying to make it to my diet, I accidentally found a diet that worked for me, one that I could stick to happily for the long term. These days, I have something different altogether, and guess what, I like it, so it's working.

Your diets and transitions to your diets will likely look different based on your lifestyle and priorities. Just know, you don't need to go all at once. Take your time, dip your toes, and then slowly integrate your new ideas. Maybe you grab fast food every lunch at work and that's a part of your routine. That might be the hardest to change, maybe save that for last. Maybe it's the part of your current diet which you like the least and you want to change it first. Maybe after swapping that out you realize you like everything else and are just happy now. Maybe you find a menu item or different spot that matches your diet better and you want to keep that routine.

The goal here isn't to change what you eat. It's to make you happier and healthier.

Now read that again.

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I'm at the pizza hut I'm at the taco bell The combination made my eyes bleed

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Oncle Spenny

I am writing this article as a small part of a larger series that will hopefully be useful for people getting into the gym, or broadly wanting to get a bit more into health and fitness. I have been in the gym for about 10 years, and it has been a cornerstone of an extremely tumultuous life.

The gym can be an amazing place. It can be a place where you go to improve yourself. It can be a place where you can become more familiar with your body and how it moves. It can be a place where you can go to get stronger to help those around you. It can be a place for meditative contemplation and taking stress out in a healthy way. Almost everyone I talk to says a very similar thing. The gym is always there for you. When things are going well, the gym can be there making you physically feel great too. When things are going terribly, the gym can be a place to focus and burn your energy, or just get away from it. It really is a good place to be, and in my opinion, almost everyone should be there in some capacity. I knew a guy, Steve, who couldn't move the bottom half of his body, and he asked me, a random 16-year-old he didn't know, to help lift him to machines and strap him in place to do his movements. If he can do it with confidence, you can too.

Health

Here are some general ideas of what constitutes physical health. It isn't everything, but everything is connected, and these give some good ideas to pay attention to.

Sleep: Good sleep will help with mental clarity and ability, physical ability, mood, and hormone function. If you feel like your sleep is really good, it is probably good enough. If you feel like you're always tired, waking up feeling terrible, or if you can't ever get to sleep, most sleep can be improved simply through less use of electronics before bed, having a consistent bedtime and wake-up time, and dialling in diet and exercise alongside it.

Diet: Knowing what you eat is important. Having an eating disorder is unhealthy. Broadly speaking, eat healthy foods most of the time, and ensure that you have general control over your eating. If you start snacking when you are stressed, be aware of it, and work on the root causes of the stress while working on not using food to solve it. Get a good amount of protein, there should be some protein in every meal. If you eat more than your body uses, your body should start to store that energy and gain weight. If you consume less than your body uses, your body will need to use those energy stores, and you will lose a bit of weight. This level is your TDEE, and online calculators aren't great at finding it. To start, just be aware of what you eat and try to make it a bit healthier if you so decide.

Movement: When you sit for a while, your body may feel stiff. If it was stiff, you would need to stretch to fix it. Stretching does not help, rather, you need to move your body more to get rid of that feeling. Your body needs to move. The contraction of your muscles helps pump blood around your body, and literally, your body is made to move. It is a body. If your work demands you sit for extended periods of time, walk around a little or do some push-ups every half hour. Steps aren't the be-all and end-all for movement, but it's not the worst metric. Get some steps in. Bike to work if possible. Do a couple of squats and push-ups at the very start of the day too if possible, getting your body moving after sleep is good for it and your mental health.

Aches and Pains: Your body likely has some aches. Chances are they don't need to be there unless you're doing something stupid and it only hurts when you do that stupid thing (my right wrist hurts when I throw someone and catch them with one hand while they are spinning). Find a good physio or related service, and get them to check out any annoying aches. Knee pain, elbow pain, neck pain, etc. Chances are you can live pretty pain-free, it's just a matter of knowing what is actually causing grief so you can fix it. Find an aggressive young physio. Over the last 10 years, we have discovered that the RICE method (Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate) can reduce pain, but actually slows down healing. Many still prescribe it to help with healing. Now, the general advice is to get things moving as fast as you can in a range that may be uncomfortable but isn't painful. If your physio tells you some bullshit like rest then do 2 generic exercises, it might be good to look for a new one.

Mental health: Be physically healthy, get paid enough, and have some friends you see frequently. Easier said than done, but frankly, this probably puts you 90% of the way to good mental health. Therapy can be useful too I suppose.

Supplements: Supplements can act as a little boost to a specific missing aspect of a diet. You can use a protein powder if you struggle to hit protein goals. Fish oil is good, creatine can be useful for athletes. You don't need to spend money on supplements. They can help a bit, but having a more consistent sleep pattern, diet, and exercise regimen will all trump the difference supplements make and it won't be close. That being said, get some blood work done and see if you have any vitamin deficiencies. Take something if one of them is notable. Women, iron is useful and is in your blood. Women have a general tendency to eat less as well as lose more blood than men. If you are frequently super tired or short of breath, look into it.

Movement

Here we will work with some basics, but I won't go into too too much detail.

You have bones, and tendons connect those bones to muscles. Muscles broadly connect things in your body and pull them together. When you grab something, you have forearm muscles that are contracting, pulling both ends closer together, and the magic of your body does this in such a way that closes your fingers. Try holding your forearm as you open and close your hands. Feel something moving? If so, the contraction is what you're feeling. If you don't feel anything, well, we can work on that.

So the body has a lot of these muscles, and they coordinate and do things for you. When you pick something up, you have to grab it with your hands, bend your arm, move your legs, straighten your back, and hold it up with your shoulders. Talking about each muscle individually takes too much effort, so I like to reduce it to fewer movement patterns.

Broadly speaking, your body's basic patterns are somewhere around: – Squatting: Crouching position –> Standing position – Pushing: Close to torso –> far from torso – Pulling: Far from torso –> close to torso – Twisting: Asymmetric forces on the body – Carrying: Holding and moving with something

I am leaving out a couple of movements commonly grouped in as basic movement patterns:

• lunging
  • I decided to keep things simple by counting this as an asymmetric squat. I think of this as a combination of squatting and twisting in terms of lifting weights.
• hinging
  • This is hinging around the hips to generate power instead of using legs alongside the hips. I decided that I would group this in with squatting purely because I think strictly hinging with no leg bend is an assistance movement and not as broad a movement pattern as the rest of these (at least in the gym).

I think these movement patterns are enough to have a pretty complete understanding of how you want your body to move when lifting weights. Pretty much every exercise can fall into these categories, or at least directly adjacent to one. For example, curls, which may start with a weight at your hip and end with a weight just in front of you, still serve to pull that weight closer to the part of your body your arm is attached to: the shoulder. Using your triceps would do the opposite. This broadly makes the biceps a pull muscle and the triceps a push muscle. Using this logic, we can categorize our muscles in a productive way for hitting the gym.

• Squatting: Legs, hips, lower back
• Pushing: Chest, shoulders, triceps
• Pulling: Upper back, lats, biceps
• Twisting: Abs, obliques, some back muscles
• Carrying: Forearms, traps, core muscles in general

Aspects of movement

Flexibility: The ability to bend, and the ability to remain strong in bent positions, broadly translates to how difficult it is for you to randomly get injured in everyday life (unless you have a condition that specifically makes it not so). Also, it makes things much more comfortable. If you do not use your body's full range of motion, your body will adapt to not using it. If you do use your body's range of motion, your body will adapt to using it. The best way to keep your body feeling great as you get older – or even just now – is literally to use it how you want to use it. Don't let your range of motion disappear. Someone who has not used their hips or stretched their legs may trip and fall as they get older and take quite an impact. Someone who has retained their ability to bend may be able to catch themselves much better with minimal discomfort.

Strength: How much you can exert yourself to lift weight. Strength is effectively the ability of your muscles to move mass. Heavier weights require more strength to move, lighter weights require less strength to move. If you can pick up something heavier, you have more strength at your disposal. A person who can pick up a 100-pound object may find an 80-pound object heavy. A person who can pick up a 400-pound object can probably readily pick up and move something that is 150 pounds. It is less strain to pick up something that is a smaller percentage of your total strength capacity, so becoming stronger makes things feel much easier and lighter. It also just feels so good to pick up something heavy.

Cardio: The ability to do things for an extended period of time. People are designed for endurance. Sweating is very effective at reducing our core temperature, and we have multiple great methods for getting around that we should take advantage of. If you cannot jog 3 to 5 kilometres right now, you might want to look into that. It doesn't have to be fast, you don't have to be pretty at the end of it, but if you can't, improving your cardio will generally improve your life. Hell, I'm not picky, choose biking or some other form of cardio and do a similar test. Cardio is the efficient long-term movement of your body, and not having it means your heart will have to work significantly harder than necessary to do far less work. There are tons of different ways to train cardio, chances are one will work for you.

Conditioning: Think of this as a blend between strength and cardio. OK, you can lift something heavy, but can you do it multiple times? Maybe you can move a big heavy box around. Can you do 50? If you're doing gardening or a friend is moving, one bag or box won't help too much, but having good conditioning means that you will be able to handle all kinds of challenges, and you can do it much longer than most people. Many strong people struggle when it comes to this. They can get big and lift heavy things, but get wiped in 5 minutes when it comes to actually doing something outside of the gym. Whatever lifts you do, make sure you sprinkle in some sets of very high reps (15 to 20) here and there, it is good for you and often helps find weak points.

Endpoint strength: How well does your body handle being pushed to the ends of its comfortable range of motion? It was thought for a long time when squatting that we should avoid our knees going over our toes because that is when most injuries occur. Turns out, training having your knees past your toes in a squat is good for athletes because they often end up in that position in their sport, and if they haven't trained it, it is now even more likely to get injured. Shoulder injuries, ankle injuries, and knee injuries are all extremely common. Lots of people feel unstable in certain ranges of motion. Training with some resistance in these weird positions can help your body learn to be comfortable in these positions and can stop you from getting injured if your body accidentally or unexpectedly gets forced into these positions.

Explosiveness: OK, so you can move heavy weight, but can you move it fast? From sprinting to fast deadlifts, explosiveness is very useful. It helps you move with better control faster, as well as can give comparable strength gains with significantly less weight. Explosiveness also carries a lot of fun. Sports and generally having impromptu fun, like chasing a stranger's dog, requires coordination and explosiveness whereas, without it, it just wouldn't be the same. A bonus to explosiveness is that it can help with weight goals. Having no fat makes explosive training tougher, the impacts hit harder. Having too much fat can also make it tougher, fat jiggles a bit, and too much fat doesn't feel amazing when doing sprints. I would know.

Getting started

Do not spend any money when getting started. If you have no old clothes you think you could work out in, get the cheapest crew shirts and whatever pants or shorts you can get a hold of for cheap and that's all you need. Old beater shoes are a gym staple. Spending money doesn't help in the gym (spare getting a gym membership). This is you, your brain, and your body. Your goals and what you have fun doing change over time. Early on, purchasing stuff might make you feel locked into liking one thing. If you want to run and your shoes are absolute garbage, maybe get some shoes.

Some apps might be able to assist you, like teaching you how to run and stopping you from just sprinting until you burn out, giving you a pace or something to work at. No need to buy one yet, there should be something free available.

Step 1: Exercise once. Get to the gym, go for a run, do some squats and some push-ups, go for a bike ride, fuck it literally anything. Before a meal, after a meal, in the morning, in the afternoon, at lunch, at night. Just get a little done. Make yourself a bit tired, then stop. Don't go insane and run a marathon, don't max out a deadlift, just do a little bit of something. A run around the block or a nearby park, go to the gym and go do some machines, they usually have pictures on them somewhere to show you how to use them. I've been doing this for around a decade and still looked around to figure out what the hell a machine was just yesterday. I sat in it facing the wrong way and looked for what I could grab. Nothing that way apparently. Ask for help, say you're new and ask a random person who looks confident to show you. I would find it incredibly strange if they said no, I have only ever had great experiences with it.

Step 2: Tell someone about it and tell them to check in on you in 2 or 3 days to make sure you've done another one. Even better, get a friend to start their little journey with you! Keep each other accountable, and make it a social experience. It's much nicer to go through anything with a friend, and it's also a good outlet to complain about soreness and such.

Step 3: Keep it up 3-4 times a week for a month (it's a jump I know I know). Have someone keeping you accountable, and if they ask you and you haven't completed it, you have to do it now. No need to do anything crazy, just make working out or going to the gym a habit. It starts feeling really good, trust me. If something is uncomfortable, maybe running is hurting your shins, maybe switch to biking weights, or swimming, which is nice on the joints. Just keep exercising.

The first step is to make a habit of doing some form of exercise. Don't worry about being great, no matter what you do, your goals will change in 5 years. Just have some fun and do something.

The Movie

I'm just riffing here because this movie blew my mind at just how little it blew my mind. Spoiler I guess? There isn't really much to spoil. I haven't watched a ton of movies, but because of that, I like movies a good chunk. They often feel new to me, I don't recognize all the patterns that make them predictable, and they can take me somewhere new. Even bad movies I can generally find good in.

Civil War was a brand-new experience for me. When the movie was done, I felt exactly the same as when it started. Literally no difference. The movie had no direct effect that lasted at all. I felt like I had time-travelled. My mood had nothing new, I gleaned no new info, no new experience. It was actually unreal how little anything this movie was, especially given that it looked pretty good.

At one point when I was talking to Shrey about music, he told me that while I listen to music, listen to the production, get lost in the stories, and think about the lyrics, he hears music. If it sounds nice enough it's nice enough. The only way I can explain this movie is that it isn't for people who watch movies, it is for people who see movies. It looks good, the characters move around, and there's a big conflict somewhere in there that the characters navigate from start to end. I went in knowing that it was apparently pretty apolitical somehow, but I wasn't expecting it to have absolutely nothing at all about anything anywhere.

So the movie follows some journalists in an American civil war who are trying to talk to the president. Let's start here because it seems to be something that happens. It is the ultimate quest that happens. First, why would the president listen to them? They have no reason. If they did manage to ask the president a question, why would he answer? No real reason. What question? The only character that poses some mediocre questions dies, so they really have nothing even if the president was with them and promised to answer. Do they make it? Well, kind of. They see the president but he just kind of dies. So this whole quest is just kind of nothing, so let's look smaller.

Maybe it is a larger quest of discovery in a chaotic world? Well, nothing is really discovered. Externally, the main group just navigates some problems on the way, which they navigate by saying they're the press. Everyone for some reason respects the press a ton and lets them do their thing. In an early sequence, the press are in the way and taking pictures while people are trying to rescue a shot comrade. No one cares about the press in the way taking pictures, they just kind of move on. No characters really develop. They don't even start with development, they just exist at the start. There seems to be an attempt at a “Come and See” like the development of a young photographer, but it ends up just being her looking into the camera a couple of times. Not even looking particularly messed up, it's just a person looking.

What happened

At some point, they are in a parking lot and take a picture of a helicopter. I forget if it was first but it didn't really do anything so I'll put it here anyway.

The gas station. They try to buy gas and the American dollar is worth nothing. Canadian dollars are more tempting. Some looters are being tortured. Nothing really happens, they just talk about the need to be brave and take pictures. OK. They just kind of walk around for a second, frankly, I completely forgot about the scene spare the joke about 300 USD buying a sandwich.

Next, they go to a place with a firefight and we get the above-mentioned scene where the press are just actively in the way. This does touch on a civil war being cruel and disorganized with killings of surrendered people, and I think was generally supposed to show that risk and show that there are indeed gunfights in this movie that might carry risk. 

They make a stop at a refugee camp where they drink around a fire, and hell, if we all just hung out real nice around a fire wouldn't life just be so nice? We wouldn't have to be so worried!

There is a sniper battle scene. This one is brutal. They get shot at so put their van in cover. They notice a sniper in full camo aiming at where the bullets are coming from, so... they run over to where the sniper is, flash their press badges, and try to talk to the snipers. This seems like the best way to get the sniper spotted, but anyway, the sniper naturally is with them. Who are you fighting for? I'm just keeping myself alive. Who are you fighting? The other guy. I feel like this was supposed to be a soldier solidarity of I fight not for the generals but for the guys in the foxhole next to me. All I can say is: “What?” Mate it's a civil war. You have chosen to be an active militant on your own and you are in a battle with one other person. If you don't have anyone in the foxhole and nor does the other person, then just, why? Also, the paint on the sniper seemed designed to not be able to be read as any alliance. This scene really bothered me. It was a real peak of feeling like it was supposed to be intense, but it was just the press fucking everything up, no one caring and everyone involved being sculpted to have as little political depth as possible, to the point of no character having any... character. Sometimes they do something a little shocking one way or another, but they are all so devoid of any real motivation or sense of place in the world. You know, maybe that's it. No character here feels like they have any real mission they are on because of their beliefs of the world. They are all just existing and doing something. Why? Well, you know.

So they needed to spice it up. One of the characters gets kidnapped and gets caught up with a pink sunglasses guy who is filling a mass grave. Interesting. Pink Glasses asks the characters where they are from and when the press people say American cities he says ”Yeah that's America.” A guy we barely met says Hong Kong and pink sunglasses kills him. OK. The press main guy who was apparently his friend starts I am a doctor screaming and the scene ends with an extra press person killing pink sunglasses with their car. This was the only scene that almost had a sovl. Ooh, xenophobia he doesn't like non-American Americans. I can see that happening. Somehow, it still felt like an apolitical guy. Like no real political anything. It didn't seem like a message of racism here and there in this system is bad and violent, it truly seemed like just a freak hick who did that and it was bad. Anyone can get behind that! Almost no one would think of themselves as that character, so it can pass. This is when the only character to think of questions for the president dies. Guess they have no real aim in their quest anymore.

They arrive at the base and realize the war is pretty much le over. The president is surrounded and has almost nothing left while the Cali-Texans have a lot. The scoop they had is done. The president is meaningless now since he lost. He isn't the president of anything, and if they reached him, they wouldn't get any questions because the president would get domed the second they got close with anyone. Anyways, they continue. This is the only time you see jets and they just kind of fly over the camera. Jets would be critical in this situation, but there you go.

Anyways, there is a pretty cool battle scene and the press does nothing but get more and more in the way of anything just to take pictures of hallways before any opps show up. Eventually one of them dies and it's supposed to be so dramatic but, you know, it really wasn't. They follow soldiers to the president and stop the soldiers from killing the president to get a final quote which is... “Don't let them kill me.” This felt rather underwhelming. 

So

This movie wasn't bad. It was truly nothing. No one did anything worth anything, no characters developed, and there was no political stance in a movie about an American civil war.

It felt like there was supposed to be a PTSD arc for the young photographer but it ended up manifesting as just her looking at the camera sometimes.

At one point I noticed how it really seemed like cameras were likened to guns and thought that could make a cool statement. Maybe the way we operate the press is violence? Maybe the way we just take pictures isn't actually helping people and we have a responsibility to do that? Or maybe it's just to show that the press is actually brave and cool guys!

I think we brought up two theories for what this movie was really about. One was about showing the chaos that America sows overseas and bringing it home to show what it is like to have a coup and political chaos, uprisings, and violence result from it. The other is that the press is the main bastion of truth in documenting what is really going on. It felt like the first option was something you could manifest, but the way the film is shot with taking pictures all the time makes it seem more like the second. The press shows us stuff may not be the most challenging take for anyone to digest, which seems to fit the feel of the movie as well.

So was it at least about how the civil war would really damage the fabric of everything? Well, in avoiding politics it kind of made no real sense why the civil war was actually happening. There were some words thrown around, but nothing that really felt like it truly explained what regime shift people really wanted that would truly sustain such a large mobilization and sustained effort. What it did do was show how you could be a cool journalist on the front lines of a big internal war capturing all these big stories. Also, the war was conclusive with the president losing, which makes starting a civil war seem much cooler. They killed the president! Kind of a pro-war macro and pro-war micro-scale film. I don't think this was intended.

What blew my mind is something that I found out later. Alex Garland, who had previously made Ex Machina and Annihilation, both of which I loved, both wrote and directed this. It is fascinating that someone could write and direct a film for A24, the art hoe film studio, and come up with a vision of an American civil war that is absolutely boneless. Not directed but someone else's ideas, not had a studio outline it but it got jacked or anything like that. This was a vision that was created from start to end by one person, and it is just so flaccid. How? It does look great. The pacing is good. It does have this overall visual delivery that I really enjoy. How did it end up that nothing?

Bonus

World War Z is a book that I really liked that had a terrible film adaptation. Well, it's not a terrible film, it's a fine enough zombie action movie, but it isn't World War Z. It just isn't like the book. We noted that the apocalypse America just looks like a zombie movie, be it deliberately or by association by this point. I couldn't help but think: of a movie about a journalist documenting something relatively impersonally, just relaying experiences as they happened, with great visuals and a really good knack for telling these short stories from all around. This movie could have been an amazing World War Z. The same visuals and overall direction given to the invasion of the white house could have made a phenomenal battle for Yonkers. Instead, it's boneless politics bait. There you go.

---

The press should be treated like police

Do not talk to them

They are the enemy of the people

---

Oncle

Language

Language is fundamentally a system used to distinguish disconnected elements. If someone takes the 10 am train, it is the 10 am train. Every train car may be different. The engineer may be different. All the people on the train may be different. The time the train arrives may be different. It is the 10 am train, because despite all the differences, the use of the language of “10 am train” helps us identify it and distinguish it. It is a train that is generally close enough to 10 am, despite other methods of transport and other trains. The language can act as a signifier (it indicates) a signified (something being indicated).

This puts language as categorical in its nature. We have categories for everything. I am a man, I generally feel like a man, and I present as a man. I have a perception of masculinity. Based on my perspective on my life, I believe I broadly fit into these categories. Others generally believe the same, though if put through further scrutiny, others’ perspectives of me put me in are different per person, and the same applies to what categories they consider being masculine. This changes what categories of masculinity describe me. The language used in descriptions of myself and masculinity are both fractured in their nature. If someone categorizes me as masculine, the fractured signifiers of their perception of the signified masculinity overlap with the fractured signifiers of their perception of the signified me in such a way that resolves with them categorizing me as masculine.

Identity

This already shows an issue. I am a subject that can be experienced directly be someone. People may not have a full understanding of me, but they can achieve a level of faith in their understanding of me to feel confident in their language used to describe me. This language they use builds up over time through experiencing me. The same cannot be said about masculinity. Masculinity is a widely contested and abstract concept that cannot be concretely experienced. Instead of language coming from experiencing it, masculinity is learned through assigning traits to it. These traits then come back in affirming a socially constructed definition of masculinity built up through social replication of more people assigning similar traits a similar category of masculine. The idea of masculinity does not start as masculinity – it starts as nothing. It has no inherent meaning or experience, no inherent value. I am me. Masculinity is what? Masculine is manly, but that is only because masculinity defines manly. There is no concrete element. What we assign as a concrete element of masculinity is something not that masculinity is defined by, but something that matches many elements in retrospect. The same logic can broadly follow for femininity.

Broadly, there are two categories that people are often assigned: masculine and feminine. There is an understood spectrum here. There are masculine men and feminine women, but also masculine women and feminine men. This concept of classification moves deeper when we consider that there are people who identify with neither. We can ask what they are defining themselves against. If different people have different perceptions of what masculinity and femininity are, would someone not be able to classify themselves as masculine or feminine and adjust their own perception of masculinity or femininity to match one or the other well enough? There are definitely different types of masculine and feminine. Could they not assign themselves a certain type of masculine or feminine?

This seems possible, even easy, on its own. Unfortunately, the language traps it. As people categorize using language to distinguish these elements, one must generally boil down a part of their identity to becoming a widely understood category of the above. Since the language becomes a part of our socially assigned identity, to have it easily come into question brings the entire identity of someone into question. If I am a social being, and those around me do not understand what I am, what am I? Is the answer to select different random features to use to describe you instead as a replacement? Would these features then assign a masculinity or femininity by proxy? It could be that they see enough features that could broadly fall under both that they could be seen as both or neither.

I have seen much of identifying as neither, if you don’t like the game you can try to reject it, but why not both? There would appear to be a greater conflict in both than neither, as despite both being broad umbrellas, they are seemingly defined negatively against each other rather than positively and within themselves. Masculinity is often seen, at least under a broadly patriarchal society, as acting in a way that fits the current cultural ideal of a man, not in a way that could be feminine. Femininity is defined in response as not doing what is masculine, doing instead what helps support the masculine to be feminine. This circular logic in defining masculinity and femininity seems to not only describe the dynamic and history of how masculinity and femininity are perceived (at least in the vvest) but explains why both seems to be more strange than neither. Unfortunately, it also completely fails at truly defining or aiding in understanding either as their own concepts.

The only way, it seems, to truly define masculinity or femininity is to have an understanding of the phenomenological experiences of being masculine or feminine outside of the environment of a society which has ingrained power structures surrounding masculinity and femininity. This is a complete dead end for two reasons. The first is the complete lack of a broader understanding of phenomenology. The other is what I broadly consider being one of the large stumbling points of the feminist movement. Liberal feminism, instead of being able to abolish the power structures surrounding men and women, ended up resolving its movement by allowing women greater access to the patriarchal power structures surrounding them.

Note: I want to be abundantly clear. This is not a talking point saying that previous feminist movements failed or were bad. This is a feminist talking point used as a point towards the continuation and future goals of the feminist movement, particularly under who I would broadly categorize as communist feminists, modern and historical. I got this from bell hooks, who used it describing how the power structures still change our understanding of love.

Un-identity

I decided if I wanted to discuss more of the phenomenological points of masculinity, I had to look inwardly at myself and what I consider makes me masculine. Truly masculine, outside of what society imposes as masculine. Given that I have above already described masculine as socially constructed, continually shifting, and built through its contradictory/circular logic around femininity, the conclusion that I arrived at makes sense. There is nothing that inherently makes me feel masculine. There is only what makes me feel as though I am me, and I can later broadly classify some of those as masculine, but only if I decide to. This decision in feeling masculine based on how one feels could be conscious, as it now must be for me, or subconscious, widely assigned to a person by the structures surrounding them. As they grow up and come to create their definitions of masculinity or femininity, they must also grow towards fitting themselves into the one they assign to themselves.

From here, if I found that there was nothing that made me feel truly masculine, but I did find that there was a sense of me I experienced, I wondered if I could just identify simply as me. There is no better way for me to signify myself than to use the signifier of me myself. I assumed that if others were to try to truly discover themselves as well, if gender is a social construct, they would, broadly speaking, find the same too. Here I realized that through reading two pages of a book and a train analogy, I had managed to think myself into being some kind of non-binary gender abolitionist. There was another realization deepening the rabbit hole when I realized that non-binary was also based on the definitions of masculine and feminine. It was, therefore, still a socially constructed identity definition category circularly defined against masculinity, but now also femininity.

Symbolic Identity

There is no social way to un-identify. We communicate with language, and language is a tool of categorization. Identity is a categorization that results from the need to describe using language. The use of language traps us into an understanding of identity that is fundamentally limited by our ability to communicate in itself.

Language, in distinguishing disconnected elements, must have a subject and an object. Someone must be speaking, and it must be to someone, even if that is to oneself. Using language, we create a model of ourselves as language, which acts as an extension of our true selves; in creating this language model, it is finding identity not for oneself, but for the reception of others. Done on its own, the person is appealing to an ideal ego, an expression of an actualized self. This ideal ego looks back, the ego ideal, a symbolic self that one must appease and aim towards becoming. This ideal ego, being actualized, must have a sense of self and identity which the subject is looking for, so the person whose identity has now been lost is doing a performative dance of identity finding to an othered version of themselves that is seeing them.

This dynamic creates a sense of self directly subject to the symbolic order, which is oppressive to the true self. Identity is no longer your identity but rather a language formation that must be abided by or else the language, the synthesis of identity and no identity, will be rejected and the subject left stranded. Once again, they would be missing a bedrock of identity to understand themselves. Unable to simply exist as oneself, existence becomes a self-categorization under language designed as a performative display for others, whether or not others even actually exist to perceive the performative self-categorization. It finds and categorizes identity, but only insofar as no identity is found.

Language Abandonment

If we were searching purely within ourselves, finding identity would be through personal reflection alone and un-identifying would be possible. Language is the signifier of something that is being signified. The words we use to describe our identity signify what our lived experience with our identity truly is, but there is an inherent disconnect between the language used and our lived experience. This disconnect is sourced from different people’s perspectives. I can describe how I feel to be me, and others can listen and do their best to connect with it, but they cannot experience my experiences or understanding of them. When we try to explain what it feels like to feel like ourselves, the use of language goes from extremely limited in its ability to completely unusable. How can I begin to explain what it is like to be me if the words used in my explanation are built through from my experience being me? To borrow from Buddhism, to even begin to attempt to give people an idea of what it is like to be me, I must be able to describe my form, sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness. Can you truly say you are aware of all of these? Would you say you have mastery and understanding? I reckon that even if someone did, they would understand that language is fundamentally flawed in conveying it.

There is a pain that can come from the dissociation from the language itself. The affliction is in a shattered understanding of self. The symptom of the affliction is the language. The relief from the pain comes from the abandonment of language altogether. To abandon the language would be through meditative practice and learning a greater understanding of one’s being. No number of signifiers is able to be compiled into a universal understanding of one’s lived experience, but one may be able to reconcile their experience for themself.

---

Tryna tell you

I’m only human baby

or am I

---

Oncle

Before we start: I am not a doctor or a psychologist. I make bold claims here left and right. Keep this in mind Before we start 2: I'm doing pretty good right now, despite how this article may come across. It's been a lot, but I've been doing a lot of processing things and I think it's paid off. This article is just a part of me organizing my thoughts and doing more of just that: processing things.

The Sad and The Depressed

One of my favourite days of the week right now is Sunday. I usually see someone, often Elisa, in the mornings, I head to practice, and then I go out for dinner with some teammates afterward. Three social events in the span of a day, interesting and delicious food twice, and some social exercise. It has everything I want in a day. This is great for me because this summer was not the summer for your Oncle Spenny.

My last year of uni was great, I had really found a role. Despite not everything being perfect, there were no major negative afflictions, which is the state in which I had spent many of my uni years. I am always suspicious of good times because I know my luck, but my luck had been holding, right up until the last week.

The Sad

note: this is a trauma dump. If you don't want all the personal stuff, you can just read the last little paragraph at the end of this section and work from there

I remember calling my dad and being happy to chat with him for a few days in a row. I was getting advice since I had forgotten my bag somewhere stupidly and gotten all my stuff stolen. A couple days later, I got a call from my mom saying that he had collapsed and I had to rush home. He had an incurable late-stage brain cancer which had already taken over more than half of his brain. On top of this, he was our family's breadwinner. Our relationship was complicated, but we were on OK terms, which I had worked hard to maintain. Not only was I losing him, I had to figure out more of the real world and fast, with no post-university buffer.

I remember being outside of an Allwyn's with my mom soon after and getting a phone call. It was my girlfriend at the time. She had separation anxiety and was worried about not being able to see me enough while I was working out the above situation with my dad. I went to Kingston to see everyone and show it would be OK, and she broke up with me. She later apologized, explained that it was an anxiety from separation anxiety, and tried to work things out, but my trust was shattered, and I decided not to go back. Essentially, the relationship ended by accident on the worst possible terms.

My dad took the most complicated way out, surviving being taken off life support for a few days and just keeping on waking up for yet one more cigarette until he didn't. There were many ups and downs in the process. The summer then went on with a vacation to the east coast which was amazing, but I soon returned home I spent the next months working, trying to figure out my role and trying to figure out my new home back at home living in Toronto again. It was a big change from Kingston, a smaller town which I had grown to love. Distances were now farther and I had to drive constantly, which brought its own crisis in not knowing how to navigate properly anymore.

Over the next months, my ex had reached out to me multiple times in her mental health crises and we had talked a few times. It was clearly not what it once was, not even close, but I figured we had things on a functional level. We had practices where we were fine around each other. Eventually, with the help of an injury, my physical health also stuttered. With it, my mental crises weighed on me and my mind shattered. It was now me who needed help. At just past 1 am I reached out to some friends, who didn't reply as they were sleeping, then not knowing where to turn I contacted my ex for help. She used the words of my cry for help and reflected them back to turn me away. To anyone reading, never do this. I have never regretted being there to help people, and now I know just how much worse not helping someone can make things. This botched response made my crisis significantly worse.

Luckily, Elisa got back to me soon after and helped me, and I had another teammate reach back once I was on the phone too. I talked to my teammate at a later date and both friends were an immense help. From here, Elisa and I embarked on a project that I will credit for helping me out of the depths of this mess: project friendsmaxxing. See friends as often as possible and make it work at all costs. It was awesome, and while we are in a different phase of the project now, it served as the groundwork for getting all the friends together and continues in spirit.

That's to say that I did get help and it was helpful, but stemming from that initial mishandling of my crisis were more crises. I dropped a semester to be with my sister when she was hospitalized years back, and it turns out that changed a lot behind the scenes. That dropped semester ensured that I would not get any awards or recognition from Queen's for the rest of my time there. Unfortunately, I cannot go into specifics, but this made me feel betrayed as well. I spent much time reassuring and convincing myself that I wasn't being sabotaged somewhere, but I effectively was.

One award that I had aimed for was the Boat Award, named after my friend and teammate Boat who unfortunately took her own life in my time on the team. At the time, I was going through a bad time myself, and despite thinking she didn't like me, she was always there for me. It was profoundly confusing to realize that it was she who wouldn't make it. At her funeral, I spoke because I felt compelled to, and I made a promise to make sure that no one around me would go without mental health help, and I would always be there for everyone. I did well in this regard. I never won that award, which I don't need, but I would have liked it.

The one who did win the award that year was the person who turned me away when I needed help. This situation seriously harmed my relationship with Boat. Reconciling my relationship with Boat has been profoundly difficult. Someone did go without help, so I feel like I failed my promise to her. I did so well for so many, but I feel like I didn't do enough. I never got that boat award, so I feel like I didn't live up to her. I know I could have gotten the award if not for that one semester, so I feel like I did at the same time. A confusing relationship with someone no longer with us is no simple task. My relationship with my father is similar in that regard.

Reconciling my relationship with my previous team has also been profoundly difficult. I want to be there and I want to root for all my friends, but I can't be there for the sake of my own mental health. I don't know how to face the person who abandoned me in my time of need, then again during a mental health crisis. I don't want the person who abandoned me to win, especially the first year after I am gone. I do want the team to win. It is a painful spot to be in. So far, I haven't fully managed to reconcile either of these relationships.

After all of this, taking a while to slowly get back on my feet, I learned that my friend and capstone project partner didn't make it after a car crash. He was 22, around the time when I consider myself as really starting to hit my full stride. The same age boat was.

All of this has been a lot to handle, especially at once. There are several major crises I am facing. I am sad, and I have been profoundly sad and anxious for a while, but at least right now, I don't think I am depressed. At least since the onset of operation friendsmaxxing.

The Depressed

I was out for a Sunday dinner with some friends from the team, and one of my teammates said that everything seemed to be going really well, but she was sad, and that made her feel guilty, especially around people who had been through a lot of specific things. She was not able to point out any specific affliction causing her feeling of dejection, but it was there all the same.

I don't think she is sad, but I do think she may be depressed.

I am not her and I cannot read her mind. I do not have complete information and details of her life which I can point out. I also want to clarify that compared to mine I do not want to diminish her experience. The opposite. I am going through a hard time, she is going through a hard time. We are both in a struggle to improve. This essay explores some of my perceived differences in these conditions in the hope that it helps.

Sadness and Depression

Sadness and depression are linked. Many think that prolonged sadness is depression. I don't think so. I think that while the feeling may present fairly similarly, being a general somber negative emotion, the mechanisms in how they work are distinct. Not only do I think it matters, but I think that especially in the current world, it is a critical distinction to make. I believe sadness and depression are completely different, and recognition of the difference may be a game-changer for people who suffer as they may be able to better understand it.

The Cause of Sadness

Sadness is inflicted upon someone. It is an acute event or condition that causes a person to feel a grievance, which feels like sadness. It follows an immunological response: when the body has the flu, your body raises its temperature to try to stop the virus from multiplying. This rise in temperature is a fever, and it feels awful. When you go through a grievance, your mind produces a sadness to help you process the grievance, and it feels awful.

This puts the grievance in the state of being the other (akin to the flu virus), and the sadness as the reaction to the other (akin to the fever). When a flu virus is introduced to you, your body works to other it again by expunging it, ensuring that it is othered again. Sadness similarly works as a method to other one's grievances. An affliction rises in the present and acts as a negative on the mental, and the mind produces sadness to process it and expunge it into the past.

In the case of loss, such as a loved one, they become memories. You may be reminded of them in the present, but their presence is pushed to the past. The moments in the present where you engage with them and realize they are not there fade. In the case of ailments, such as career-ending injuries, the ailment cannot be expunged, so instead the mental expunges the identity associated with what the ailment prevents to the past, forcing the person to create a new identity to bring into the future. An athlete may no longer be that athlete, they are something else now but used to be that athlete.

I also have categorized traumas under sadness, which may be controversial. I believe that permanent traumas are the equivalent of a fever so bad it causes permanent damage or death. Trauma is a sadness so bad that it either inflicts a permanent mental scar or in the case of debilitating traumas such as PTSD, the reaction kills the present instead of the past in its reaction against the affliction. Instead of a person leaving a major affliction behind, they are unable to live completely in the present, a part of them becomeing stuck in that past.

The Cause of Depression

Where sadness works with the immunization model, an affliction with a purge, depression instead works with a fatigue model. You cannot sleep off the flu, your body must expunge it (you sleep to recover the toll taken from this process). Alternatively, your body cannot simply expunge fatigue, you must sleep to recover it (and your body may expunge ideal function until you do to encourage sleep). Depression is caused by exhaustion from coping with a world that is not designed to accommodate your humanity.

Many say that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. I think this is not true, or at least, the wording may be misleading. I believe that a chemical imbalance may continue a depression longer than it should exist, but the initial cause of the depression is generally not a chemical imbalance. Either the depression causes the chemical imbalance, or something causes the chemical imbalance that causes the depression. The chemical imbalance does not spawn from nowhere. Whether it is a chemical imbalance or not, I believe it is initially caused by this fatigue.

Fatigue does not arise from a specific condition. It arrives through wider processes of living, and if the fatigue is not addressed, results in exhaustion, or at worst, burnout. If not created by an affliction, however, how do we know what processes of living afflict the exhaustion? Simply put, it is more long-standing life circumstances than any one specific thing, and a combination of many processes and non-human oriented circumstances can, in conjunction, slowly cause wear on the psyche that results in exhaustion and burnout. These conditions are generally not personal, but rather impersonal, external, and political. They do not afflict a person, but people. They do not come from your relationships but from a lack of them. It does not come from nothing but is systemically created.

One of the first and most predictable systemically created causes of depression is alienation from labour. What are seen as high-skill and desirable jobs are technologically advanced, and generally involve high mental expenditure put into a computer as the machine used to process the labour. Nothing comes from the machine, the results of the process are simply sent away. On top of that, a product is rarely finished, and the result of the labour is often intangible or not even recognizable. To further this, technological surveillance, optimization, and the decline of unions have made people further squeezed to perform tasks like a robot instead of a human. This is beneficial to profits, but extremely detrimental to the well-being of the people being squeezed.

To add to this, our free time is spent working more than ever. Even beyond side hustles (read as having multiple jobs), people are now addicted to performing free labour. Social media platforms gain their value from having more users and monopolizing people's attention. To contribute to these platforms and engage on them is to perform labour for them. We spend all day labouring just to return home and continue to labour for free under a different labouring structure. We are addicted to work that we have no control over, and given that much of it is for free, the compensation we have is abysmal. Even under the industrial capitalists who abused their workers to the extreme, at least the workers had some time that was truly theirs. That time is now capitalized on with unpaid labour delivered to us through smart devices. The ability to be free from labour is no longer respected as a core of our humanity.

We also now have to be much more creative with how we interact with work as a whole. Previous generations were broadly able to be successful while just being told what to do. You could get a job. In the Keynesian era, there was practically 0% unemployment with an extremely robust social welfare safety net. In the competing Soviet Union, there was a job guarantee. You could work at a company, get raises or promotions, and then generally retire off of that. Now, it is nearly impossible to afford a home in much of the world. Where previously a single income from a mailman could raise a family, now, a job and a side hustle may not be able to afford a decent place to live at all. Generationally, this is not understood, which leads to a wider political confusion about living standards. They were supposed to always go up over time, but that isn't the experience of many young people nowadays.

Another aspect is structural loneliness. The isolation in the workplace is not the extent of it. Many neighbourhoods were deliberately built to be as isolating as possible. Suburbs were designed with keeping people out in mind. They also enforced more space between houses. We have a lot of data that people quote about how many people in their neighbourhood someone is able to remember. Those who live in towns are able to remember and know several times more people than those in suburbs. Those in the suburbs may even say they have not talked to anyone in their neighbourhood in years. n top of this, cars are a travel medium that promotes isolation from spontaneous encounters with people. Technology like earbuds also provide constant stimulus and prevent anyone from talking to others randomly. It is often even considered rude to try to do so at all.

On the line of stimulus, social media and other technological innovations have led us blindly into a world of constant overwhelming stimulus. Distraction can help delay sadness, but feeds into depression. We constantly consume content, often from multiple sources at the same time, and deprivation from that content is considered weird. Even internally within these forms of constant stimulus, the rate of stimulus is increasing. What was once scrolling text posts from friends turned to more global posts based on topics, which has now turned to short-form content: exposure to global algorithm shovel-fed videos, each designed to grab as much attention as possible. This over-stimulus makes the real world, the physical world we live in, extremely boring by comparison. We become isolated from reality.

For those who go out to search for answers, there is also a broader confusion about the world. When they search, they find liberal history misleading, but the newfound discoveries are hard to communicate, especially without being a buzzkill. People complain about capitalism, but liberalization seemed to do a lot of good historically, raising people out of poverty. People complain about neoliberalism, but the economists say this is the best way. Are we in the neoliberal era or the techno-feudal era? Will the solutions proposed make things way worse if that is answered incorrectly how do we know? There are so many things to look into and so many fields to explore, where does one go to find more? There are many conflicting answers, which ones are actually correct or at least on to something? It is extremely confusing, overwhelming, and exhausting. Even just looking at any one structure of finance is often so complicated and convoluted that the most knowledgeable don't really know what they're doing.

When the mental labour of existing becomes taxing, we submit to exhaustion. When the work is too much, we burn out and are given no time to recover. It is under these conditions that depression takes over, and now you can see why it cannot be expunged. to expunge it would be far greater than to handle our own emotions, to handle our emotions without changing these circumstances would simply lead to a greater ability to be exploited, which would lead to further burnout. That is, if you find a way to cope, it will only free you up to expose you to more of the aforementioned.

If it cannot be expunged under the immunization model, the exhaustion model implies that it needs to be rested. This does not mean rest as in sleeping but rather a freedom to get away from exploitation and bombardment of our senses through spaces like social media. It may mean complete rest from these, or it may mean use in a healthy moderation. This rest would require freedom from work, exploitation, and the speed of stimulus. This is extremely hard to achieve, as there are a lot of resources spent trying to make it as addicting as possible to succumb under these circumstances to more media consumption. This is why depression is so common right now.

Crisis!

I believe that crises come at an intersection of sadness and depression.

Depression, being an exhaustion, creates an apathy. It resists strong emotion. Depression is not a wrath or hatred, but a wider indifference and warped reality that loses its sense of joy and whimsicality. It is the dulling of intensity, and crisis spawns from intensity. Sadness on the other hand is a process that can be incredibly intense, but can usually be handled in a favorable and human environment. People have struggled with sadness forever, but through strong human connections, the emotions would be processed.

When a person goes through an overwhelming sadness without the wider environment that supports their humanity, we arrive at a crisis. The lowest of the low. It is here where the strong negative emotions of sadness are able to combine with the negative emotions of depression to send someone to rock bottom. If depression is a long-term steady signal, and sadness is more volatile, both being at their lowest sends the overall mental into a negative spiral, straight down with no immediate trusted and safe network to stop it.

Aside: Everyone should have a plan written down somewhere for what to do in a crisis. In these lows, the brain is beyond logic. Writing can help organize your brain, and maybe it can help you if you're unfortunate enough to come across a crisis.

Analysis and Solutions

These are methods I used after my crisis on my journey to becoming better. All of them were and still are useful to me, and I will continue with them. I recommend if you are facing something you look into what may be useful to you.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

I believe cognitive behavioural therapy is best targeted at solving issues of sadness. This is not to say that it cannot help with depression, but I believe sadness is its most precise target. It is based on finding specific grievances then helping you process the emotions, and helping you improve your interactions with those specific grievances. I spent some time on a cognitive behavioural therapy workbook after my crisis, and it helped me immensely. I was able to take the complex mountain of issues I was facing, organize them in my mind, and recognize the emotions that I was struggling with. The workbook, Mind Over Mood, was an indispensable tool for attacking my complex sadness, and I would recommend it to anyone.

But why do I think it targets sadness more than depression? I believe cognitive behavioural therapy targets specific grievances for an individual to help them process it. As sadness needs to be expunged into the past, it can help in the processing of the sadness, akin to how medicine may be able to help treat sicknesses. The focus is on what is happening to a person and helping them overcome it, helping them move forward. Facing fears, learning strategies to relax, and organizing to process emotion is incredibly useful, but under my model depression does not need to be expunged. It needs to be rested.

Cognitive behavioural therapy can help with this resting process, but I believe it to be more of a by-product of the process rather than the express goal worked towards. Time spent processing emotions in a workbook before bed is time spent achieving your own labour on your own terms, for you and not for anyone else. It is quiet, relaxing, and mentally calming without additional stimulus. Time spent talking to a therapist is similar, and also social. It will engage in this rest and will help, but these instances of rest are temporary while you are engaged in that process. To be sustainable, the immediate rest needs to be used to make other changes to sustain the rest outside of these temporary outlets.

Psychoanalysis

I believe that psychoanalysis is best targeted at solving issues of depression. If depression requires rest from living under circumstances not designed to accommodate humanity, psychoanalysis helps us understand the basic conditions of human living. It gives us insight into the core of human behaviour and allows us methods of understanding the systems we interact with. It can identify the wider plights of humanity, which allows us to learn how to rest from them. It is not rest in itself, though the reading may be restful, but it can help us learn how to rest and what we need to rest from.

It may also be the case that someone's life seems to be going well with no identifiable plight. In this case, anti-depressants may be an indispensable tool in improving their conditions. It may be that an initial change in the depression or anxiety alone is enough to break out of the negativity and start an upward trend.

Where psychoanalysis suffers is that this overthinking of everything and understanding of the plights of humanity can be stressful. It can become a specific affliction to a person, its own sadness. Not only that, but it can be complicated and obtuse at best, which leaves a lot of interpretation for many topics you try to analyze. At that, it is extremely fun if done correctly and with friends, which I would recommend any day.

Anti-Depressants

After my crisis, I started taking a low dose of anti-depressants and have found it useful. I believe that anti-depressants have a role in some cases. Anti-depressants will not solve the problem, but can provide the necessary cover which allows someone to make necessary changes. If one is exhausted or anxious, it is incredibly hard to get out and do things that will provide cognitive rest, such as getting out to see a friend. Anti-depressants can help boost a person to the point where they can do this. They allow people to get out of bed, do laundry, and all those Sisyphean tasks which exist in such a constant cycle that they can overwhelm constantly.

I think it is dangerous to treat them as a solution. Someone who is depressed because they only ever work and never see friends may use anti-depressants to feel less depressed, but if they still do nothing but work, they have simply turned themselves into homo laborans, one who exists purely as a subject of labour. This uses anti-depressants not as a method of solving the issue, but as a coping mechanism which only serves to allow themselves to further their own exploitation and exhaustion.

In summary, they are an incredibly useful tool, but every tool should be used properly. If we recognize what depression is, the usage becomes more clear. I think this may be able to help people in their journey to getting better if they have been prescribed anti-depressants. They are a part of the process, but not the destination.

Goals and Healing

For both sadness and depression, the goal is the same: feeling better. I said earlier that I think they are distinctly different, but I think the goals for healing are incredibly similar. Healing from these conditions is simply to return to being happy as a person and living under circumstances good for a human to live under. Some of this we can control, and some of this we cannot.

For both sadness and depression, community is incredibly useful. For sadness, it brings a method of venting and connection that can help create new memories to expunge the sadness and trauma of the past as you move forward. For depression, it creates an environment of connection and support that is good for a social being. Creating a close and trusting bond with a larger community as well as having multiple communities of any size you feel safe around is an integral part of the healing process.

Everyone should also pick up a craft that they do for themselves. Creating something physical with the sweat of one's brow, creating from nothing, taking something raw and turning it into a work worth more than the sum of its parts. Alienation from labour can be devastatingly alienating, but being completely in tune with one's work can be a joy. You can create for yourself or others, but it must be on your own terms and through your own personal labour. For sadness, emotion can be put into creating that can help process raw emotion alongside processing raw materials. Learning more also provides new direction to move forward. For depression, it is a return to the humanity of labour that can be rare right now. Many contractors say that no matter what they will never work a desk job because of how soul-sucking they are, even if the contract work is brutal on its own. At least it connects them to their work, which is a cognitive relief.

Lastly, lowering the rate of stimulus is a must. The world is a constant barrage of forces all competing to monopolize your attention for any amount of time. There is no easy escape from this. We can, however, reduce time on social media and be more mindful of what we are doing when we are on social media. I set app usage timers on my phone which I find useful for this. How often do you really find something useful on a late-night scroll? How much time is spent actually catching up and how much time is just mindlessly scrolling? That's what I thought. For sadness, being alone with your thoughts for a while can be instrumental in actually processing your emotions, even if it doesn't feel good in the moment. To have additional stimulus is to run away from processing your emotions, which means delaying their complete resolution. For depression, time away from stimulus provides the best cognitive rest. Even boredom, which we dread so much, brings about opportunity for new whimsical experiences alone or with friends which will provide more lasting memories than any daily doom-scroll ever could.

The goal is to feel better. This ramble has helped me process a lot of my thoughts, maybe it has done the same for you.

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Steady tryin' to maintain I'ma find a perfect balance we gon' be al-

---

Oncle Spenny

Some ideas before I get into Capital, Piketty, and Carney

An Overly Simple Look At Why We Have Economies

Everyone knows the classic adage about how the economy was born and expanded. People didn't all have the same goods or skills, so they started trading goods with each other. Different things had different values, so people found ways to work with differing values. One way was a single currency in which all goods could be traded, and voila, you now have some version of a working economy. Now, people can specialize and everyone in the community can benefit.

Later, things became bigger. Completely different regions of the world had completely different resources, methods of production, and finished goods. These goods could be traded too, but having multiple currencies makes things a little more confusing. In comes a global currency and exchange! Now, things can be traded everywhere more easily. The economy has now surpassed the community and is now, in some way or another, global, The global economy being built up of many smaller economies. Different places are able to produce different goods significantly more efficiently. If each place produces the goods it is most efficient at and trades with all other places in the global economy, everyone should be able to have their needs met in the most efficient manner. Similar to how on a local level all community members could benefit, now all communities globally could benefit from each other. That's the theory.

This story presumes that the expansion of this “economy” was to help out as many people as possible. Why have a larger economy if it won't help everyone out? If everyone works together, we can all live a better life by doing what we do best. This idea has become global, and we are way more efficient than ever before. Why do we still have to work so much? With all these gains in productivity, why do most people seem to just get the minimum? How are there rich countries with massive sections of the population who are barely able to sustain their own survival?

Looking to the future, we have many problems on the horizon. One of these is climate change. Currently, capital believes that this will be solved by growth because that is how issues have historically been solved. Overpopulation used to be a very daunting issue, many major economists thought we would not be able to generate enough food to sustain ourselves. Luckily, we innovated our way out of it with the green revolution. Now, the issue of overpopulation is rarely thought of at all. Climate change may take a similar course, but it is not guaranteed. While there may be technological breaks that allow us to ignore the problem, relying on that doesn't seem like a real plan, but rather a comforting phrase to maintain current slow progress. We know certain “tipping points” and slowly fail to divert our course away from them, but these current limits are only what we directly know. It seems incredibly likely that there are different tipping points which we do not know. We may pass these tipping points because having specific limits seems like a promise to investors that we can make it to that limit but stop there. To stop first is to be the first one leaving the growth, which means you lose profit. Others will still chase the profit. It is a goal to work asymptotically towards, not something to avoid at all costs. These limits are incredibly important, holding countless lives at stake, but the system does not know how to hold any value in the potential for human life.

It would seem the goal of an economy should be ensuring that humans live the best lives possible, but it would seem to me that the capitalist system the world runs by is incapable of achieving this goal. This isn't because the goal is unachievable, but rather that the way the system goes about theoretically achieving this goal does not actually achieve this goal. The system isn't broken at its core, it is rather efficient to the point of dominating the world. It is just the focus of the global economic structure that is not actually helping everyone in the way they may expect. In other words, capitalism creates value in a global economy but fails at utilizing that value to actually make everyone's life better. Instead of making everyone's lives better, all of the better goes to those who dominate in the system: capital. If the value of an economy was being able to make everyone's lives better, it is safe to draw the conclusion that capitalism is starting to fail at its own understanding of value.

Value Systems And Value

There are purchases which provide a solution to a problem a person may have, and there are purchases that are frivolous. I feel it would be safe to say that balancing these two types of consumption is at the heart of most economic debate. When it comes to necessities, those on the left may argue that we need to collectively change focus to providing for everyone's needs. Those on the right may argue that when certain people have more money, they are more capable of investing than those without, and thus giving them the means to invest will lead to the best outcome for the vast majority of people. When it comes to frivolous purchases, those on the left may say anything like we don't need it at all or we should allow some regulated markets. Those on the right more or less just go with the idea that if someone bought it, it must have value to them, and therefore is valuable and should be produced.

This debate extends beyond how things work and is not just a debate on what people should or should not buy. It is often tied to a fundamental argument over what it means for something to have value at all. There are objective theories of value which tie the idea of value to that of an item, like the labour theory of value, which argues the socially necessary labour power that goes into an item creates its true value. There are also theories of value that tie value not to the item but to the consumer, like the subjective theory of value, which argues that whatever someone is willing to pay for an item is the true value of that item to them.

Right now, we live in a world based on that last idea: the subjective theory of value. Value is in the eye of the person who wants to purchase, and if they consider something to be worth it, they will buy it. Trying to actually conceptualize this is extremely messy at best, and funnily enough, often necessitates creating some form of objective theory of value which the subjective theory of value can use as a basis to function. From an intuitive standpoint, this is already extremely messy. It seems that people want the labour theory of value to be wrong so bad that they created a model of “anything goes” and decided that having no actual working definition of value was just as good as trying to find what creates value.

One of the core features of the subjective theory of value is that it blurs what value actually is. For two objects, the price of purchase can be an extremely poor indicator of the use of an item. Washing machines may trade at a comparable price to a designer belt. One of these is a revolutionary item that has permanently changed the dynamics of labour and sanitation, allowing women to enter the workforce at a much greater rate. The other does about the same thing as a cheaper belt. The main difference is that one of these is optimized for use value while the other is optimized for exchange value. One will be purchased because to live without it would be such a handicap that you likely would struggle to navigate modern life. The other will likely be purchased to show off the fact that the purchaser can purchase it.

The conflict between use optimization and exchange optimization is not just something that can display wealth. It manages to create contradictions which can lead to crises. The housing crisis of 2008 demonstrates this well. Houses are lived in and provide us, alongside appliances within, with immense use-value. Through investment and speculation, there appeared a bubble. Houses were not being bought for their use-value, but rather their exchange values. Houses were being bought up not to be lived in, but as a speculative asset to derive profits. As housing was going up, it seemed a sure investment to make more money based on its historical reliability built on its massive use-value. When the exchange value rose too high above the use value, the “true” value of the houses was nowhere close to the price they were being exchanged at. The price faltered. Houses were bought and not even filled. The price started decreasing. Being over their heads in loans to buy houses at an ever-increasing price to sell later, this decrease caused loans to default, and a crisis occurred.

Modern technology has effectively solved necessary uses. A new toaster has nothing new to add that old toasters can't do, but that doesn't allow growth, so other features are added to increase the exchange value. Aesthetics are crafted and emotional attachments are given to items to encourage consumption far beyond the actual necessities of the consumer. It also allows people to buy items which have no real use value at all, but are instead based completely on exchange values. Imaginary uses are created for items like fidget toys in order to sell them. Similar to the housing market before 2008, a bubble of exchange values is added on top of the use values, which creates a race to the top for how much exchange value one can get out of a simple item. Eventually, as the contradiction realizes its absurdity, the crisis emerges.

Major crises tend to bottom out as low as if not lower than the previous. This would make sense if people needed to reel in their spending to the core use values of an item instead of spending more money for aesthetic purposes. The use value is actually real, and with the uses being solved, it makes sense that an approximate return to this value may be a more solid foundation than any amount of exchange value built up on top of it. But why do people buy into this if they could simply satisfy their needs and stop consuming? Capitalism has adapted itself to create a new mentality which demands further consumption. It ties items to aesthetics and emotions, which unlike needs are inherently elastic. This elasticity allows for added stresses to draw re-consumption where it is not necessary but rather liked. These likes can be shaped by slow-changing trends or influenced through the digital consumption of ideal spaces apparently used by others in a way that seems more appealing than the current. There is always someone on social media with a nicer environment that helps with their better workflow. Frustrated? swap it all out. Stressed? Buy something to relieve it. Constant consumption and viewing of better things make the reality of what you have feel inadequate. Buying it might just help that. Until it is real at least, where the next aesthetic will present itself.

If the use value is real value, it would make sense to maximize the use value and then allow for more human activity on top of that, activity that need not be monetized. Instead, capitalism opts to maximize the not-so-solid exchange value on top of the use value in order to drive further consumption and growth, which helps to create the conditions for crisis. Goods are produced faster as the economy grows. Goods are produced at a rate faster than they can be consumed. A crisis of overproduction occurs. Companies contract, people lose their jobs, and wages are depressed. These crises are extremely bad for the population, but also a core feature of the capitalist business cycle. It would make sense that an economy that works for the people would try to minimize this, but that would stifle the market, so it cannot happen. The value that helps people has been lost. It has been replaced with a new one which seems to shift focus in the opposite direction.

The Internal Dilemma

The profit motive is at the core of capitalism, and by extension, liberalism. Capitalists are left to be the implement used to create change through their desire to expand markets and find more value. This may work when there is very little to start with. Resources must be harvested: labour harvesting produces value in the now-harvested goods. Those resources then must be shaped into something usable in some way, which provides more value. As resources in the immediate area are capitalized on and processed, there is more value in resources lying beyond the immediate area. Through population growth and expansion of the scope of the total system, the system can grow through harvesting and producing more, and produce and harvest more by growing. This recipe for growth was a massive success.

Globalism has reached almost the entire world now, with only a couple of population sites being not completely integrated in Asia and Africa. Outward expansion is no longer possible. Population growth is also slowing. With no more external expansion readily available, growth must now come from inside the system. Internal growth, however, is a confusing idea. If it does not produce more and more people do not come out of it, what is growing? Capitalism is about the profit motive, so the profits must grow.

This means internal expansion is effectively just increasing inequality. Capitalists try to grow their value further, constantly demanding growth. That growth is no longer available through external sources. It must come from more intense extraction of the sources it already has access to. Industries which are expanding can use new technologies to increase the rate of production without increasing labour costs. Machines are expensive, but far less expensive than the cost of significantly increasing a labour force. By introducing new technologies, tasks can also be deskilled, which may serve to reduce the cost of the current workforce as well. In saturated markets, technology can be used to allow layoffs to keep production constant while reducing the labour force, enabling more room for profit.

While external growth is available, these strategies can be used to drive up production for expanding markets, but internal growth drives directly into a contradiction. Employers want to lay off as many people as possible, while still demanding that those people buy their products to drive further growth. There are no new people being added to the system to remedy the contradiction. The workers, the ones who do the actual production, get squeezed. Rising costs, lowering wages, and reduced political power drive them to a point where they effectively become punching bags for the political-economic system in which they reside. Their lowered wages mean they can't afford as much. Having less being purchased means profit margins will be increased per product to continue growth under less volume. Higher profit margins mean increased costs. Lower political power means depressed wages. This seems to be a mirror of the commonly talked about wage-price spiral constantly touted by mainstream economists, but instead of inflation, it seems to better resemble stagflation: stagnant growth, high inflation, and decreasing employment.

Capitalism, while growing, was able to produce more for more people, creating an economic system that was able to out-compete anything before it. The growth effectively increased living standards everywhere (when regulated), and the system worked well for an increasing number of people. Global capitalism seems to run directly into a contradiction. If the value of the global capitalist economy is to ensure better wealth for everyone, global capitalism seems incapable of providing it. The mechanism that drives the system is the same mechanism that ensures that the system will not be able to achieve its apparent goal.

The Digital Ownership Paradox

Rejection of usefulness stems from this. Continuing to grow under a global capitalist system requires less efficiency. Solving problems is a bad business strategy. Satisfying all needs would prevent consumption if needs were the priority of the economy. Since just about all major needs for the maintenance of regular human life are solved, the system needs to find ways to allow increases in efficiency in production in a system that does not demand them. The solution is manufactured inefficiencies in consumption. Appliances that serve multiple real and necessary uses become multiple appliances that serve real uses alongside many functions that are completely unnecessary. Additionally, appliances that solve a problem will now be driven to act in a way to un-solve the problem which was solved. Planned obsolescence un-solves the problem through the manufactured breaking of the appliance. Emotional capitalism can un-solve the problem by attaching the solution to personal aesthetics, then using changing aesthetics to demand re-consumption even though the appliance is still functionally fine. The usefulness is removed from being the core of an appliance.

Another tenant of this inefficiency in consumption is the introduction of middlemen to a system. A business no longer has decisions made by a CEO with a vision, but rather has a board with consultants who advise on how decisions are made. The product doesn't get sold to a customer, but rather to platforms for resale. A product is often not sold at all, but rented perpetually, allowing the same product to be sold to many customers. This may be sequentially or at the same time, or rented to one until the amount paid is greater than if it was outright purchased. This vertical integration of indecisiveness to avoid private responsibility simply balloons bureaucracy in the process of failing to actually deliver any ownership of items to end consumers. This is contradictory to some of the core ideas of capitalism: the idea that markets will create more efficiency and reduce bureaucracy, and the idea that private ownership is freedom in the sense that it allows people to own. These ideas have struck a middle-ground of less efficiency, more bureaucracy, and preventing ownership, all in the name of bolstering profits.

The gig economy is a prime example of this middleman ballooning in what were traditionally already services. Unable to come up with new ideas, which would require creativity alongside risky investment, the easier and more reliable method is to simply undercut a service that has been regulated and insert yourself as a middleman to deregulated micro business owners. Platform people who will take on the burden of risk, atomize them as much as possible, and take a cut of all services they provide. Each of these atomized workers is responsible for themself. They are also able to take advantage of different sections of labour law, which tends to be more lenient on tiny businesses. Individuals doing work by themselves are not nearly as regulated as larger models, and thus a large model of individuals does not need to abide by all those labour laws as they stand.

Platform companies are an example of bloat for functions that exist in real space. Software does not exist in real space but can be replicated practically indefinitely for almost no cost. Creating a post-scarcity space should be a marvel of human progress. Instead, it has become a hunting ground for rent-seekers and middlemen to create scarcity where it does not exist. Digital rights management and non-fungible tokens are examples of people trying to create scarcity. The value of a post-scarcity information-sharing environment should be unimaginable, but to capitalism, its value only exists insofar as that value can be realized through extraction to a private owner. The value for humanity has been completely lost by the new value it could pose to investors who know how to take advantage of it.

Digitally, innovation has also seemed to lose the core of what people imagine value to be. Most innovation over the last years has simply been deskilling, moving from purchasing to subscriptions, and optimization of monetization models. All of these only derive further purchasing if other ways to consume are eliminated, like piracy or third-party purchasing. Thus, in order for the “free market” to thrive in this space, IP law needed to be put in place so that the state could enforce private companies' artificial mini-monopolies over digital assets. When this enforcement is put in place, private companies no longer have to sell some complete version of software, but instead are able to continuously rent it. They are able to manipulate the supply and demand of their products at will, and then speculate on what their manipulations will do to the resulting value of their products.

This not only is generally anti-consumer but also exposes further contradictions in how capitalism attempts to find its value. The free market is thought of as acting as an alternative to the state, but the state and legal enforcement is the only reason that their digital assets have any value. Without the state, everyone would simply be able to copy the information effortlessly and acquire a free copy of the software. If this were to happen now, there would be legal repercussions, a form of political violence, against those copying the game. The freedom of the market acts in opposition to the freedom of end users. Political domination demands market freedom, which only exists in a roundabout near nonsensical way from that domination.

A third direct contradiction here is that the capitalists are only able to give the ability to use software by restricting the ability to use the software. It exists and is infinitely replicable, but that isn't profitable, so restrictions like digital rights management are used to stop it from being used so that the ability to use it can be graciously given in exchange for money. The value of the software cannot come from the code or software as it exists, but only as its non-existence can be enforced against those who wish to acquire it without paying.

A Look Forward

The growth of the global market was supposed to provide more freedom and better lives for all. For a long time, it was successful in this endeavour. For some, this still may be the case. In the future, it is clear that the weight of the systemic contradictions in capitalism means it will likely be unable to do this on a global scale. It has lost sight of the human aim for human benefit and has replaced it with an infinite demand for growth. Even technological marvels such as a post-scarcity information-sharing environment must be shuttered just to bend to this will. Capitalism simply cannot understand what is actually valuable and what is not.

All systems come to an end when what is valued under the system comes into too much conflict with what is valued by people. Eventually, when the contradictions become too strong, a new paradigm forms to bring us into the future. The next system, to replace the current, must not only be global but also a compelling alternative. It must be able to value that which is made more valuable by not having its value extracted. It must be a more human approach in a system that enables the human approach. It must upend the class-based system where success and freedom are dictated by the ability to dominate others and restrict their success and freedom. It must allow growth as well as degrowth. I believe to achieve this, it must be planned and thoroughly democratic in its planning. We can rebuild it. We have the technology.

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Fuck getting money for real Get freedom If I run out of shots I'm going out poking

---

Oncle Spencer

Kayfabe

Kayfabe is not a very complicated concept, but I think in the digital age it is particularly important. For anyone on the internet, it is known intuitively, but widely not recognized. Kayfabe is essentially a stage presence and persona that treats its own existence as real, not crafted. It is a persona created by an actor, but that is not allowed to be acknowledged. The extent of this can vary, from existing purely on stage and the actor letting up offstage, to the actor completely indulging themselves in their character at all times.

This came to dominance in the world of professional wrestling (The WWE kind). Wrestling is first and foremost a show. These actors go up on stage and perform their characters for spectators, and the result of the match is planned to create drama or a larger story. The entirety of the show, however, isn't strictly limited to what happens during the match. There is backstage drama of the fighters threatening each other. There are interviews with the wrestlers where they hype up the crowd. There is a persona that does not let up. The wrestler is their own person before us completely different from the actor that plays them. These legendary wrestler personas are a result of kayfabe. To say the actor is putting on a performance does not cover the extent of it; Hulk Hogan is not Terry Bollea, he is Hulk Hogan.

Now, just about everyone engages in kayfabe. Everyone crafts some form of digital persona of themselves on social media that others can see. For most people, it does reflect some aspect of their reality, those who travel may depict a lot of their travels, and those who go out to clubs a lot may often depict them at clubs. Still, it is not a true representation of the real them, but a crafted representation of an aspect of the real them. I already noted this in Digital Reflections That Can Never Come To Be, so I won't dwell here too long. For others still, this kayfabe is a completely and necessarily crafted image. A hustler can only hustle on social media if they appear rich. They must appear as if their hustle is working. They can only appear rich to others if they always appear rich, even if they aren't. If the kayfabe lets up at any point, everyone can recognize the grift, and the hustle comes apart.

The Selfie Itself

The selfie is one of the most popular art forms in circulation. It is effectively the result of an absolute deskilling of art. Getting a portrait used to take a highly skilled artist. Technology like cameras meant that the person making the portrait needed less skill, but the technology was still rare. Advancements in cameras like digital cameras and portability made the technology more common. Other technology like computers and the internet made it easier to copy photos, learn how to take better photos, and share photos, creating a social necessity. The supply of selfies was enough to generate a social demand for further selfies as a form of self expression. This trend continues until smartphones, which create a seamless integration between high-quality photos, immediate processing, and instant sharing. It is no longer a form of creative art, but a basic human action that can be done trivially.

Selfies have become the lowest form of art possible. It is the same, it is dead simple, it requires minimal interaction, and the result is something not really notable in any moment, just something you see briefly and move on from. Even bad artworks are an unskilled or undirected attempt at making something interesting, a signifier that is a bad reflection of a signified. Selfies are nothing more than their exact form. A selfie may be taken of you somewhere, and the only purpose is to show that you are there. There is no further challenge or depth.

It would seem there are effectively two types of selfies: those taken and kept, and those taken and shared. I think that the artifacts of these two goals have a much greater overlap than people give them credit for. Firstly I think that almost all selfies are taken to be shared, then later may not be. Even when sharing with others isn't the explicit goal, I believe that selfies are part of a digital kayfabe meant to be shared with oneself. If you want to see where you are, you can just look around and appreciate where you are. What people seem to want instead is to be able to look at their crafted persona, seeing what their digital expression of themselves is. In this way, even selfies taken and not shared are shared, just with a future you instead of publicly.

This also makes it a narcissistic art. It is a picture of yourself with some form of changing background. This self-placement means that you are the center of the image, but the actual merit of the image is in the place you are. You could simply take a picture of a place you were to show it off. Everyone would know you were at that place, but it then wouldn't have you, so it wouldn't add to your digital image. This makes the selfie almost a self-contradictory art form, where you are the least notable part but you can't not be in it or else it ruins the ability to show yourself. It is a narcissistic art form to add to a digital kayfabe that reflects an optimized version of yourself to others. It is shared to draw further attention to oneself, or at least a representation of oneself which one has control over, and share it in a digital marketplace crafted by oneself in which one can get the most praise without drawing on any negativity. To create something genuinely challenging is to create something that would get ignored by people who don't like it or removed if it continues.

Looking At Me? Looking At Me

Sharing selfies may be a driving force behind them as a cultural art form, but it doesn't explain why people immediately take selfies at the moments that something notable is happening. We have the largest catalogue of images available to us in human history, and through computers and the internet, it is constantly available to anyone (at least anyone taking selfies). If we see something, we are almost certainly able to find a properly taken image of that same thing that we can hold to remind ourselves of being somewhere. We could similarly show it to people and describe our personal experiences to others. Despite having that option, people seem more inclined than ever to get specifically an image of themselves in the given context. Given every opportunity to live in the moment and not have to worry about capturing it, people feel compelled to capture the moment without living it more than ever. It would seem that a digital representation of oneself is the only way for us to trust our real experiences and memories. The fleeting is scary, so we must reflect ourselves into a permanent representation of that fleeting moment.

Mark Fisher noted in Capitalist Realism that it seems young people are in constant need of being connected to the internet and become anxious if they are disconnected from it. They will check their phones even if there is nothing to check or listen to music even if just extremely quietly so they don't actually hear it enough to pay attention to it. If people are already effectively cyborgs, as I noted in Short Form Content, The Algorithm, and Us, this makes perfect sense. Being deprived of the ability to instantly communicate, look things up, or find directions using our phones is to get ripped away from a core function of our modern humanity. It makes sense that disconnection from our core abilities would be stressful, like a temporary loss of ability to use a limb. In this aspect, selfies are a way to immediately connect ourselves back to the comfort of the digital matrix, ensuring that no matter where we are, the connection is still there. If a place is challenging and difficult, we can retreat to comfort of our phones. If it is sterile or boring, the digital matrix can add another dimension, entertainment or narcissistic image creation, to make it more exciting for us again.

This is a phenomenon that I frequently notice in my life and is noted in a movie I rather like: The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty with Ben Stiller. There is a cameraman in the mountains who has worked a long time to get a photo of a leopard, and when a perfect shot comes across his camera, he takes his eye out of the camera. He doesn't take the picture, instead saying “If I like a moment, me, personally, I don't like the distraction of the camera.” It is a very boomer-core scene that I hold dear. The cameraman decides not to look through the camera, but instead straight at the leopard, because the camera “gets in the way.” The real experience of looking at the leopard would be impeded, the experience diminished, by looking through a piece of technology at a real-time image of the same thing. It acts as an extra step in the process of experiencing, a barrier between us and the real experience. The experience which can only be perceived by us at that moment through our qualia.

Being so inundated with curated digital experiences, the real world turns to the foreign. Instead of being something to be experienced, it is something that can be digitally captured and turned into a digital experience. This action removes people from the real experience, putting up a comfort barrier, and placing them back into the realm of the digital matrix-reality where things get experienced through a screen. On the other side of a screen, nothing can really hurt you. There is a common trope of people getting into extremely dangerous scenarios to take selfies, like being around wild animals or performing dangerous activities. Many blame clout chasing, which may be true, but I think it doesn't describe the extent of it.The real world entails strong emotions and reflexes now mostly obsolete in daily life. The natural world, free from our sanitized and safer version, can be incredibly violent, undetermined, and stressful. When confronted with this, people who are not used to it and do not need to grow used to it are able to use selfies as a means to retreat back into their normal. Tourist settings are similar yet opposite, moving from an external threat to an internal crisis. When confronted with something mystical seen online and planned for, when things become real they are often underwhelming. The real does not abide by the rapid pace of the digital, and selfies are able to maintain a cultural kayfabe that these places are indeed experienced that way. People are able to dress up a snapshot to appear as exciting as they had seen online, and thus, allow themselves the illusion that it is how they also experienced it, just as the others all do, even when it is not the real experience had by any of them. Confronted with the bland pace of reality when compared to the digital, selfies give them a retreat into constructing their digital image to experience it for them.

Taking a selfie is also inherently strange in its process. You look into the camera, and in the camera, an image of you is you looking back at you. You are in a place watching an image of you there looking back at you in that place. The act of taking a selfie doesn't exist in you existing, but only in response to you taking yourself out of existing solely in real space. It is taking a piece of your existence out of the real world to help you further recognize your existence in the real world from the perspective of your being outside of yourself. To take a selfie is to put yourself into the gaze of an other. It is an appeal to another you which does not exist, it is an imagination created by you in that instant. The act, thought of as personal and real, is made inherently impersonal and outside of the real through its own existence of trying to create a version of self-existence digitally, outside of the self. It is its own contradiction.

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It's gonna feel real good I'm starting with the man in the mirror Could it be really me pretending

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Oncle Spencer

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Scrap bin

Extra content if you want. I didn't feel like it fit and didn't feel like it was complete enough but didn't immediately know how to complete it. I don't think I'll be revisiting selfies soon, so I figured I'd just keep it here. It tries to visit how selfies came to be so popular and what purpose that serves, but I liked my article just sticking to the act of selfies more.

Selfies are incredibly handy as a tool for capital. Everyone can create their own personal likeness commodity that they can have (most) control over. Being their own entrepreneurial self in charge of their own self-commodity, they are engaged in the wonderful marketplace where everyone is on even footing. Their likeness commodity included with all those surrounding in all their locations count as cultural capital too, a new economic idea where we pitch our history and cultural practices as their own source of value. By its nature of being exactly all the self commodities, it is perfectly representative, allowing engagement with like-mindedness and giving as much expression to any person as any person is willing to engage with and invest in it. If one so desires, they can exploit their digital likeness-commodity and aim to become an influencer to make money off of their image, where they can now be free and do whatever they want and make an earning from it.

This falls perfectly under the psychopolitical model of the achievement-subject. The repressive state apparatus is able to eliminate those who are deviant, threaten those who may become deviant to stop it, and kill political dissidents without real repercussions. Now, it became necessary to optimize the people who were not on the “wrong side”, stirring them into action to become as productive as possible to stimulate further growth. Every person must be actively enthusiastic in exploiting themselves. Everyone can make anything they want of themselves through crafting and optimizing their likeness-commodities to be what they want to be. They can infinitely consume an internet's worth of everyone else's likeness-commodities too, giving them more ideas on what they can do themselves. We create a romantic obsession with our own self exploitation that makes us think it is not only normal, but the best. Emotional value is raised through our consumption to drive more consumption, and to help reduce crises of over-accumulation, constantly cheaper and faster consumption generated more inefficiency in consumption. We work for a company by day, and we self exploit to generate more consumption by night. Massive velocity of online data can be used to target people in their consumption, their data bundled and sold to draw better advertisement and targeting, and the cycle continues. The selfie is not the cause of this, but rather a natural by-product of its massive scale and manipulation. Its simplicity and non-existent barrier of entry make it the perfect delivery device for psychopolitical emotional capitalist self exploitation and surveillance capitalism.

This message can be similarly be applied to new models of capitalism as a whole. Workers already work in a labour marketplace. During the turn of the neoliberal era, there was a deliberate re-framing the narrative for success, moving from giving people tools and helping those who are down towards giving incredible opportunities around people for them to find. Instead of having a welfare state with job training out of school, now there could be investment fairs where students could pitch ideas to get investment and get bought up by capitalists looking to invest in ideas they think could be profitable. This occurs at many levels. High schools have some exposure to clubs and fairs as well as opportunities (mostly for incredibly gifted students) to do more outside of school to gain interest. It can be seen in the pipeline to universities, but also does occur in some cases outside of that. It is very clear in universities. Hackathons, investment clubs, and guest lecturers for private corporations happen near daily. All of these are designed to help optimize people for their role in selling themselves for higher opportunities to whatever companies are aiming for one goal or another to hire young talent. These are opportunities that students can take if they are highly motivated and willing to work hard to get them. The hard workers will succeed, and their value as hard workers who sought out the opportunity will reap a reward.

This fails on three fronts. Firstly, it undermines the universal application of benefit to people who need it. Those struggling or in a spot where they are unable to properly focus on ideas that are profitable get left behind completely. Where a welfare state means that they can find their footing when they can, this no longer happens. The rising tide no longer raises all boats, it just raises select boats much more. Secondly, it leaves investment and procurement of investment exposed to capitalists who have reason to not give certain ideas investment. A mining firm that decides to open a mining branch of a university may not invest so heavily into ideas that question immoral practices that the firm uses. The interests of the capital class will never be fundamentally challenged by its own investment.

It does succeed massively in another angle. It puts the burden of failure not on those with the most ability, those with the most capital, but instead on the individual. Failure simply means that you did not work hard enough, allocate your personal resources and attention properly, or take advantage of the opportunities that exist around you. Constantly self-optimizing and hustling are a recipe for burnout. How do you get around this? Simply by using your digital likeness-commodity as the image you put towards those who may have investment. To show your success, you must publicly show yourself as successful. When in the field of the capitalist, you must constantly maintain a kayfabe of being a hardworking and successful person with the best ideas. An image that shows you achieving in some way is the perfect tool for this, and thus the constant selfie taking is just an optimization of becoming a perfect achievement-subject for exploitation. Again, the selfie is not the cause of this, but rather a natural by-product of its massive scale and manipulation. Its simplicity and non-existent barrier of entry make it the perfect delivery device for creating images of self-optimization to attempt to achieve better opportunities under a more unequal system.

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Look at me Look at me Look at me now

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Oncle Spencer

The Dream Job

A study from 2019 found that in the US and UK, the most popular dream job was to become a content creator/influencer. The study compared this to China, where the rate was down significantly, but still sat around 10%, taking fifth place. These studies are not alone, with another one two years earlier in the UK showing a rate of over 50%. This comes as a shock to many people. Older people grew up with dream jobs like becoming an astronaut. A job of heroes, made up of only the best and highest achieving who get to live out a magical imagination of exploration beyond Earth. The astronaut dream works for parents of those dreaming children too. The job that these childish magical imaginations with the societal reality that they must pursue high grades to work towards their goals.

Many classic dream jobs blend these two factors of childhood dreams and adult real-world work. Think of judges, police officers, nurses, doctors, and garbagemen. A job created by a motivational figure for a child. A job that gives them a goal they can turn into adulthood reality. A job that their parents and other supportive figures can help them achieve. A job that exists in the world that demands credentials and a journey to achieve. A job that helps people. A job that gives a role in society for you to aspire to fulfill. A job that gives you a sense of belonging in the world around you. A real job.

Influencer is not quite like these jobs. It is a job that exists purely in the digital realm. A reflection of someone that they have specifically created to drive consumption of an image. It isn't them, it is a likeness commodity they have created: selected snapshots that together create a new persona with a curated aesthetic. If enough online consumers identify with the aesthetic, the commodity stands a chance of making it in the digital marketplace. To achieve that, the persona must be tailored specifically for success in that extremely competitive marketplace. It does not produce something or help societal function, a commodity with some form of advertisement price but no use-value.

Reflections of Ourselves

Lacan theorized that we exist with two versions of ourselves. The first version is the real version. This self exists in the now, our current person. The second is a mirror image we craft of ourselves. This mirror image is what we see when we create our goals and desires. When someone wants to become an astronaut, they don't think of an astronaut. They think of themselves as an astronaut. They imagine what it could be like to go to space. They picture the reality of what it could be, the emotion of how those around them would react, and the journey they need to take to get there. From here, they create an image of themselves working to get there, attempt to become that working image, and then hopefully become the image of that final goal. The second version of ourselves is who we want to be and how we mature and create good habits. They are us in the future, helping us grow up and become better.

For the old dream jobs, this image was that of the childhood hero. The child would decide who their hero was, envision themselves as that person, envision the path there, and then partake in that journey. The job of an influencer changes this. The mirror image is no longer a person that exists, but a commodity curated out of a person's likeness. Similarly, the path to becoming a successful influencer is not necessarily a personal journey to the actualization or realization of a mirror image. It is a path of ensuring that the digital image of yourself is market-successful in its own actualization. It doesn't produce anything or provide a meaningful service, it is just creating a digital self-designed for constant consumption from strangers who will never be evenly interacted with.

The path to becoming that digital image is obfuscated. Simply put, it means posting everything as favourably as possible to increase chances of success. Even if one becomes a “successful” influencer, one must keep on the journey permanently, reinventing themselves constantly, for fear of falling off. Similarly, there is no real metric as to what it means to be successful. How many impressions count as successful? Is constant growth successful? Is an enjoyable community successful? Is an income level successful? There is no real answer, and thus, only a grey area as to whether or not there is a true goal to achieve.

Influencers and hosts of online shows also constantly talk about how they fake having other jobs when talking to others because their current money source is not a real job. There is no real societal value or standing that comes with it. It does not provide a ground function to society and does not grant a solid role in society. It simply shouts out others for their real roles in society, advertising products, or platforming those who are working on something real. Thus, there is no real mirror image. At best, the mirror image is just an imagination of a snapshot of some specific point of the process, like a post.

To become an influencer is to make the mirror image of yourself a digital image. We exist in the real world, and as such, we are unable to become this new mirror image. It means that the personal goal of who they want to be is fundamentally unachievable. Those who wish to be an influencer will never achieve their goals because their goal image is not a real image for them to become. Their life goal and societal role is merely a montage of carefully crafted moments selected for looking the best. As their lives are inevitably real, their lives will never be a montage of high-emotion moments, and they will constantly feel like they are falling short of the dream they once had.

This is not to say it is impossible to be a creator but to say that the reality of being a creator is not the same as the mirror image imaginary of a creator based on experiencing their end likeness-product. Almost none of them will be able to make it anywhere, and if they do, the job is not as the job presents. The journey of creation is the job, and then it is luck (alongside some optimizations) from there on. The end goal is never actually achieved.

The Realization Grift

This influencer existence is perpetually in the now. As it is unable to truly be achieved, it is constantly in the achieving process. As the digital image exists in a montage state, it exists as a time-atomized snapshot version of the real self. The goal mirror image is not a real image of a person, and thus, the real person effectively lives as if having already become their mirror image, creating a disassociation between their lived life and their perceived life. To be marketable, they must appear as an actualized self-image for others to aspire to become to draw consumption. One must not aspire to become better, one must simply curate their image to make it as if they already are.

In this way, it is like a Ponzi scheme. Influencers create perceptions of themselves for others to present themselves as actualized, which others engage with and wish to become. If the consumers work towards that goal, they will have to start by convincing others that they are also achieving despite not having yet achieved. The grift only works if the kayfabe holds strong, their actualized digital image never breaking, which goes on to influence others. To view but not engage is to live vicariously through others having a life having achieved their mirror image, despite the real person behind it having not, still creating a digital influencer mirror image but resigning to never attempting to actualize. It is to burn out before even beginning to attempt. Either way, the mirror image created can never truly be worked towards.

Influencers no longer need to aspire to be someone else, they are perfect and should no longer worry. Just present the perfect parts, and the digital image of you being perfect will form itself.

We have let children interact with digital networks and social media, outsourcing much of the parental strain to the digital matrix. Without any thought, we have reached a point where the most popular goal that children aim to aspire towards does not exist in the real. It is anti-societal structure, anti-social, and atomizing to the point where real existence exists in time-compressed montages instead of real life. These kids have only lived under digital-exposed capitalist realism. I believe that means we can see in them what grows from this form of capitalist realism. Capitalist concepts of value have completely degraded. Everything solid has melted away into aesthetics. The goal now is to become an aesthetic.

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It needs, it seeks affection Hungry, it fiends attention Look at me, look at me, you lookin'?

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Oncle Spencer