The repair man and I stood before it in front of my truck. He looked at it nervously, asking me how we were going to get it into my pick-up truck. His face seemed to tighten up in a combination of what looked like equal parts fear and question. As he started to bend over to grab this sucker, I squatted down and rapidly scooped it up and gently placed it in my truck.
I lifted a 382 lbs electric motor???
Actually... no. I lifted the Variable Frequency Drive that controls the speed of the motor. For those of you not familiar with a VFD, it's basically a computer that runs Tesla's greatest gift to mankind, and it barely weighs 60 lbs. So, why in the hell was this kid, who has to be about my age, twisting himself up, questioning how the hell two men, supposedly at their physical peak, going to handle such a modest piece of equipment?
Welcome to Generation ROT!
This kid, physically speaking, was a tribute to our epoch of degeneration: Corn Syrup fattened with shoulders and a neck custom-destroyed to make out the slightest detail on any 1080p screen put in front of his face. All around me, I'm watching my peers wreck themselves at a rate that has some predicting my generation will be the first to live shorter lives than their parents in a long time. While we try to figure out how to enjoy the less time we have on earth, we're guaranteed to have a shit-storm of ailments brought on by this eat-shit-don't-do-shit way of life. No wonder everyone's treating 30 like it's old. How many of us 30 year olds are looking at ourselves in the mirror, knowing that our physical peak has gone by when in the back of our head, we know it should still be going on?
Seriously, professional athletes in most sports are at their absolute best between the ages of 27-32. There should be no fucking reason to treat this like the gateway of old age!
Nothing's getting better either. My wife had me watch Jamie Oliver's food revolution. It's downright fucking horrid how little people know, or even care, about what they eat anymore. With all due respect to Oliver's work (which I appreciate very much) if anyone gave a fuck, they'd figure out how to eat right on their own regardless if school taught them to or not. Never before in the history of humankind has more information been available on such a vast scale to even the youngest of our physically-degraded population. If they wanted to know, they'd could figure it out. It's all just a google search away!
Speaking of Google, I did a little experiment, typing in the following words and recording the number of hits. Maybe we can draw some conclusions about what information people most want to know about...
Eating right...39,300,000 results
Strength training: 54,300,000 results
Justin Bieber: 445,000,000 results
Free Porn: 394,000,000 results
Lady GaGa: 549,000,000 results
Selena Gomez: 194,000,000 results
Jersey Shore: 72,500,000 results
OWN: 4,080,000,000 results
Fat and sexy: 162,000,000 results
It's nice to see where our priorities lay...
It seems to me that what we care about most is being indifferent and lazy. People don't want to know and they don't even care that they're rotting on the inside. Hell, I see and hear the healthy and strong mocked as much as their messages are even given half-attention to. When you think about it, the extreme popularity of the plague driven, flesh-rotted zombie makes for a great mascot of generation ROT! This generation has descended into degraded bodies moving around with no sense of direction or control over themselves... they just want to eat!
Some suggest that it's someone else's responsibility to wake up this pile of fatties and make them get into shape. Who exactly is supposed to do that? Maybe our pack-a-day, hen-pecked president who can't seem to stop face-fucking every fast food restaurant he can whenever he's away from Michelle? Or, maybe congress can do something about it. 
Then again maybe not. It doesn't seem like they know what the gym is supposed to be used for these days, do they? Is this one too many cheap shots? Well, don't forget, this is the same bunch of clowns who subsidize the very crops that get our peeps fat, gave us that atrocious food pyramid guide to eat "healthy", and say that giving the kiddies chicken nuggets at school is perfectly alright. You know that's a short list too but let's face facts: no government anywhere has shown either the good judgement or the qualifications to feed a fucking sewer rat properly, say nothing about the future generation of degenerates expected to take their place!
If this is ever going to get better, then people need to WANT to do it for themselves... or be forced into it by necessity. That first option is hard but I can guarantee that the second one will suck even more. I don't expect one, angry blog rant to make any difference but at least I got this off of my chest. For now.
7 comments:
Justin, you are right that the information is out there. The problem is not information, it's a lack of culture. We do not have a food culture in this country, as Michael Pollan has so eloquently argued. Go anywhere else in the world where American capitalism has not yet infiltrated their food culture, and you will see beautiful, fit lovely people. So, my point is, Jamie Oliver is doing a real service. Culture serves people by giving them a code to live by without having to think about why. Culture is intelligent. We don't have that. But we need it.
I go to South America at least once a year for two weeks at a time and I live a stone throw away from Canada. "Food Culture", or lack of, doesn't amount to obesity. American capitalism doesn't seem to have an impact one way or another either.
Certainly American eating habbits do.
Now that's what I call a rant. Good stuff. I don't normally dig the swearing in your blog (doing yourself an injustice IMO) but in this case it's well and truly justified...
It's not an awful lot different over here in England by the way. I'm often aghast at the sorry state of people my age, and even more worringly, the state of people ten years younger than me. Depressing.
I agree with Paul - where American capitalism goes, American eating habits aren't far behind, at least it seems to me.
And if I might make a thoroughly English comment; Jamie Oliver is as fat as anyone. It's just all concentrated in his tongue. Mockney chancer.
The food cultures of our parents is being replaced by a profiteering food industry that has at its disposal the most powerful propaganda (PR) machine ever devised in human history. People like you and I with our inquisitive natures, we would be the warriors and shamans in a more traditional culture. But most people are simply carriers of their culture. They do not inquire, but simply propagate the accumulated wisdom of their tribes and nations. Like you, I am disgusted by the fatties I see all around me. At 41, I am in the best shape of my life. But I always try to remember that we are a people under siege, psychologically, culturally and socially.
hey justin, an off topic question. I want to do rope climbs, but I've got no space. Will close grip towel pull ups work the same muscles and get me stronger at rope climbs?
K,
Yes, they do work similar muscles but there's more to it than just recruiting the same muscles. There are three, major differences between ropes, towels and the chinning bar...
1. There are brief moments where only one hand will be gripping the rope while the other pulls upward. Ditto for the descent. When you chin or pull, the two hand contact at all times with the bar, or the towel, makes the exercise much easier.
2. The standard concentric followed by the eccentric movement of the muscles (tightening and lengthening) of the pull-up is much, MUCH easier than a rope climb. A rope climb is one concentric contraction after another. Coming down is nothing but eccentric movement. BIG BIG DIFFERENCE!
3. What happens when you go to failure, during pull-ups? You drop...what...2 feet tops, right? What happens when you go to failure during rope climbing? Well, you can't fail during a rope climb! Don't underestimate how much difference this will make in the training effect!
I've got some ideas that I'm going to experiment with and I'll get back to you...
I'll be waiting man! thanks!
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