Your Body Is Art
As artists, we should treat our life as a living work of art.
I’m starting to consider the human body as the apex of beauty. Think of your favorite sculpture, the form, shape, and elegance of the physique. I think of my time spent in Florence, gazing at the sculptures of David, Hercules, and Achilles in Piazza Della Signoria. Not only do these sculptures evoke a strong emotional response from the viewer by simply looking at the grandeur, size, and beauty of them, but the myth and stories that have been carried throughout history accompanying these great men have stood the test of time.
Farm to Fork
I’m actually going to be purchasing a half cow soon. I’m waiting for my deep freezer to come in, will be visiting the Amish farms in Lancaster, and I’m trying out a couple of different farmers this year. I figured if I’m going to be eating this much meat, I might as well buy from the best, locally, instead of always going to Costco for my food supply. I’m looking forward to actually visiting the farms, looking at the cows, engaging with the farmers, and truly engaging in a farm-to-fork practice where I can build a closer relationship with the farm that feeds me.
Cows Eat All Day
While I was abroad in Israel, volunteering on a kibbutz, I spent some time working on a cow farm. The cow farm is actually what drove the economy of this community by producing dairy products like milk. One thing I noticed while working on this cow farm, navigating my way through the fence, around the large animals, stepping over piles and piles of waste, is that cows are eating constantly, for the entirety of the day. Cows are always eating because they primarily eat grass, which is not a satiating food. This is why I think humans shouldn’t eat plants, because I think of a cow and how it is grazing and eating throughout the entire day. Not to mention, by eating these plants, you wind up shitting out so much of the nutrients from your body. That’s why on these cow farms you see piles and piles and piles of poop everywhere.
Humans Don’t Need Three Meals
Now that we have my wonderful description and vivid depiction of cows pooping and eating all day on a farm, do you want to be like a cow?
Humans have been programmed to think that they need to eat throughout the entirety of the day, with three square meals.
Think of the typical American in Philadelphia, waking up, grabbing a bagel, popping it in a toaster, spreading some sort of cream cheese, jam, peanut butter, or butter on it. Maybe as a side they will have a Tastykake, a cookie, or some other sweets. For lunch, processed meat on bread. Dinner time? Let’s have some pasta, pizza, rice, beans, and maybe if we’re lucky, a piece of chicken. Not to mention, they most likely have a snack in between lunch and dinner. The typical American does not give their body time to rest, to stop digesting food.
By fasting and giving your body a break from digestion, you allow your body to go through autophagy, where it’s repairing the cells, repairing the damage, slowing aging, and reducing the risk of chronic disease. Fasting also helps regulate blood sugar levels and can reduce the risk of type two diabetes. My personal favorite is, because your brain is not using energy for digestion, you have sharper mental clarity. And finally, the number one effect of fasting that we should consider is how it burns fat from your body.
Sculpt Your Body
By burning fat, and gaining muscle through weightlifting, we sculpt our bodies into works of art. I personally eat one meal a day, 100% red meat, before I go to sleep. I just wait until the sun is setting, come home around 6 PM to break my fast, eat, and then rest. I also like this notion of “breakfast” – break fast? Perhaps breakfast is the only meal you need in a day? To break your fast.
I typically eat 3 pounds of beef, which may sound like a lot, but after eating meat for two years, this is what my body needs. I’ve never felt so happy, strong, sharp, and creative in my entire life since adopting this new relationship to food and health. I highly suggest you give it a shot, start fasting, and feast on meat in the evening.
Leverage ChatGPT
ChatGPT premium is such a freaking godsend. I love using it every single day, prompting it questions that arise in me while reading, thinking, or writing. One way that I’ve been utilizing ChatGPT recently is to fix the grammar in these blog posts, by simply copying and pasting the chunk of writing from iA Writer on my iPhone, where I click the microphone and voice dictate my thoughts, and tell ChatGPT to fix the grammar only, sending it back to me in markdown code so that I can publish it directly to my blog without the need to format headings, bold text, italics, etc.
Yesterday, after coming home and importing my photos, I was deciding between two shots, thinking about which selection to make as the keeper. While I pretty much knew which one was the better shot, I sent ChatGPT two images and asked it for advice upon this selection. It was actually so useful to read the description it gave me about the different photos, and why it preferred one over the other. Not only did it solidify my choice, but it helped me think deeper about the photo that I made. I say that we should treat ChatGPT as augmented thinking, like our personal helper, our own slave?
Artificial Intelligence Is Our Friend
It seems that filming yourself with a GoPro is even faster than voice dictating your thoughts with the iPhone. By simply carrying a GoPro with me, clicking the red button, and streamlining my thoughts out loud by speaking, I’m killing multiple birds with one stone. Yesterday, I filmed a video “Street Photography as a Stream of Becoming.” Essentially, as I was walking towards a stream, the thought popped up in my head right away, and I just wanted to get it out there. Instead of reaching for a phone and writing, I simply take my GoPro and film myself as soon as I get a thought. After walking for five minutes and recording my thought, I use the Bluetooth from the GoPro to my iPhone to import the video directly to my phone. I use the shortcut app on my phone to extract the audio and import it directly to my Files application. I then launched a website, Assembly AI, where they transcribe the audio file for me. Actually, it seems that YouTube transcribes files for you, but it’s hard to copy and paste it directly from the phone, but easy to do on a desktop, so I use this third-party app. When is ChatGPT going to directly transcribe and make blog posts or essays from my audio and video? I think this will be the ultimate tool that I am looking forward to going forward. Anyways, I then copy and paste the transcribed audio from my video, and send it directly to ChatGPT. It typically sends a response describing my ideas and giving its own augmented thoughts about it. I then simply send it a prompt to write a blog post from my transcribed audio, to send it to me in markdown code, to give simple headings, and cover the ideas I talk about so that I can directly publish it to my website. After it sends me the markdown code, I copy and paste it directly into the iA Writer application. From there, I can extract the PDF file and publish the video, audio, text, and PDF, directly to my website blog. You can also use VideoPress on WordPress, to directly embed the video to your site, allowing both the video and the audio to be downloadable. I also publish to Spotify as a video podcast, so there are multiple ways to listen, watch, and read my content.
At the end of the day, I think we should just use all of these modern tools in ways that can enhance our workflow, and hope that these ideas can help one other person streamline the way they do things. If you haven’t already, you should definitely download ChatGPT and start using it today. I also love using the DALL-E system to make images for my blog posts sometimes.
School Is Prison
Now with ChatGPT, what is the function of the school?
School is good to be around other students, to have community, make friends, etc. But when it comes to learning, I see a decentralization of information. I have an optimistic outlook on the future and technology, where education is essentially free, and anyone can learn at their own pace, honing in on whatever interests they have. I think that in the future, higher education will be obsolete, unnecessary, or just free in general.
When I was a child in Catholic school, I have nothing but positive memories. I remember learning about the stories of Jesus, going to church, having time for arts and crafts, playing outside in the grass, learning math, science, history, and even participating in the Reading Olympics, where I got to read and write about lots of really interesting books as a child. From my early childhood memories, it actually felt like the movie Stand by Me, where I spent my time exploring in the woods, biking the trails, walking along the train tracks with my two friends, getting in trouble, causing havoc and mischief here and there, hopping fences we weren’t supposed to, skateboarding, etc. However, I remember around seventh grade, we had to take some Terranova test. This test was the most important period of our lives, it seemed, where we had to study rigorously every single day, as this test and grade were going to determine the outcome of our future. Not only would it determine where we could place in high school, but also be a future proponent as a college student. We were always taught as youth that college is the most important path to take in life, that this is your ticket to success. Just fill out these bubbles, study hard, and go work hard. To me, this is what occurs in high school; we are stuck for eight hours, taking bullshit tests, and then spending hours after school slaving away in the books to do our homework. You essentially work the entirety of the day, from the moment you wake up, to the time you go to sleep, with the amount of work they assign you in high school. Not to mention, this results in neglecting your physical health and well-being, getting paralyzed, waking up the next day to repeat. Just yesterday, when riding the bus, I noticed a high school student so tired, just sitting there, exhausted, sleeping before getting to class. Public education is breeding people to be perfect, docile, obedient slaves, always eager to work hard, our new ultimate virtue in society.
I remember in high school, having to go through metal detectors, x-rays, and not even being allowed outside during lunch or breaks. All of the doors were locked, there was security in the halls everywhere, and it basically just felt like a big prison, where you were being trained in a slave factory, to sit down for eight hours per day, take orders, listen, and regurgitate information. You basically just learned to memorize a bunch of facts that are useless and that you forget the next day. It doesn’t set you up for success, or teach you anything useful that you will now utilize as an adult. Because of this, I can’t help but think of school as a prison, and this is just my personal experience. Maybe yours was different, and you have positive memories of high school. But for me, it was controlling, like you’re just a prisoner, and I saw this very early on. Because of this, in high school, I would often skip class, go make art, be creative, and try to find doors that I could escape through, and explore outside in the grass or the nearby university campus. School essentially just trains you to be a slave, listen to the bell ring, and get ready for either a factory job or office work.
Banking and Money Is Our New God
God is dead, and we replaced him with bureaucracy.
I have this fun image in my head of Jesus, with his whip, flipping the tables and attacking the moneylenders outside of the temple in Jerusalem. The more I contemplate Jesus, the less I think of him as some peaceful hippie, but more so as a rebel, a troublemaker, somebody that got in the way of Rome, the Pharisees, and everyone in between. However, Jesus rode a donkey when he entered Jerusalem during his final days, a sign of peace, as opposed to a horse that a king would ride into battle.
I remember when I was in Jericho, hanging around the Bedouin people. They typically ride donkeys throughout the desert, and one time, they allowed me to hop on. What I noticed is they are very aggressive to foreigners, or people they are not used to riding, and would knock you off after 30 seconds of riding. If you give a carrot to the donkey on a stick, and dangle it in front of it, it definitely will obey, and move onward, in hopes of acquiring the food. If a man is willing to trick the donkey, what makes you think man won’t trick another man with a carrot on a stick?
Perhaps we are all chasing after a carrot on a stick, fiat currency, cash dollars, money, and material wealth, moving onward, until the day that we drop in our grave. The sad truth is, our money is depreciating in value each year, and our new God, the central banks, found a cheat code in the video game, kind of like in The Sims, where you can give your character unlimited money, so that you can upgrade your mansion and buy all the coolest furniture, by printing paper out ad infinitum through the implementation of the Federal Reserve. They hold the carrot and the stick, and we are all donkey slaves. Maybe we should look for an apple instead, take the stick, make it into a whip, peacefully flip the table, and opt out of this corrupt system by purchasing bitcoin. The only difference between Jesus and our Messiah is that our Messiah is an anonymous person named Satoshi Nakamoto.
College Breeds a Generation of Debt Slaves
The other day on the bus, I was chatting with a young woman who told me she hates her job, but needs to put her head down and work for the next 10 years to pay off her debt. I think this is the ultimate tragedy in life, and higher education is breeding a generation of slaves to debt. Just read your paper dollar; it is used as legal tender, for all debts, public and private. The entire country of the United States is a slave to debt, and so are the individual citizens. Why spend $60,000 per year to become a lawyer, if you’re going to be a slave for the next 30 years? The function of college is to get a piece of paper, so that you can go and get a job, and chase after more pieces of paper.
Family, Nature, and Community
Because our career is at the forefront of American life, we no longer have time to spend with family, in nature, or even make new communities. This is a sad reality, where we genuinely have no time. Think of the 40-hour work week, and the amount of time you have each day. We are sacrificing our physical bodies and pursuit of material wealth, killing all the opportunity to form families, or make communities. You could argue that technology is bringing people closer together, with the ability to connect via the internet, but to me this is not real, and something we should be highly skeptical of.
The blockchain will be used, not only as a public ledger for bitcoin, but also for the future of decentralization of information. With the advent of artificial intelligence, we will not be able to determine what is truth from falsehood. Actually, at this point, I decided to opt out of social media by removing comments from my YouTube channel, because I just automatically assume that everyone is a bot. Just think of Reddit and the people that use this site. Even if they are real users, they’re basically just bots to me. However, I actually do believe that there’s a high likelihood that many of the accounts on social media are just bots, and now with AI, it’s very easy to create them. These bots can infiltrate communities online, spread hate, division, and make other people, actual users, respond aggressively in the comment section. We are allowing the media and technology to enslave our minds, causing emotional reactions from individual users. This emotional response will then drive people to the streets, to protest, to cause havoc in our communities. This is why I believe blockchain to be an integral part of the future of technology, where it can be used to verify information in a decentralized way, cutting through the noise, the bots, and the potential dangers of the future, where nefarious actors will use this technology for evil. As much as technology may advance our society, it could also lead to our decline.
The antidote is to return to nature, to spend time alone, walk in the park, hike in the woods, etc. By returning to nature, you give yourself the opportunity to contemplate, to ask deeper questions about life in general, by ignoring the noise and chaos of modern life. I think it’s time for us to all reconnect with nature, and contemplate our connection to something greater, like the universe, or perhaps even God?