malcolmlklein57

The point, if I may dare to sum up: Old age is an annoying, ridiculous and pathetic decline toward the state of a turnip softening in a compost heap, if death is not kind enough to intervene first.

But why write a book about it?

Most boomers, beneath whatever faith they have in free radical therapy or green tea, know the lonely and painful disappointments that await them. They read the necrologies in their alumni bulletins before they look at the class notes, then realize that they can no longer remember who the dead ones were. They are called \"spry,\" or even worse, \"well-preserved.\" White-haired, with hands fisted to hide tremors, they hate the store clerks who ask, \"What can I do for you today, young lady?\" Mechanics working on their old pickup trucks give them an actuarial once-over and then say: \"Take care of this baby and it\'ll last you the rest of your life.\"

Mr. Miller makes sure to take all hope away from us, condemning \"the positivity psychologists\" who promise a glorious, sensual, wise, healthy and virtuous old age. He says that the fields they practice in—self-help, mystical geriatrics, cyber-techno-immortality—are \"either culpably moronic or a swindle, one in which its purveyors, it seems, believe their own cons.\"


Instead, he says, life in old age \"is a desperate struggle not to be laughed at, sneered at, or looked down upon.\" As an example, he asks: \"What of my clearly decaying scholarly capacities? . . . I can\'t even reliably come up with words like \'refrigerator\' or \'kitty litter\' and must endure my wife\'s hand gesture of irritated contempt to \'get on with it.\' Can I ever get lost in a book again without my mind wandering?\"

This superb lecture on our food history demonstrates that is NOT our consumption of animal protein/saturated fat, contrary to popular opinion, which has increased our rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc. Instead it is our increase in refined carbohydrates, polyunsaturated fats from seed oils, and sugar which has led to the health epidemic we have today. Removing these items personally, and on a national level, will lead to the amelioration of the obesity epidemic, and related diseases.

What did we mean by the term "Mate"? Diana and I are "Mates" not just siblings. She knows all my failings and still loves me. She loves me because of some of my failings. So I am completely myself when I am with her. We do not have a goal or a plan. Our final knowledge is that one day one of us will be alone again but we will have still the other within us. This is the reason why living with dogs can teach us so much about being Mates. Their inevitable loss prepares us to lose all and everyone else who is close and to help us know that in our hearts we are still together.

The goal of Mates is Mateship! The result of Mateship is connection with another and to yourself.

How does Mateship happen? In the recent past, Mateship was I think a product of a crucible. War is such a crucible. In war, men are often put into situations where they willingly would die for another. Many veterans never wish for another war but their eyes glisten as they recall how it felt to be so connected with their mates. Before modern medicine every mother offered her life in exchange for the new life. In this context, every mother could look another mother in the eye and share a moment of common accomplishment and of destiny.

Is war, or sharing the risk of death, the key for Mateship? Yes I think that it is but also I think that it is not essential. I suspect that it is also the product of a Trusted Space.

A Trusted Space is a "Place" where it is safe for people to take off their masks and so show their full selves. When we sat every evening for hundreds of thousands of years in a circle around the fire and told our stories - we were in a trusted space. When we lived our lives in public, there could be no masks. In a world that was based on reputation, your name was your most important asset. We showed our full selves to another and we were accepted for being whom we were.

Do we have to return to tribal life to find mateship? No more than the people of the Renaissance had to put on togas. We only have to understand the circumstances of the camp fire and of tribal life and find modern equivalents.

David Graeber: On the Invention of Money - Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics
A Reply to Robert Murphy's `Have Anthropologists Overturned Menger?

By David Graeber, who currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of `Debt: The First 5,000 Years' which is available from Amazon

2. Money's superior mobility, supposedly a social boon, really means that real wealth is stolen from most communities and regions and concentrated in a small handful of parasitic ones. Globalization's ravages are inherent in it. (Yet even many nominal anti-globalizers want to continue with centralized money.) It uproots al stability, all community. It's capitalism and money which most of all give the lie to "conservatism", since nothing's more radically destructive of all existing institutions and values, and for such a nihilistic non-purpose.

Money empowers corporatism and leads logically to kleptocracy.

We don't need such mobile money. Globalization, including its historical forerunners, was always about luxuries, never about anything we need. Markets, especially those for food and other core necessities, are naturally and sufficiently local/regional.

T$ are locally anchored and therefore are truly conservative of community and society, and the infrastructure of trust necessary to maintain them. Money's mobility encourages mercenary and aloof attitudes among transaction participants. It encourages an extreme atomization, as each transaction is a discrete granule. T$ are necessarily part of locally anchored socioeconomic networks and ongoing relationships requiring trust and building acquaintance, neighborliness, and often friendship.

T$ necessarily stay in the community. By definition, they stay in the time bank. Therefore they're better suited to natural and rational economic and political arrangements, which must be relocalized. They work toward self-sufficiency at the individual, family, community levels. They're closer to venerable and time-tested arrangements for social credit and barter. (T$ can become interchangeable between regions, but only through the democratic deliberation of the time banks involved. This would constitute the rational form of trade where trade supply meets actual demand, instead of the way "trade" under capitalism debouches in the aggressive forms of dumping and other assaults on competition and community.)

Getting Stronger is a blog about the philosophy of Hormetism, based on the application of progressive, intermittent stress to overcome challenges and grow stronger physically, mentally and emotionally.

Right now, in this moment, just look at yourself briefly with your mind's eye. See if it is not possible, even as you are reading this, to catch just a glimpse out of the corner of your eye of the feeling of you, the you-ness of you, the profound and primal ordinariness of you. See how certain, how literally unquestionable it is that you are here, and how that presence of you here is certain in a way nothing else can ever be.

If you do this once knowingly, you will without fail do it again... and again... and again... And the day will certainly come, without regard to anything else you are doing or not doing, without regard to anything else that is being done or not being done to you, when you will notice that the underlying fear of life is dead â€" an old and false notion about your nature snuffed out by contact with the reality of your nature.

John Sherman

The Gokhale MethodSM uses healthy posture and
movement to help you re-establish your body's structural
integrity and regain a pain-free life.