I’ve been working out again recently, but I haven’t done a great job of losing weight. Part of it is my eating habits, which admittedly are pretty poor. But I’ve developed poor eating habits as a result of never having good guidance as a child and then later turning to fast food during my adolescence. And despite being quite aware of these conditions, it’s really close to impossible changing one’s habits, especially when one’s motivation diminishes on a daily basis.
Anyway, a thought occurred to me the other day how this relates to exercise. Next to my gym, there’s a Hometown Buffet. I remember spotting near the exit a flyer for LA Fitness. Now, think about this. A buffet next to a gym. Isn’t that ironic or even oxymoronic? And the fact that the gym places advertisements in the buffet is even more suspicious.
Of course, you can deduce that the gym is attempting to “help” the people at the buffet by providing a rather overt hint. Usually though, the people at the buffet are not the types that would go to the gym in the first place (until it’s absolutely the last straw). Still, if you think about it, the way human’s rationalize things like this most likely looks like, “Well, if I go to the gym, I can go back to the buffet guilt free.” Or something like that.
Of course, that’s not the reality in all of this.
But if you further expand this notion, you start to think of how all this is pretty fucked up. First, the thing is that people (at least in America) are for the most part hooked up into the whole fast food/poor eating situation because we’re trained from birth to eat this kind of food. Despite warnings from doctors, etc. we still consume food like this and as a result gain weight.
Those of us that manage to partly break this cycle attempt to remedy this situation through hitting the gym. And as we age, we have to put more effort since most of our metabolisms slow. By the time we finish our routine, we’re completely spent.
This whole cycle to me is just part of the whole productivity cycle that we’re locked into. We’re constantly occupied and too tired or lack the time to break out of it. And if you’re into conspiracy theories, this is exactly what George Carlin’s Owners want. To keep you in a pacified mode so that they continue to maintain a gigantic machine where only a select few control the important decisions in this world, while the rest of us slave away trying to just maintain ourselves.
Of course, the government would be involved in this. I mean, the FDA allows the fast food industry to keep shoveling down poor choices by the large corporations that constantly spend huge dollars lobbying and bribing the government. And it, for the most part, works in the government’s favor as the vast majority of us are rendered impotent, alienated and dispersed from halting this cycle.
Truthfully, on a totalistic scale, I don’t care…at least with regards to the vast majority of people out there. I’ve learned that people already have made and accepted their destiny in taking mini-bribes through their shallow, demeaning materialistic existence that transiently satisfies their lusts.
For myself, I do care because I’m not part of the so-called Owners and want a piece of that action. But that’s a different topic.