All or Nothing
We tend to drive ourselves towards absolutes. Things are 100% good or 100 percent bad. Forget your middle ground, on the fence bull. It makes decisions easier. All or nothing. Middle ground or gray areas offer a subjective nature to decisions and if you aren’t aligned, then you aren’t one of them. I was training with my mother, and during a squat, I saw her knees would cave in. So I asked her to push her knees out. Her knees whipped out so fast and extreme that she rolled to the outer edge of her foot and nearly lost her balance. “Not that far,” I told her. She responded, “Well which is it?” I love my mother, but I was ready to hit her with the “bless your heart” statement. It’s about balancing closer to the middle and rebounding from extremes.
Old comic books made it easy. The bad guys were always bad and did bad things on purpose, while the good guys were always, to a fault, good. It was easy to see the good and bad as black and white or zero and one. Bad guys didn’t sometimes do good things. It was more they refused to do any good things. The Golden Era of comics worked more like Bibles than purely entertainment. It showed a moral compass that some actions were bad and other were good. Quite sure the Bible did similar things on a bigger scale, but stories about David and Goliath are no different than comic books. The comic books were just geared to the youth.
The original 1940’s concept was the Joker was a murderous, jewel thief that killed for fun. There was no mention of the Joker’s full life until 1988’s “The Killing Joke”. According to this piece of Batman lore, the Joker is the result of one bad day. He lived a meager engineer’s life with simple joys of a wife and a child on the way. He convinced himself that he didn’t have enough. He didn’t have everything ready for a perceived perfect life. This lack of “things” drove him to a mafia group that exploited him until the group forced him to rob Ace Chemical and “fall” into a chemical vat. Since his creation in 1940 and for 48 years, the Joker was absolute chaos incarnate. The stories all depicted him this way of only evil for evil sake. Bad guys did bad things because bad guys only do bad things. Period.
Now when it come to us. We see ourselves as the good guy, the hero all the time. But we don’t do good all the time. We know our nemesis or enemies as pure evil (in comparison), but they do the same good and bad things we all do. Being 100% good all the time is hard and challenging, but even then, what of the choices that only have bad results. The trolley problem is when you must decide who to sacrifice. Do you select a loved one or strangers to save? You aren’t Superman, so a bad event will be the result. Does this make you a bad person?
It now seems that I have gone off the rails. Why would I have an opinion on absolute when dealing with a fitness blog? I’m tired of watching all of these all or nothing approaches. No sugar or no carb or no fat or no animal products or no eating after a certain time to be offset with all juice or all animal products or all plant or all fat. These are not all good or all bad. If you are allergic, then don’t do that. Otherwise adapt to a moderate approach. Like brownies? Eat the fucking brownie and move on. Don’t eat all the brownies in one sitting. Moderation. It would be a good thing to share with the ones you care about. But also know, if someone doesn’t want one, you shouldn’t excommunicate them for their choice.
This can also be the ones who train too much. You don’t need to be in the gym 2-3 hours 8 days a week. You don’t have to push 100% 365 days a year. You think it’s all about what you gain in the gym, but all the results occur once you leave and relax.
Whether it is ridiculous of how much political parties pull at each other and the stupid tribalism it forces. Moderation is almost an insulting term. We are told to get and desire more that more is always better. Have more money. Have more power. Have more shit than the other assholes around to prove you are of MORE value.
Then we are told to have nothing when it comes to other things. Have no narcissism means to have no self-worth or importance. Have no doubt means to be impulsive to everything. Have no anger means to not be driven or allow injustices. But we need these things as an emotional scope. We grow and appreciate more things when we balance towards the middle.
We forget that a little can go a long way.
