Are You Better Off Now Than You Were a Year Ago?

That's an easy question everyone should ask of themselves -- at least once a year, to get a gauge on whether their health and life is improving, or just worsening -- to which "aging" is the explanation that requires no further explanation or investigation.  That is just how it is -- and one accepts as gracefully as possible -- or appropriate others will deride and mock them into falling in line.

"Of course, life can only get worse from here on out," the self-appointed wise ones will admonish -- as though thinking any other way, was proof of one's stupidity.  That's how far we've fallen in the last fifty years -- when people used to think that life was for improvement, and not merely grasping at last straws.

The rare exception seems to be those found at gyms and health clubs -- who think their primary job is to improve themselves -- and not merely demand that of others, while one increasingly does nothing for themselves.  That has been a trend for these fifty years that needs to be reversed -- at least in individual lives -- before it becomes a prevailing way of life.  Those are the pioneers of every time and place -- the exceptional few who see the problems overcoming societies, and take it upon themselves to find a better way -- even if they have to create it themselves, but that is how reality has always come into being.

That is in fact, the reality of human beings -- of what they actually are and manifest.  They always begin with these basic assumptions and premises -- of whether the purpose of life is to get better, or merely to get worse -- and so the best one can hope for in that version of life, is to live as long as possible, even if one is no longer aware and conscious of anything anymore -- let alone capable of doing anything for oneself.

Yet it is thought enlightened and progressive that we enable that kind of life -- rather than entertain the possibility that we can empower lives so that each individual increases their capacity to do those things for themselves, and become less dependent -- which is to become more independent and free.

People are entitled to whatever they can provide for themselves -- and have that primary responsibility as citizens of any society, to do so -- long before they demand the constant care and assistance from those who don't have those things for themselves.  In such a society, those who simply demand the most, believe they are entitled to that as their fair share -- and that everybody else, exists to provide that for them.

The foundation of those capabilities, is one's individual efforts to increase their health and well-being as their foremost duty -- even if nobody pays them to do so.  The real payoff, is that quality of life, as the basis for the enjoyment of all the experiences they will have in their lives -- unlimited by their diminished and undeveloped capabilities, for doing even the simplest and most common things in life.

Invariably, that is simply to move with ease and without pain -- and not endure a life of agonizing and debilitating pain, that only ceases when one leaves their life -- usually in some inglorious way -- often in the absence of any societal presence and participation for several years, and often decades.  To even see such people, is a jarring reminder of how individuals are shaped by the presence and contact of others -- and merely existing for years in isolation to the forms that are barely recognizable anymore as human.

Just as in ancient Greece, the gymnasium or academy, is where people go to shape themselves -- their minds as well as their bodies, as the most healthy environment for doing so.  One could alternatively, go to movies, restaurants and other entertainments where it would be ruinous to become gluttons in those venues -- which is a large part of the problem of contemporary life and health -- that people overconsume the wrong things -- because they can afford to.

The limit of exercise, is one's own natural energy to engage in it -- tirelessly, and finding out what those limits for every unique individual, is the major reason for those exercises -- and not just arbitrarily doing, what everybody else should be doing.  Not to discover the possibilities and limits of one's own living -- every day of one's life, is the unexamined, unfulfilled, and unlived life -- that no amount of it in diminishing, compromised and undeveloped repetition, can even imagine.