We All Must Become Bodybuilders

The distinguishing characteristic of aging and deterioration, is muscular atrophy or shrinkage -- obviously visible as sagging and wrinkled skin -- for which there is no dynamic, underlying support -- of the musculature.  That is less obvious in the obese -- because of the mass that supports the skin, just as artifices like botox do in filling out the spots that have basically collapsed because there is no underlying supporting structure -- as the muscles are designed for.

Thus one can tell right off, whether that specimen is "robust" -- or in declining health, which is the major cue in life as to a prospect's chances of success or failure, which in the successful and healthy, determines the course of their lives.  They don't make bad choices, but instead, make better and better choices -- which makes the quality of their lives improve with age, rather than revealing the accumulative effects of a life of bad choices.

First we have to acknowledge, that the quality of our lives is a choice -- and not just random fate, so that all choices result in the same outcome, so it is futile to hope to do better.  Many people try to pass off that despair as the wisdom of being older -- and so go through the motions of doing something productive and meaningful, while having no idea of what they are doing, much less how they could be doing it better.

For such people, nothing really and actually makes a difference, but they go along unquestioningly -- because one can't be wrong doing what everybody else is doing -- even if it is obviously and categorically not working.  Their sole criteria of "right," is what everybody else is doing/thinking, regardless of whether it makes no difference.  It is the end-all and be-all, just to do what everybody else does -- including the complaining of the futility of their activities and lives, because that is what everybody else does.

But assuredly, some things do make a difference -- and the reason there are differences, and not that an "enlightened" society must now ban all differences -- and agree that everything must be the same.  Obviously, that is a giant step backwards for individuals as well as civilizations -- and human evolution.  The thrust of evolution and progress, is that we become more discriminating -- and not less -- to the ultimate achievement that we cannot distinguish any differences in anything.  The supreme achievement of life, is to be able to distinguish differences (qualities) that no other person can distinguish as well -- or even realizes there can be.

That obvious difference, is whether one is getting better, or worse -- and determining what behaviors and activities result in those conditions -- in all the things we do, to produce the preferred outcomes that enhance our lives and prospects for the future -- all the days of our lives.  It doesn't make much sense, for life to get unrelentingly worse each day, all the rest of our lives -- until death is a welcome release, and then lament that end.  Better one should go suddenly at the peak of their powers -- especially at a hundred.  That alone would be a life extraordinarily lived.

But the present pattern, is that one peaks fairly early in life (40), and then may spend half as much in decline -- claiming that is the normal and healthy, and the only thing that can be expected, as the way life is -- despite the fact that life was not always so long, and kind.  Life before, was "brutal, nasty and short," and people were conditioned to such lives -- but now, that is not the only way it can be.

But a better life doesn't just happen.  It happens because people deliberately make it happen -- in all that they do, as the organizing principle of their lives.  For the first 40 years of one's life, it is not so  important to be a bodybuilder, one as one ages, it is increasingly important and obvious that that is what one must do -- but is presently, when most people stop and abandon all hopes of becoming one, because the present regimen and conditioning ideas, fail to work -- and prove futile and discouraging.  That is not inherently the case.  It is simply that the popular notions are wrong -- and fail at those times they must succeed -- that really matter.

And that is the major determinant of the quality of life in that latter half of one's life -- that makes those years golden, rather than the unrelenting torment it has become for those who no longer care -- about anything anymore -- or can tell the difference.