Motivation

I thought of an idea before falling asleep last night that I am surprised I still remembered in the morning. You know how it is, you have the most brilliant ideas either in the shower, in bed, or while you are hanging from your toes on a slave boat somewhere. Yea, that.

So, I made one of my goals for myself getting back in shape. I want to stay healthy and not have like a million problems wrong with me when I am in my 40s or whatever. That would be nice. I can already feel myself getting old when it come to what I eat, and how my stomach responds to food. I love spicy things, but if I overdo it my body rebels in not so nice ways.

I also want to look good. I've always had a fat stomach, and that is something that really needs to change and make me feel like I have made progress towards being a better person. Vanity has never been my thing; I am incredibly humble, and I think that my body has been fostering that attitude. I want to be more confident.

My grand epiphany is that I am not allowing myself to date or pickup women until I bring my weight down. I want to be about 205 before I will start looking to date again, and a goal weight of 185. This will allow me to have some muscle tone and lose my belly fat. I think by taking women and relationships off the table will allow me to focus exclusively on myself and being a little vain. I need a little narcissism.

Getting in shape and getting more good looking will put me in a much better position to be more selective about dating. I met a lot of girls this summer, but nothing really went anywhere because I just wasn't being very picky about who I dated. I went out a lot and really wasn't very interested in whom I was seeing.

I'm going to take this time as well to get better at understanding and interacting with women. I'm one of the stereotypical dudes who has always put women on a pedestal, seeing that they can do no wrong. Recent history has contradicted this, and now I don't hold women in general in such high regard; not a women hater though. I can have really great conversations and have a lot of fun with women when I'm not attracted to them very much, or that element of nervousness is gone. If I am not actively trying to impress girls that I see as potential dates, then I can get to know them a lot better than if I was.

I'm also going to look into some books about gender studies and relations. I can't put my finger on it, but the equal rights movement has taken a lot of wind out of the sails of men in terms of gender equality, and it seems the pendulum has swung a little too far. Men don't provide the same value as they used to in terms of being the bread winner and the provider of the family. Our culture has shifted away from more romantic and selfless values of family, love, and happiness and replace them with more self and tangible ideas like money, success, and sex. I'm not saying that any of that is bad, as a balance must be struck.

Men who at one time could attain value to women through being the breadwinner and champion of the household, now don't have as much worth to society when women being able to do the same work as men. Men are the gender that is wired to procreate, and the mechanism in the past has been through being the dominant gender; with the genders being more equal I don't see people having children. I'm worried that the US will start to go through negative population growth in the next 10-20 years due to US citizens not having children, and the only growth is experienced through immigration.

This has already gone on way too long, but I also think more and more people are single because there are exponentially more avenues of expression than there have ever been before, and it's exponentially more difficult for two people to have some common ground and interests on top of being attracted to each other. Or I could just be a hater, and think that only really attractive people are getting together and having babies while the rest of the population isn't very good looking, but has false high expectations of a mate driven by popular culture.

Ultimately I'm a romantic, though I feel that I have to change who I am to find someone else.