Junk-food needs not be bought at McDonalds. It needn’t be food at all, the motions are the same whether it’s internet or TV or sugar or whatever: anything that we have an urge to consume, knowing full-well before and during and after we’ve consumed it that not only it doesn’t have true value, but is also destructive in the long run, and yet we still do it because it satiates some sort of need… that is the enemy.
It’s especially bad because it distracts and tricks the spirit from getting nourishment, and growing, from giving and receiving, creating and consuming, that which has actual value. It’s making the easy choice, instead of the right one, and it hurts not only us, but the people around us too.
The crucial piece of the puzzle which I always seem to forget: from the point of view of healthy food, junk-food tastes awful. From the point of view of junk-food, I’m just gonna have this one more piece, and tomorrow I’ll start eating healthy, I swear.
In the same manner, you cannot prove to yourself or truly appreciate the value of exercise, or think your way into practicing, when you haven’t practiced in a long time/ever. It’s simply not a fair fight – the seductively easy and ever-present experience of lounging around is compared with the rarely (if ever) experienced feeling of satisfaction after a workout, or, worse, with the even more impossible-to-image state of being of someone who practices regularly.
What’s it like to know Japanese? I can pretend to imagine it’s cool, but I’ll have to learn it to really find out.
You are what you eat, so if you want to be something, you gotta eat the vitamins, day in and day out. And don’t think for a second you really know what the feeling will be like once you become something. As always, you only really have the here-and-now, which, incidentally, is probably telling you to take just one more glass of Coke.
A response I want to turn into a reflex in such situations: Instead of resisting an urge, do the positive opposite. Stopping yourself from refreshing your inbox? Write a blog post. Trying to ignore the Cola in the fridge? Write a blog post. It doesn’t have to be completely correlated (though of course it helps), the impulse itself simply needs to be redirected somewhere of value, not merely resisted. When idle, create instead of consume.
Beating Tolstoy 
