Numbness as a feeling

G-morning 👡 

This is Andrew's Apples, a small white bag of four fresh *fruits* to nourish your soul and make you feel great. Like your smart healthy friend who isn't that annoying. In under 2 minutes. Let's go picking. 

1. 🦵 The Leg in Legolas. This tweet. If you hate training a certain body part, you need to focus 2x more on that body part. Approach life similarly. This is the end of this point.

2. 🍷 Numbness as a feeling. People drank a lot during the pandemic. For good reason too, despite whether you deemed Dr. Fauci a saint or a fraud. Get this: From 2019 to 2020, researchers found a 25% increase in the number of alcohol-associated deaths. So there are two main generational attitudes toward tough times. Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1982) stereotypically assume a stoic numbness-as-a-feeling approach to life, best evidenced in movies like The Breakfast Club, Reality Bites, Slackers, Before Sunrise and so on. The characters in these movies want to talk about how funny and screwed the world is and how they may even want to change it, but what's the point? Boomers, conversely, skip the intellectual rhapsodizing, suck it up, and reach for the bottle (fluids and pills both work). The current zeitgeist is someplace in between: working and medicating hard like Boomers yet resting and bitching like Busters. If everything in life is a trade, whereby you give one feeling to get another, what feelings are being exchanged in the trade of drink? As the pandemic's invisible looming effects take their sweet time, we'll belly up to the bar, gripe a bit, and order another round.

3. 🤝 You too? C.S. Lewis said the the hallmark of an opening friendship is, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." Meanwhile Americans have fewer friends than ever before. And it turns out friends are really good for you and your health: "making one more friend increases an individual's general health measure by 6.6% of a standard deviation." The stress of having weak social connections is enough to delete the progress you may have made with diet, exercise, and sleep. But the world is changing. In 2022 your online friends may be just as real as the friends in your city: swapping stories, teasing each other, applying to the same local militia, ending the world, etc. No old man on the porch stuff here. But who will you call when 'you' crash your self-driving car? That super-online skinny engineer living in Egypt?

4. 🍴 More than eats the eye. Eating disorders affect ~10% of the population worldwide (mostly women), and I do not know why this would slow down. Social media (which someone recently asserted to me is better defined as just 'media') has not socialized us to be less vain. Thus over time people will likely adopt stranger and more antisocial ways to eat and to not eat. And then there's this statistic: Less than 6% of people with eating disorders are medically diagnosed as “underweight.” You would have no idea by merely looking at the other 94%. There are countless ways to eat enough food and still lose or maintain weight, so long as it's the right food. This newsletter likes to cover 'food addiction' but humans will worship anything addictive, even the choice to not eat.

How do you like them Apples? Suggestions? Hate me? If you ever need anything, hit reply. 

Your friend, 

Andrew 🍎 

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