The Gladiator Makes His Plans once He Enters the Ring

In praise of NOT planning ahead.

Maximal freedom

Who controls you. Your schedule, or you?

Figure it out later

My thought:

Humans naturally don’t “plan” things in advance. We work best when we improvise, “feel the vibes of a situation”, and “wing it”.

Don’t have a consistent workout schedule

Something I realized about working out:

Many people have rigid days in terms of working out. This is a bad idea.

For example, let us say that Friday is “deadlift” day. This isn’t a good plan. Why? What if the night before you slept poorly? Or you’re still augmenting/recovering your strength? Some weeks you might need 1 week of recovery, some weeks you might need 2 weeks of recovery, or sometimes you only need a few days. Or sometimes you might want to workout the same muscle group or exercise two days in a row!

Go with the flow seems like a wiser decision.

Modernity is all about planning

“Taylorism“: the philosophy of timing everything, and squeezing ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’ from our lives.

The notion is that man is like a machine, and could be made more productive and efficient, in terms of a linear scale.

Truth: human and man is a biological being, a trillion bazillion times more complicated and complicated than even the most well-calibrated machine.

Humans require rest, recovery, and we cannot work 24/7 like machines. Nor should we. From an aesthetics perspective, a man who tries to imitate a machine is repulsive.

I’ve never planned anything in my life

Ever since I was a kid, I always ‘went with the flow’, and as a consequence have succeeded in almost everything in my life. I have only failed when I try too hard to plan things in advance.

Taoism

Taoism has been one of the greatest philosophies I have integrated into my “real” everyday life.

Don’t force it — (wu-wei).

The Western and American notion tends to be:

We want to eliminate as much chaos, irregularity, and “scary” unforeseen things, in order to maximize our personal pleasure and fashion in life.

Taoism x Americanism

I still do love American entrepreneurial notions of “taking control of your destiny”, and “with enough hard work and hustle you can climb the social ladder.

It has worked for me. The American Dream has pushed me to next levels. My mom was working-class poor, and now I am part of the ‘tech elite‘.

Perhaps the ultimate hybrid of Americanism and Taoism is this:

Strive and hustle as hard as you can (American), but know that everything won’t always go your way (Taoism).

Don’t plan your life.

I didn’t plan on being born. I didn’t plan on being born in America. I didn’t plan on studying Sociology, nor did I plan on pursuing photography and street photography full-time.

I didn’t plan to discover philosophy, or any of the great masters of photography. It all happened by chance. And once I came across these things by chance, I started to pursue it with great zeal.