Dysmorphia: hating how your body looks (even if it looks objectively great).
Eumorphia: loving how your body looks.
Are we allowed to love the way our body looks?
Eudaimonia (good demon, good inner spirit), or ‘happiness’, or “human thriving” (eu means ‘good’ and daimon refers to our inner daimon or demon or spirit).
Dysdaimonia
The thought of eumorphia first came to me via Nietzsche, who coined a word ‘dysdaimonia’. Essentially the OPPOSITE of human thriving (eudaemonia). People with a parasitical spirit, who just wants to suck out the joy of all human happiness.
Dysmorphia?
Why flex if you’re not the strongest person in the room, your county, your gym, the park, your state, your country, or the world?
This is funny, because there are many bodybuilders who are objectively insanely jacked and ripped, yet … they have low self-esteem. So the question about body builders and weight lifters and powerlifters, etc:
Did you start bodybuilding or lifting weights with low self esteem and started to lift weights to increase or augment your self esteem, or did you start lifting weight already with a high self-esteem, and you started lifting weights to increase your already high self-esteem?
To clarify, did you start lifting weights because you were the skinny fat kid who always got picked on? (I was a fat kid who was teased a lot and I started lifting weights at age 11 to not be fat anymore). Or did you already have a high self esteem, and lifting weights was another way to increase and augment your self esteem even further?
My life story
Growing up as a kid, I liked to run around. I was very physically active, as my mom took me to the park all the time. My mom tells me stories of when I was a kid and I went to the park and it was time to go home — she would say she was leaving without me (to incentivize me to leave). But I would ignore her and still play on.
Fast forward a bit, I’m in New York and my mom is working all the time. Me and my sister at home unsupervised, and we gotta eat. Costco hot pockets baby! Costco corn dogs! As a 10 year old, I think I ate like 3-5 hot pockets a day. Needless to say, I got really overfat as a kid. As a consequence in the 3rd-4th grade, I got teased a lot for being fat, and having ‘thunder thighs‘. Then one day I decided:
Fuck this, I’m not gonna be fat anymore.
My friend Spencer remembers and jokes about it … how I put rocks in my backpack and started to run around Bayside, Queens as a kid. I started doing pushups and sit-ups at home, and asked my mom to buy me some weights (dumbbells) and I started lifting weights at home (shoulder press, bicep curls, etc). As a consequence I became the strongest and most buff out of all my friends.