The Absurdity of Exercise: Laziness and Modern Society

I've been thinking lately that, from a global and historical point of view, our workout routines are pretty pathetic (okay, so if you're a pro athlete, I'm probably not talking about you).  In the past and in many developing countries today, the idea of heading to the gym to burn off extra calories or to work on your pecs would be absurd—people got enough exercise just in providing food for themselves and their families.  But in our modern, largely machine-driven world, the only way to keep ourselves healthy (read: prevent ourselves from turning into giant twinkies) is to add physical exercise back into our daily lives, usually in very artificial ways.  Treadmills, I'm looking at you.

Reflections like these lead me to the conclusion—one I seem to reach far too often—that there's something incredibly wrong with the modern world.  Technology is awesome and all, but it just doesn't seem like human beings were cut out for sedentary lifestyles.  It's obviously not good for our bodies to sit around in front of computers and TV screens all day, and the fact that people who exercise regularly are less likely to be depressed suggests that it isn't great for our minds, either.

With obesity on the rise, something's gotta give.  Not that I really have any suggestions; I suppose that, precluding a large scale back-to-the-caves movement, people just need to get off their asses and hit the gym more often, as artificial as it is.  I'll probably stick to my hour a day work out and spend the rest of the time poking around Facebook and sipping lattes.  Unless anyone wants to go live in the woods?  I might be persuaded...

Could be chill?

Where the Dragons At, Dreams? Or, My Failure to Connect to the Collective Unconscious

C.G. Jung:  Dreamin' big

I've been reading this book called The Inner World of Choice by Frances G. Wickes, a Jungian psychoanalyst.  For those not in the know, Carl Gustav Jung was a disciple of Freud who broke off from Sigmund's posse to start his own school of psychology.  The basic idea is that all of humanity is connected by a "collective unconscious," a realm of archetypes shared by people of all time periods and cultures.  Examples of these archetypes include the Dragon, the Hero, the Wise Old Man, the Sorceress, and so on.  And just as Freud believed that dreams revealed the suppressed wishes of our unconscious (usually sexual desires), Jung thought that our dreams could reveal messages from the collective unconscious, which we must confront to become fully integrated human beings.  The system is pretty complicated and I don't pretend to really understand it, but that's the gist of it.

In the book, Wickes provides examples of how the collective unconscious manifests itself in her patients' dreams to convey powerful messages to the conscious ego—that is, the part of our mind that is active in normal waking life.  Here is a typical example of the dreams Wickes recounts in the book (shortened here for brevity's sake):

I am on a great plateau that sweeps with magnificent curve about huge snow-capped mountains...An old man, an impressive patriarchal figure, is pushing a plow...As I go up to him, he speaks to me in a chanting voice of archaic King James English.  The wisdom of the earth speaks through him, a wisdom that he has absorbed through... tilling the soil in this high place of beauty, preparing the earth to receive the seed...

Wickes then goes on to interpret the dream as a call to artistic creation (hence the planting metaphors).  Aside from the problems of interpreting dreams, what strikes me most about this dream (and pretty much all of the dreams in this book) is how utterly unlike my dreams they are.  When I dream, I never encounter wise old men or menacing giants; I don't remember the last time I found myself on enchanted snow-capped mountains.  Usually I'm just at home or at school, with my friends or family or other people I know.  Not to say that these dreams aren't sometimes bizarre or haunting, but they just aren't "archetypal" in the Jungian sense.  That is, unless "the girl from class that I'm crushing on" is a manifestation of an archetype.  Could be.

Jungian Archetypes:  Hero vs Dragon

So all this leads me to wonder:  Am I just utterly disconnected from my unconscious life?  Am I already such an integrated human being that the only thing my unconscious has to convey are trivialities about things I am already (at least partially) aware of?  Highly unlikely.  Or is Jung just full of shit?  His collective unconscious doesn't seem to be as inclusive as he thought.  But then again, I have talked to people who do seem to have typical Jungian dreams.  One friend told me of a dream where she was swallowed by a dragon and had to climb her way out through its eyes—an archetypal, symbolically loaded dream if there ever was one.  In fact, there's one pretty close to it in Wickes' book.

So what gives?  Why don't I dream of dragons and witches and all that?  Do any of you have dreams like this, or are they of the more prosaic sort like mine? Let me know your thoughts.  At the very least, indulge my voyeuristic curiosity by telling me about an interesting dream.

What is this?

I was inspired to start Invincible Summer as a forum to discuss certain philosophical/existential questions that I tend to obsess over.  My aim isn't necessarily to provide a wealth of content (although I'll try my best) but to start discussions on the kinds of things I like to think about on a daily basis.  So to get right to it, these are a few of the questions that I hope this blog can launch conversations about:

• Is there a God?  If so, what is He/She/It like and how can we know?
• Is there a mind-independent world?  That is, would anything exist if we did not perceive it or believe it to exist?
• How do we know anything?  How can we be justified in our beliefs?
• How should we live our lives?  Why?
• Are values (moral, aesthetic, and otherwise) objective?  Or do concepts like "good" and "bad" simply express our desires and opinions?
• What does it mean to be myself?  Am I my body, my brain, my memories, my personality?  Or am I some sort of immaterial soul?
• Do we have free will?  If so, how much?
• What is the meaning of our subjective experiences, if anything?  That is, why do we feel happy, sad, confident, anxious, guilty, proud?

I realize that these are the kinds of things discussed in an Intro to Philosophy class, but my hope is that this blog will generate thought among people who might not usually ask these questions (i.e., non-philosophy majors) and allow for conversation outside of an academic setting.  What I am really concerned with is how our answers to these questions affect our everyday lives, so I hope to bring in lots of related topics—music, art, film, psychology, and pretty much anything else that I find interesting and think other people might as well.

Hopefully we can get some good conversations going!  Let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions for topics or posts.