lifestyles

I’ve been meaning to suggest that the discussions with little
(if any) relation to computing and computers be moved elsewhere,
but I see yeti did it already.

As such, I’m tentatively cross-posting to news:soc.misc (that
seems currently unused) and setting Followup-To: there.

I do not intend to comment on the topic at hand any further
in news:comp.misc, but I’m open to suggestions as to where else
it should be moved.  Feel free to disregard the Followup-To:
newsgroup and instead add a more suitable one to Newsgroups:
/and/ point Followup-To: there.  TYC.

On 2025-02-27, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

 > But I consider coffee—no matter how good quality if might be—a drug
 > to be totally kept on a leash.  I don’t think we should make regular
 > use of any stimulants—of any drug at all.

 > I am probably a naturalist.  If coffee “accelerates your physiology”,
 > then we can say that such “speed” is not the natural way of your body.
 > If you do it every day, you’re totally not respecting the natural way
 > of the system.  Not a religious thing at all—recall that perspective
 > I had on tattoos.  So this is another illustration of why I find myself
 > more religious than the vast number of very religious people I’ve ever
 > met.

How do you define ‘being religious’?  (And, FTM, ‘religion’?)

Human beings can be said to be made to the same broad plan,
but so far as we know, no two humans are entirely identical.
What, then, would be the reason to believe that a given
lifestyle, however well it works for an individual or group,
would at all work for any other individual or group?

Seems to me much like saying that a particular software (Systemd,
D-bus, Wayland, OpenOffice.org, Android, Linux, GNU Emacs, –
whatever) ‘works for everyone.’

Think of it: there’re over 40 recognized human blood group
systems.  Assuming that every group allows for two distinct
blood types, there’re already over 1e12 possible combinations.
Compare that to less than 1e10 humans currently living on Earth,
and the conjecture expressed by Karl Landsteiner in his Nobel
lecture [Landsteiner] doesn’t seem at all far-fetched:

 KL> These findings justify the assertion that very numerous individual
 KL> blood differences exist in man, too, and that there are certainly
 KL> other differences which could not yet be detected.  Whether each
 KL> individual blood really has a character of its own, or how often
 KL> there is complete correspondence, we cannot yet say.

(I. e., I choose to read that “each individual blood really has
a character of its own” as a conjecture.  In my defense, I’m not
the only one to read it this way.)

[Landsteiner] http://nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/landsteiner-lecture.pdf

Some would say it’s all in the DNA, but the thing is: DNA
replication isn’t perfect, and so every single cell has /its own/
DNA.  These copies are /mostly/ the same, and with the amount of
redundancy observed, a few errors here and there tend to be of
no consequence.  Still, a mutation happening at an early
development stage might result in, say, an individual who has
one healthy lung, while the other is affected by some genetic
disorder; a condition known as mosaicism.

As such, even identical twins, or clones, aren’t actually
identical.

Moreover, individuals with chimerism have cells descendant
of more than one zygote, with even more difference between the
respective DNAs of the cells of different lineages.

Consider that, for example, people with type 1 diabetes lack
the ability to produce enough insulin on their own and require
taking synthetic insulin as a drug instead.  Pernicious anemia
is characterized by the inability of the body to extract vitamin
B12 from natural sources, and thus requires said vitamin to be
either taken directly as a drug, or added to their food.

Failure to take drugs regularly with these and many other such
health conditions could be fatal.  Which is to say, for some
people, the “natural way of [their] body” is to die, whereas
drugs allow them to “unnaturally” survive.

As to stimulants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?curid=601284#Personality relates
the Paul Erdős’s interaction with drugs as follows:

 PE> His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, “A mathematician is a machine for
 PE> turning coffee into theorems”, and Erdős drank copious quantities;
 PE> this quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős, but Erdős
 PE> himself ascribed it to Rényi.  After his mother’s death in 1971 he
 PE> started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern
 PE> of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could
 PE> not stop taking them for a month.  Erdős won the bet but complained
 PE> that it impacted his performance: “You’ve showed me I’m not an
 PE> addict.  But I didn’t get any work done.  I’d get up in the morning
 PE> and stare at a blank piece of paper.  I’d have no ideas, just like
 PE> an ordinary person.  You’ve set mathematics back a month.”  After he
 PE> won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of Ritalin and Benzedrine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy#Personal_life quotes
“Motorhead Videobiography” thus:

 L> I first got into speed because it was a utilitarian drug and kept you
 L> awake when you needed to be awake when otherwise you’d just be flat
 L> out on your back.  If you drive to Glasgow for nine hours in the back
 L> of a sweaty truck you don’t really feel like going onstage feeling
 L> all bright and breezy.  […] It’s the only drug I’ve found that I can
 L> get on with, and I’ve tried them all – except smack [heroin] and
 L> morphine: I’ve never “fixed” [injected] anything.

In either case, the individual involved sees their stimulants as
means to an end: doing math in the Paul Erdős’s case, and doing
heavy metal in Lemmy’s.

To me, it’s mostly about free software.  If I need methylxanthines
for that, then I will take them.  Not unlike Erdős, I at one
point stopped taking them for an entire year.  It, too, sucked.
Currently I take at least one 36 hour long break from anything
containing caffeine or theobromine every week so not to develop
tolerance.  It’s worked fairly well for me so far.

I can respect one’s choice of a ‘drug-free’ lifestyle as a goal
in its own right; and I can as well, perhaps to a lesser degree,
respect one’s choice to take drugs as a goal in its own right.
I don’t see either choice working for me, however.

Similarly for tattoos: I don’t see much point in them and would
try my best to never get one, sure.  (Even though I acknowledge
that the society on occasion /does/ force us to do things with
our own bodies regardless of our thoughts on the matter.)

That said, I don’t see much point in, say, ballet, and would try my
best to never get involved with it, in any shape or form, either.

Then, however, I understand that I’m not God to be able to
foresee every possible chain of cause and effect.  A person might
die because of the disease contracted while getting a tattoo.
Another might survive after a severe blood loss because of having
their blood type tattooed somewhere on their body.  (If anything,
I have my blood type recorded in my photo ID, but I don’t have it
with me at all times.)

Every decision and every field of endeavor have their own risks.
Getting a tattoo is risky, but so is participating in ballet.
You risk trauma by doing mountain-climbing, and you risk falling
into a sedentary lifestyle (with its own share of health risks)
by doing computer programming.

Case in point: I, too, appreciate long walks, especially in the
countryside.  Last year, that ended with me staying for a week
at a hospital (the first hospital stay for me since pre-school):
I took a walk in the woods, and got bitten by a tick.

And with regards to, so to say, conventional religions, the way
I read St. Paul’s [Epistle to Galatians] is this: do not obsess
over body, for sooner or later, it /will/ fail.  Though perhaps
it’s to be taken with a grain of salt, given that one of the core
Christian beliefs is that death is transitory, while life is eternal.

[Epistle to Galatians] E. g., http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/?curid=1065 .