The Education of Axel Heyst

[guitarplayer]

Ah I see, haven't thought about it that way. I get what you mean!

[AxelHeyst]

To muse a bit further: my lifestyle in 2019 had the appearance/ aesthetics of a certain kind of frugality which I was attracted to. But I didn't then understand the mechanics of real frugality and voluntary simplicity, so I had no solid strategic function. Because of that, the very most frugal lifestyle I could have pulled off, if my execution and tactics were on point, would be maybe like $40k.

Fast forward three years through my self-directed ERE strategy boot camp, and my strategy is much improved. Well, for one thing, I HAVE a strategy now, I understand the real mechanics and function of frugality and voluntary simplicity. And now, even if my execution was total garbage, the max I could probably spend is 15k, 20k maybe. Because I just make better strategic decisions without having to think about it. The kinds of strategic decisions I made (or failed to make) in 2019 wouldn't even occur to me today.

So the reason you couldn't imagine spending that much at first, guitarplayer, I think, is because you were trying to imagine having such terrible *execution* that you spend 60k, but you're thinking from within the decision making framework of your quite good strategy that makes it almost impossible to spend that much. You'd have to first imagine having such terrible *strategy* that spending that much is almost inevitable no matter what your day to day decisions are.

[guitarplayer]

Yes precisely. It could be seen as a matter of means vs ends. When you have good means (strategy), ends (stuff, experiences etc.) are achieved relatively cheaply in terms of money. So initially I thought: I just wouldn't have enough time and space for $70k/year worth stuff and experiences. With poorer means, sky is the limit in terms of spending.

[jacob]

So the reason you couldn't imagine spending that much at first, guitarplayer, I think, is because you were trying to imagine having such terrible *execution* that you spend 60k, but you're thinking from within the decision making framework of your quite good strategy that makes it almost impossible to spend that much. You'd have to first imagine having such terrible *strategy* that spending that much is almost inevitable no matter what your day to day decisions are.

This is an interesting framing because it recognizes how "spending efficiency" is made out of two factors: strategy and tactics. "Better to do the right thing than to do things right". Also how much more difficult it is to see the [wrong or right] strategy compared to the tactics.

[AxelHeyst]

Trying Hard, Intrinsic Motivation, Stoke, etc
Over the past year or so I've been spending a lot of time working on my relationship with intrinsic motivation. One of the effects of my career (2009-2021 RIP) was to damage my relationship with Trying Hard, as well as my ability to take my time to methodically drop deep into a task in a calm yet focused way. The mechanism for this damage was the introduction of extrinsic rewards for the form/shape of activities I had always enjoyed. There were the obvious and typical external rewards of salary, benefits, status, etc. But also there was the less obvious external reward of the narrative that the Work Was Important and we were all Green Warriors in the pursuit of Creating a Better Sustainable World. If it weren't for this story, I suspect I'd not have burnt out so hard.

The way the story worked was to push the 'time bin' of the experience of working hard to infinity, by defining the reward/goal I was working towards as "The world not sucking so hard." Obviously that never happened, so the real and deep reward I was seeking never came. I was essentially training myself that all of my efforts were infinitely futile and would never be rewarded. From a dopamine mechanism perspective, I think the explanation is that I learned to never dissociate from my work (because the reward hadn't been realized yet), so I was in a way always 'in' the experience of whatever my work was... and so all of the peaks and troughs and baseline levels of dopamine became associated with the effort and activity of work, and it all became this futile, frustrating, exhausting soup of flailing effort.

Or maybe I just had a vitamin deficiency, who knows. Point is, by the end of it all, I found it incredibly difficult to experience joy in Trying Hard. A real key point to emphasize here is that for my entire life, I've *always* felt a profound exuberant joy in the act of trying hard.

The most mystical, blissful, delighted, light, joyful, etc etc sensations I've ever felt have been while inside the experience of trying really fucking hard on X. X could be a physical effort like mtb, climbing, running, could be marathon-style deeply dropped in to a purely cognitive endeavor like an engineering problem or understanding a difficult book, could be a manual skill-based activity like making model airplanes or wiring up an off-grid PV system.

I don't like taking it easy, except in the context of rest and recovery periods in between bouts of Trying Hard. In that case, taking it easy is great and necessary.

Imagine my distress, then, at having the joy sucked out of trying hard. Can't get off on effort, can't get off on no effort. Damaged goods.

Okay that brings us up to current events. Over the past year I've been focused on removing sources of extrinsic motivation from my life. This is where the whole 'income should only be an incidental yield' thing came from. I've also been critically examining my relationship with purpose and narratives of meaning, which is a tricky thing. It's not like I think having a sense of purpose is a bad thing, but when the fulfillment of the vision of the purpose becomes the locus of attention during striving and effort, that's a mechanism for leeching intrinsic motivation out of my soul. What to do?

Well, what I've been trying to do in various ways is embrace the deep meaninglessness of everything, which isn't much of a stretch for me. I've been doing it in a lighthearted way, though, essentially just internally giggling at my own notions of importance, meaning, or impact, when I'm living in a world (or is it a dream?) that's just a tiny speck of rock hurling through the Great Nothing on its long journey to the Heat Death at the end of the day. Dissociating myself from narratives of meaning is creating a void, a vacuum, inside of which I'm attempting to create an inviting and attractive space for intrinsic motivation to come check out again. Sort of like when you break up with someone in a kind of shitty way, and then date someone else for a long time who, it turns out, sucks, and then you break things off with them and realize how awesome the first person was but you can't just *ask* them to move in again, you've got to play it cool, so you coyly set up your place to be really nice in a way that you like but also you know they like, and then try to arrange 'coincidences' so maybe they'll swing by to grab their old sock that they'd left in your place and see oh hey wow you've really spiffed the place up, and then maybe you'll start chatting about stuff, and one thing will lead to another...

tl;dr I've been working on seducing my old friend intrinsic motivation back into my life. Intrinsic motivation doesn't really give a shit about long term goals, she just wants to get off now, to ride the peak of dopamine and then hop off before the trough. I'm cool with that, it honestly sounds like a fair deal. I see how I was being unrealistic and selfish before by asking her to stay strapped in for the whole thing, the ups and the downs.

I'm not arguing for, or attempting to set up for myself, a life devoid of meaning, long term goals, ethical boundaries, or humanistic perspectives. I'm trying to disentangle those things from my ability to squeeze a bit of joy and exuberance out of my existence. Some things work best when there's a bit of distance between them, and I think that by having a safety gap between narratives of meaning and intrinsic motivation/trying hard, my ability to experience/engage with *both* realms will be improved in my life. My ability to Try Hard and enjoy the hell out of it is powerful, and my ability to discern threads of meaning and orientation in the world is important. And the two can inform, reinforce, complete, etc each other. But smooshing them together ruins them both.

Where I've been at, or getting to, then, is what I've been thinking of as Phase 1: Stoke Surfing. This is where I stripped everything that looked like extrinsic motivation from my life that wasn't bolted down, and cultivated the ability to just hang out and discern what was going on in my mind-body, and notice the sensation of intrinsic motivation when it more or less arose spontaneously in me, and then surf that wave of stoke for as long as it lasted and hop off when it was done. I was careful to try not to force anything, to not bring any narratives about what I should or shouldn't be doing to bear on my actions and sensations. I needed calm waters to be able to pick up on what were to me the subtle and timid sensations of stoke, that I had spent more than a decade beating down with a stick.

I tried really hard (ironic) to *only* do things I wanted to, and examing closely if it was something I actually *felt* that I wanted to do, or something I *thought* I should want to do. I took this to the point that, in a circumstance where I was around a nice lady who probably was DTF if I'd asked nicely, I asked myself if *I* was into it, and the response was "I mean, meh", so I didn't pursue it. I didn't really understand why, but the signal (or lack of it) was pretty clear so I just went with it.

Generally thought it's been nice, and I've learned a lot. Also, just bobbing along in the placid waters of tranquil non-expectation has its limits. At some impossible to define point, self-care becomes self-indulgence and it's like all right jeez get on with it already, how long you just going to sit there with your pecker in your hand like that.

I *think* I'm about ready to move into Phase 2: Stoke Mastery, which involves more active and direct control and exertion of conscious will over my ability to experience intrinsic motivation. This is the dark art of *creating* authentic desire to do something I *want* to want to do from the inside of the experience.

I don't actually know how to do this yet. But I have some ideas and I'm beginning some early experiments. I'll report back when I have some results to discuss.

[ertyu]

if you're trying to achieve control and exertion of consciousness over your ability to experience intrinsic motivation, aren't you again asking of yourself to feel like you think you should be feeling? even though this time how you think you should be feeling is "internally motivated"

[AxelHeyst]

Yep. It's a bit of a paradox. Although maybe it's just semantics that gets confusing when using the term "internal" motivation. It's a question of whether I'm fine with passively acquiescing to whatever state happens to come over me, versus taking initiative to guide my state in a direction I prefer.

An alternative framing is that what I'm doing is cultivating an internal and external environment that is most conducive to the flourishing of a desirable state. As opposed to exerting 'control' over my internal state. Aka instead of being a stoke master, I'm trying to become a stoke master Gardener. Amending the soil and ensuring adequate water and keeping pests away, etc.

Something to avoid is non-acceptance. The self talk should never be "I don't feel internally motivated right now, that's Bad, I don't accept that." However I feel is however I feel, and that's wonderful. Accepting/loving whatever state I'm in, and then making a conscious decision to move to a different state, is the trick. I actually suspect it's not that difficult. We'll see.

There's a difference between "I should feel a certain way" and "I want/I choose to feel a certain way". One is an expression of judgement, the other an expression of desire. Or taste.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Hi AxelHeyst,

I have enjoyed your latest, and timely, blog post:

My approach to spending less than $200 a month on food - http://tylerjdisney.com/blog/2022/10/10 ... th-on-food

Good writing and strategic thinking.

I am currently reading about calorie restriction and fasting in relation to longevity and thought to ask if you still shoot for 2,700 calories/day. How did you arrive at this number? BMR + adjusted for your level of activity?

If embracing restricted calorie intake (in the form of less food per day or fewer meals/fasting) is actually beneficial for health, that could also lead to less money spent on food as a second-order effect.

EDIT: Link edited to HTTP. When I pasted the original link, it did strike me as odd there was no HTTPS and I checked with HTTPS (and got the certificate warning) but forgot to remove the additional S when submitting the post. Apologies for the mix up.

[jacob]

My approach to spending less than $200 a month on food - https://tylerjdisney.com/blog/2022/10/1 ... th-on-food

I'd suggest looking at dollars per pound instead of dollars per calorie as the latter doctrine is biases towards rice and canola oil and away from celery and tomatoes. One can use a few different values for vegetables, meat, cereals, oils.

PS: Somehow firefox throws up a security alert for the https link.

[7Wannabe5]

Of course, the problem with using $$/lb is that it favors foods that have already been reconstituted with water vs their dried equivalents. So, you gotta juggle a bit.

I am currently trying to wean myself off of bad habit of eating out that I developed due to too many years of dating Calorie Kings. I mean, I lie if I say it isn't nice to have somebody pick you up in their car and take you out to eat after a long day exerting the patience necessary to teach fractions to 5th graders. OTOH, if I'm home by myself doing something like working with spreadsheets, making a pot of soup for myself seems like an enjoyable change of activity. IOW, I have a "too much Mom stuff" limit, and on days where I push myself beyond it, and I don't have a Calorie King to pick up the bill for dinner, I will sometimes find myself in a booth at some place with a name like Grandma's Kitchen paying too much for a bowl of soup.

My general point being that I thought your post was very good, and beyond even identity analysis, value analysis and "energies" flow analysis comes into play.

[Scott 2]

The link works fine over http:

http://tylerjdisney.com/blog/2022/10/10 ... th-on-food

There's a cert mismatch using SSL. The site is defaulting to a squarespace wildcard cert:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze ... Results=on

[AnalyticalEngine]

The analysis on cutting your food spending is quite helpful. Overspending on food is something I still struggle with, and I appreciate how this lays out the layers toward truly making the change. I am going to attempt some of these steps to cut my own bill, and I will report back on the experience.

[Slevin]

Interesting post. My overall strat is mostly the same that's been echoed here: use high calories / dollar foods to make up the bulk of eating (but supplement these with even more veg). My tactics of how I went about implementing were fairly different though.

I focused on developing a repertoire of recipes using those cheaper foods, with a lot of veg crossover between recipes, so waste stays low (the bulk foods keep basically forever in sealed buckets with gamma seal lids, while green veg is good maybe a week or so). Depending on your temperament, 5 recipes could be enough to know, or for some people its on the order of 50.

Then I developed several "fallback" options that can be made in 5-10 mins for when I'm just tired and not feeling like cooking food (very important to me). I think everyone needs these for those times where you are shortchanged on effort and are a #1 priority to replace when they are becoming low in stock.

This gave me a "low effort" way of keeping myself on the cost trend, as I always had an easy way to adhere to the low spending diet without having to do any "active" work.

Especially for those high fiber foods, if you are switching from a diet where you don't eat a lot of the fibrous foods normally, or just not a lot of one food that ends up being a staple in the changing environment, you should expect a digestive "adjustment" period that could be quite uncomfortable. It takes time to build up the tolerance, and so switching from a "less fibrous" diet to one more like AH is pointing to in this article you might want to do over a number of months as your body builds up tolerance to the new fiber / different fiber. I didn't do that, just adhered to the diet entirely when I switched, and there were more than a handful of nights where I just laid in bed all night with gastrointestinal discomfort (water is your friend in this situation, even if adding more things to the mix is the last thing you want to do).

Once you have a simple system in place, if you want to make it more rich, I recommend learning a bunch of different recipes with similar ingredients. This is, to me, a way of learning the general "parameter space" of the food. So with lentils, you can get pulled into a lot of Indian, Middle eastern, Central + South American, African, and Asian foods which all use similar ingredients but the overall outcome is fairly different (due to spicing and cooking method / prep). If you make some of these recipes for each culture, you can start to see how each integrates the lentils into a flavor and texture profile, and this lets you become better at "hacking it" the times you are short on ingredients or are just feeling like an artist and want to make your own creation for dinner or whatever. This is drastically past "good enough", pushing into the "learning how component bits effect the whole" and is a game of hundreds if not thousands of hours...

Small tactic:
* at the farmers market, buy "seconds" if they are available, these foods are just ones that look a little weird, but are totally fine tasting, and can often save you 30%-50% off the price of a good. Often they are sold off in bulk, so these mix best with a large freezer and a little bit of food prep.
* if you end up eating tofu as a cheaper protein source, with more firm varieties, freezing it (ideally out of the water, but whatever is fine) and then thawing it again changes the texture and makes it more "meatier" (more firm, more strong, more spongy) and makes it hold sauces much better.

[zbigi]

Once you have a simple system in place, if you want to make it more rich, I recommend learning a bunch of different recipes with similar ingredients. This is, to me, a way of learning the general "parameter space" of the food. So with lentils, you can get pulled into a lot of Indian, Middle eastern, Central + South American, African, and Asian foods which all use similar ingredients but the overall outcome is fairly different (due to spicing and cooking method / prep). If you make some of these recipes for each culture, you can start to see how each integrates the lentils into a flavor and texture profile, and this lets you become better at "hacking it" the times you are short on ingredients or are just feeling like an artist and want to make your own creation for dinner or whatever. This is drastically past "good enough", pushing into the "learning how component bits effect the whole" and is a game of hundreds if not thousands of hours...

My experience so far is that, if you cook in batches and freeze them for later, a lot of the texture and smell is gone. Maybe I if would reheat them more (bring them to higher temperatures) and over a longer time period, it would bring those detail back to life... I need to try that.

[theanimal]

I'd suggest looking at dollars per pound instead of dollars per calorie as the latter doctrine is biases towards rice and canola oil and away from celery and tomatoes. One can use a few different values for vegetables, meat, cereals, oils.

I think $/lb is sufficient metric if you buy the majority of your food. For those who are looking to complement store bought food with a garden, hunting, fishing and foraging $/calorie becomes superior as it represents the things that you are not able to easily source yourself. For example, given the prices where I shop, using the 400 cals/$ metric I can get eggs, cheese, mixed nuts, peanut butter, olive oil, butter, flours and beans, among I'm sure a few other things. If I go up to 800 cals/$ (more in line with under $100/mo), the list is the same minus eggs, mixed nuts (but still can buy walnuts & pecans) and cheese. Many people would find such a diet lacking on its own. However, it starts to look a bit different when you have 200 lbs of potatoes in the root cellar, a bunch of pickled and blanched veggies, berries you picked earlier that fall, 20 salmon in the freezer and deer quarters hanging in the yard. IF you have these other options, cal/$ allows you to approach closer to the realm of $0 because it eliminates options that would otherwise be available under the $/lb metric.

[Slevin]

My experience so far is that, if you cook in batches and freeze them for later, a lot of the texture and smell is gone. Maybe I if would reheat them more (bring them to higher temperatures) and over a longer time period, it would bring those detail back to life... I need to try that.

I usually freeze ingredients, not prepared foods. Sometimes this means some prep there (chopping, blanching, etc), but the end goal is usually using the ingredients in a meal that is cooked in a way that losing a bit of "crunch" etc doesn't matter. I do cook and freeze sauces (red, vodka, etc), and haven't noticed a big loss of flavor there. Theoretically you can use that same principle for prepared foods that you freeze, i.e. a curry or a chili is going to lose a lot less texture and flavor in the freezing process than a veggie stir fry (which will usually keep the veggies crisp after the cooking process).

In terms of reheating methods, 100 percent. Worst (in terms of flavor) is the microwave, or maybe boiling. Best is in a pan or a toaster oven / oven. However, that is against the convenience factor.

[AxelHeyst]

I am currently reading about calorie restriction and fasting in relation to longevity and thought to ask if you still shoot for 2,700 calories/day. How did you arrive at this number? BMR + adjusted for your level of activity?

If embracing restricted calorie intake (in the form of less food per day or fewer meals/fasting) is actually beneficial for health, that could also lead to less money spent on food as a second-order effect.

BMR+Activity level to get an initial target, that I then validated with the daily tracking. (My calorie intake is lower now, that's just what worked for me at the time).

I read that the benefit of intermittent fasting (8/16, which is what I do now) at the same calorie level of no fasting, calories to satiety, is *almost* as good as absolute calorie restriction, as in, lower overall calorie levels. Am I recalling that correctly? Either way, yep, the less you eat, the less you have to pay for eating!

I'd suggest looking at dollars per pound instead of dollars per calorie as the latter doctrine is biases towards rice and canola oil and away from celery and tomatoes. One can use a few different values for vegetables, meat, cereals, oils.

I'm going to check that out. It doesn't make intuitive sense to me to approach it that way but I haven't run a model or given the heuristic a fair test drive.

At any rate, the calorie/$ metric (and, I'd argue, a $/lb metric - ANY single metric, is my point) is useful but not sufficient for most people. I use cal/$ in the case when I'm in the store and see some thing and think "Oh, hm, I think I might want that, but I'm not familiar with that particular product", and I can do a quick check on it. It's not appropriate for lots of kinds of things one can buy in a grocery store, and it's not sufficient for building a food strategy.

The heart of my approach was to build an entire meal plan for a day, where I got sufficient calories as well as (what I considered to be) sufficient servings of veggies and vitamins and nutrients etc, avoided foods I considered 'bad' or unacceptable, and it wasn't so bland and boring that I decided it'd be better to go back to a cubicle job. 1, Energy, 2, nutrients n stuff, 3, taste. The activity of building the meal plan, and designing a variety of equivalent alternative meals, built my intuition around ingredients and recipes to the point where I rarely think about food cost anymore. I just buy the kinds of ingredients that I need for the kinds of meals I now eat, from the places I've learned to get food from, and I don't go to bed hungry, and I feel healthy and nourished, and it costs less than $200/mo. I think the end result is similar if not the same as having a price book in your head that you wrote about in the book, it's just that a big 'ol spreadsheet is what got me there.

[AxelHeyst]

It takes time to build up the tolerance, and so switching from a "less fibrous" diet to one more like AH is pointing to in this article you might want to do over a number of months as your body builds up tolerance to the new fiber / different fiber.

I dig your approach, thanks for writing it out. Developing a broader repertoire of recipes is something I'm still scrounging around for motivation for (I have a high tolerance for repetition).

I just wanted to point out - I was trying not to imply any dietary specifics in my post, so as not to distract from the overall point regarding the application of strategic thinking. Anyone can apply the principles and reduce their food cost regardless of what diet values/approach/etc they have. Obviously it's going to be easier for a vegan to cut costs than my friend who has food allergies for days and can basically only eat meat, some fresh veggies, and potatoes.

[AxelHeyst]

Shifting topics: I'm about a week in to experimenting with exerting my will over what I do and how I experience it, rather than waiting around for a stoke wave to spontaneously arise out of the ether and being ready to hop on it. Background post. Here's some notes on how it's gone.

I've been drawing three squares in my journal in the morning of each day. Each represents an hour of time I want to spend focused and trying hard on something. Similar to Cal Newports definition of a Deep Work session, but more open to broad interpretation. When I spend an hour Trying Hard, I fill in the square. If I do more than three a day, I draw more squares and fill those in.

I have not *scheduled* any of my focus sessions. I don't want to overdo the structure, and it can be stressful to have decided that I'm going to do a thing at 1400 but then someone wants to chat, or something. So - I'm intentionally not doing timeblock planning at the moment.

The result of the squares is that I pose the question to myself "what am I going to do to fill in my three squares today?" and I've got lots of options, so the decision is typically easy. My GTD system also makes the intuitive prioritization of projects and tasks, um, intuitive, so there's no overhead or anxiety related to choosing what to do. Or rather, deciding what to fill my task hopper with is a separate process that I'm well practiced with.

Before I do a thing, if I think about it at all, I try to make sure I think about how enjoyable the activity of doing the actual thing will be. If I notice myself thinking things like "man I'm going to be glad when that's done" or thinking about getting paid for the thing (if it's a paid thing), I do basic mindfulness redirection: notice the thought, acknowledge it, and nudge my attention back to how enjoyable I find doing the actual activity to be.

While I'm doing the thing, if I think about it at all, same same. My intentional self talk menu is composed of things all the way from "Gee, isn't this nice?" all the way to "I LIVE FOR THIS SHIT!!" depending on how intense the activity is. Yes, I actually play the scene in my head from the movie XXX where Vin Diesel is about to get sucked out the back of a C-130 by his parachute and says that line while everyone else is freaking out. Whatever works, brah.

After I've done the thing, if I think about it, I try to foster a sense of nostalgia: "Wasn't that great?" and remember / re-live how enjoyable it was to be absorbed in the thing or how psyched I was on keeping going even though it hurt, or whatever.

Results/Observations:
My energy levels are high, the amount of stuff I've been doing per day has increased, I seem to naturally aka without effort be oriented towards seeking fun stuff to focus on, and it's easier for me to begin projects/tasks that I otherwise am not that psyched on (by gently redirecting my focus and self-talk).

I'm really noticing how much self-talk is often a subconscious narrative going on in my head... and how easy it is to tweak it. To ertyu's point, there's a danger here of suppressing or harshly self-judging aspects of oneself, and setting up a new pattern of 'shoulds' - aka I SHOULD Try Hard or I SHOULD want to do X hard thing. That is to be avoided.

How I feel about what I'm doing, is that I'm mostly just paying attention to the narratives I have in my head, and questioning them, and inviting myself to be deliberate about which narrative I choose. The old/unconscious narratives, the ones that are more focused on the external rewards or whatever... where did those come from? What makes those authentic? They are signals that exist inside me, but who the hell put them there? I'm not sure, and I'm not totally sure it's worth the effort of tracking every single one down.

Getting back to my context post above, I *like* the idea that I'm a person who enjoys Trying Hard, intrinsically, for my own reasons. That's both a top-level, conscious belief I have, AND I think it exists at a deeper level in me. I have a profound somatic response to the idea of trying hard, and it's a sensation that I've been familiar with for my entire life. These other narratives/stories in my head that have interfered with my relationship with Trying Hard, those feel like the interlopers, the externally injected and inauthentic learned defense mechanisms based on experiences I had in the world. But I've got them now and so I have to deal with them somehow. Denial and overt aggression is, I'm guessing, not going to work well. Hence the mindfulness based self talk, noticing, invitations, etc.

I should just mention that I have never been a serious meditator. My longest meditation streak is something like 10 days. Basic familiarity with self-observation, acknowledgement and releasing, and repositioning the attention is all that's required for what I've been doing so far.

[ertyu]

Good point: the narratives are not authentic, just habitual. And no one really needs to have consciously put them there: mirror neurons are excellent stuff, we only need to observe how those around us behave and we soak it up without even realizing we've done it. Mom goes to work because we need money, I study to get a good grade for the test, we diet "to lose weight" and exercise "to be healthy" -- instead of, you know, because healthy food is good in and of itself or because we enjoy the act of moving our bodies. There's certainly enough going on in the broad cultural soup to install extrinsic reward thinking, no one needs to particularly try to instill it in you.

I enjoyed this post, thanks for sharing