Category Archives: Philosophy

Cold Showers

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Cold showers jumpstart my day. It’s an easy way to start off beating the resistance. If you I beat it once a day, I think that’s more than some people.

Last summer, I started taking two ten minute cold showers a day. It’s an easy way to increase lean muscle, stimulate your immune system, and keep your mind happy. Seneca bathed in cold water everyday of his life, even as an old man.

During the winter in upstate New York, I stopped because I would have gotten pneumonia.  Now that I live in San Diego, I take cold showers every morning. The 52 (brutal, I know) degree San Diego mornings make it easy to convince myself to just turn the knob to warm water. But I don’t. I always turn it on cold. When I’m done, it’s an accomplishment. I can tell myself that I did something uncomfortable and hard, and I haven’t started my real work yet.

If you want to try taking cold showers, it’s best to start just 30 seconds or one minute and increase the time you stay in by 30 seconds each day. I made passing time easier by memorizing my favorite monologue of all time or by meditating. If you don’t have something to keep your mind occupied it’s harder.

Haters Gonna Hate

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I’ve been reading Meditations by Marus Aurelius and it has brought only enlightenment and self-examination:

No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into you own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity. They kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. And that somehow cuts your mind from clearness, and sanity, and self-control, and injustice? A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, ad remain unstained. To have that. No a cistern but a perpetual spring. How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VIII 51.

Haters gonna hate. They have been hating throughout history and will continue to hate, so accept their existence and ignore them. Move towards benchmarks with ruthless efficiency and self-control but maintain humanistic ideals in your progress.