Outliving the Shoeless Sock
Once again when I intended to share about a big doctor’s appointment, employment insecurity interjected, always the attention hog. Well I will not let it bury the lede again. I was lying down on the reclining countertop draped in the same paper material as toilet seat covers every patient knows whether they’re 4 or 41. The nurse practitioner repeatedly pressed hard with her fingers all over my torso without explaining the purpose before exclaiming, “All I can feel are abs!”
That is what I needed you to know and remember. It was embarrassing, I didn’t expect it. It’s not like I was flexing as hard as possible. I told my wife and rather than acknowledge being impressed, she kept repeating it in a mocking tone. I thought that was a flippant way to regard a professional medical opinion and didn’t know I married into the Kennedy family.
The NP’s honest observation picked me up from a fog of fragmented thoughts after finding out from my boss about a project already in process to replace our CRM software with an AI-built internal system. This won’t be completed tomorrow, and there could be a place for me in this future state while I continue to be hounded with work from all sides in current state. But getting rid of Salesforce drums up some existential questions for a Salesforce administrator.
We’ll leave it at that for now. I have some fluid opinions on the implications of vibe coding a system of record, but I should gather more insights from tech influencers to plagiarize at a later time.
Last July I really wanted to go deeper into the health lessons from this book “Outlive”, but I got distracted by being fired in the lobby at the cardiologist. Now, just when I want to revisit and try to give you something useful, the book’s author Peter Attia makes 1,700 Control-F appearances in the Epstein files. So I feel like I should address that before somewhat promoting his content. I might have to bump the health stuff to next month because I only have a few hours left in February to get this one out. But then I’ll probably want to chronicle our Disney cruise. I’m never going to get there.
Right or not — just being honest — I have minimal interest in the Epstein eternal after-party. If someone committed a crime, I love the idea of pursuing aggressive civil damages for the victims. Otherwise, eh. The ringleader hanged himself in jail and the ring died with him. That’s a pretty solid outcome.
The rabid attention and resources seven years later would be more productive applied to stopping current sex trafficking. Every iteration of these news-light news stories feels less about justice and more about wrist-slapping rich old white men, which certainly has more entertainment value than “Love Is Blind” but about the same junk-food nutritional value added to your mind and soul.
I’ll borrow a version of the standard Epstein defense and say the only interaction I had with Attia was casual while reading his book. Our relationship felt static and one-sided. He has no idea I exist. I am not a fan boy defending him. I vaguely know of a whole “longevity bro” culture which seems like a good fit for me, but my YouTube algorithm is dominated by three categories:
My stand-up comedian best friend who insanely will realize a childhood dream when he headlines Radio City Music Hall in April!
Tennis greats, but not just them playing tennis. I don’t know why I keep watching Djokovic interviews. The best clip though is of his rivals. It is physiologically impossible to make it through this gem without giggling.
Action movie scenes including a phase of all Denzel massacring bad guys in the “The Equalizers”, always creatively without a gun
I’ve never listened to Attia’s podcast or even knew what he looked like until the news broke. He released a statement saying he never witnessed anything illegal, attended a sex party or visited the properties. He claims naivete but asked Epstein about a police investigation and cracked jokes like “Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” My judgment on that is muted and biased having made countless remarks in the same genre to my douchey bros and disapproving wife, although none of them are registered sex offenders.
So there is my analysis without a conclusion. You can play the cancel game all day long with any product. Don’t watch Penn State football while you’re at it. Maybe an acceptable compromise is don’t buy “Outlive”, and I can try to give you the takeaways piecemeal. I’ll leave you with one this month before punting.
Exercise is the closest thing to a magic potion, far more effective than cycling through variations of the latest diets and supplements. The New York Times has the worst way of repackaging clickbait breaking health news that you should exercise and eat vegetables.
What I found illuminating from the book is the link between grip strength and stability to health span, the amount of time you get to enjoy on earth before that last alive-but-not-living phase of basically just existing mentally and/or physically. The dream for everyone — especially for those like me who had kids later in life and want to extend our overlap — is to push that health span out until a hopefully steep decline:
I see our parents struggle unbuckling car seats and putting on shoes like it’s a Crossfit workout. Grip strength and stability seem like a sound investment to make now. Offices designed to hold humans sitting for unnatural lengths of time should include pull-up bars in every corner. People taking a minute to work on their dead hangs between meetings should be a normal sight in modern society.
Lately I’ve been putting on my shoes in a way that increases both stability and OCD compliance. This seems intuitive yet uncommonly practiced to me: You should put on a sock and a shoe rather than both socks first to minimize the amount of time the sock can be exposed to dirty elements. A sock getting dirty is perfectly fine given it will be hot washed. The problem is if you then put it in a shoe, which is not washed at all.
So now my method is to balance on one foot while putting the sock and shoe on the other without touching the ground until that shoe is on. The wobbling and flailing feel like functional stability training.
Meanwhile my bloodwork from the physical came back fantastic after months of being on rosuvastatin. I am hesitant to take it forever though. I need to reread the dense chapter on heart disease, the No. 1 killer in America and my formidable genetic obstacle. For now, with future vocation and health span in flux, I can only go off the prominent indicators noted by medical experts and their fingertips.