The Do Culture — May 12, 2025 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Lemmings🥴
Be Here🎶
Innovation🤔

THE DAILY UPDATE

Humanity is interesting. By and large, I think most of us Muricans know that how we are living our lives isn’t necessarily good for us. We’re too busy, too connecting, eating and drinking too much crap, too disconnected, too focused on things that don’t matter. Despite varying degrees of this awareness, we won’t do anything to change it.

I am no exception, though I’m trying to become one. I get caught up in this Culture of Do, as well, where my worth is defined by how much I accomplish, whether that’s at my job, my side business, around my house, as a father, a coach, a husband, blah blah blah. I am on screens far too much, be they phones, TVs, or laptops. I know with certainty that all of this isn’t good for me, but yet despite my threats to throw all this crap in the nearest lake, here I am, doing the same stupid thing over and over and over again.

I read an article awhile back that said the reason we individually can’t give up these things that we know are bad for us is because collectively we can’t give up these things that are bad for us at the same time. If we all decided that tomorrow, May 13, 2025, was the day we all were going to give up all the stuff that’s killing us and sapping us of our joy, then we could accomplish it. But since we can’t agree on basic things like whether widespread access to guns is good or bad or when life begins, how are we expected to agree to do anything as one cohesive unit? The answer is we shouldn’t be expected to because we can’t. We’re not strong enough, not united enough.

Thus, people who do disappear from social media, who do truly disconnect as much as humanly possible these days, these folks are seen as strange outliers, like that kid in kindergarten who ate paste. If we encounter these people, we might as individuals laud their courage and strength and ability to separate themselves from the herd, and we might even ask, “How’d you do it?” But in truth, we don’t really want to know. At least, we don’t want to know to the point where what they tell us is a blueprint for us to follow in their footsteps.

And so instead we follow in the footsteps of those leading us to our ultimate doom, like lemmings plunging off a cliff into the abyss below. In the process, we are developing actual medical conditions from the way we are living our lives, be they neck conditions attributed to how we constantly look at our fucking phones or mental conditions from how we are constantly connected, constantly on a stage, constantly in the know.

When I wrote yesterday that I wanted to run, I think what that really is all about is my desire to turn back, to leave the herd, to be one of the modern-day adult paste-eaters. But yet, I don’t do it. Why? Because my life is lonely enough as it is. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself. But would I rather be even more alone and less frazzled by the Culture of Do?

I think so.

Something I’m grateful for today: Night sounds.

Something I’ve (ghost)written: Medical Advances Spur Insurance Product Innovations

Song In My Head When I Woke Up: You Should Be Here, by Cole Swindell

Meaningful Lyric From SIMHWIWU:

Everything’s just right
Yeah, except for one thing
You should be here

Song of the Day: Black, by Pearl Jam

Meaningful lyric from the S.O.T.D.:

I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life
I know you’ll be a star
In somebody else’s sky
But why
Why
Why can’t it be
Why can’t it be mine

Something good from today/yesterday: My Bonus Son’s graduation party and playing cornhole with Wifey Poo, Boy The Elder and the DIL. Wifey Poo and I won.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Going to see the Small Town Murder podcast event at The Pageant.

Fat-Ass Update:

Starting weight: 230.6 on 2/12/25
Goal weight (for now): 199.9
Today’s weight 221.7 (-8.9)
Fat-ass burn-off remaining: 21.8 fat-ass pounds

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The Do Culture — May 12, 2025

THE DAILY UPDATE

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