God, it sucks to have to force myself to eat when I have zero appetite.

It sucks because it means overriding, by sheer force of will, the messages from one of our strongest drives, appetite.

We tend not to think of our appetite as being a powerful drives because in modern society it is regularly satiated in most circumstances. This is so true that most of us have never experienced true hunger because most of us have never gone more than twelve hours without food.

But there is a reason people say that any society is only three meals away from a revolution. It’s the same reason why when we try to imagine a sympathetic crime, we imagine a starving man stealing a loaf of bread.

We all intuitively grasp that hunger has the power to make people do things they would not ordinarily do. And most people would consider those things justified.

Hunger is not to be fucked with.

But fuck with it I must, albeit in the opposite direction. My body really does not want me to eat right now. It is sending me powerful signals to that effect. I am at the nadir of appetite where eating itself seems gross and bizarre.

I mean, sticking oraganic matter into my saliva dripping maw and then crushing it into a paste before swallowing it?

How very weird.

But still, I am eating. I am eating because I know that my appetite is a dumbass that doesn’t know what is good for it. I know that it is so staggeringly stupid that it will turn off as a response to low blood sugar, which you can only cure by EATING SOMETHING.

And that realization helps. It really does. Knowing that my appetite is not to be trusted and that I have to eat in order to keep myself from feeling really, really bad and that once I have eaten I will feel better really helps to overcome the bad messages I am getting from my stupid body.

It’s like it doesn’t even have a brain.

Being able to override those urgent biological messages takes character. or guts, or grit, or whatever you want to call it. And it is what truly defines adulthood, in my opion.

I have talked about this many times before. My rough definition of character is the ability to choose pain. That means knowing something is going to hurt and doing it anyway because you want what you will get out of that something.

Note that this is not, I repeat. NOT about suffering for no reason or suffering to prove what a manly man you are. Fuck that shit. People who suffer for no reason are dumbasses who don’t understand nature.

No, what I am talking about is overcoming your natural instinct to avoid pain in order to achieve a goal. A goal you choose for yourself.

It sounds simple enough but a lot of people get hung up on it, sometimes for decades. Myself included. And it doesn’t matter how smart you are because this is not a function of intelligence. It is a matter of your connection with your will, and that is something those of us in the high IQ set often have a problem with because it’s so emotional.

And not even the fancy complex emotions that an overweaning ego can kind of be cool about. Nope,. these are the deep, primal, gritty, sweaty, ugly, animal emotions that happen on so deep a level that it is practically invisible to us due to our incredibly strong instinct blocking filters.

The very filters that allow us to be so smart, IMHO. In order to develop a high IQ, a child needs tto block out the “noise” of their senses and instincts so they can concentrate on the kinds of abstract symbol manipulation skills that modern society values.

And speaking as a victim of a very high IQ, I can say that is certainly true with me. And let me tell you, it can produce some pretty amazing results. I owe all my wizardly powers to developing that powerful filter at a very early age.

Thanks, traumatic childhood!

But I think it also leads ot a lot of the problems we face. Like physical coordination. On the surface, there is nothing that connects high IQ with poor physical coordination. The two seem to have nothing to do with one another.

The connection is instinct.  The human body has an extraordinary set of complex physical coordination instincts that allow us to do all kinds of amazing things.

But they are still instincts, and so if you have this thick filter that blocks out messages from your instincts, you do not have access to these abilities. You will instead try to re-invent the wheel by trying to figure out how to do this things with your top-level rational mind, and that is a task for which it is ill-suited.

Thinking is just too damned slow for robust physical engagements with reality in realtime. Only instinct has the speed to handle complex physical tasks because only instinct can go from stimulus to action without having to go through a long detour through the rational mind.

And that’s why we smarty pants types suck at gym. Write that down. It’ll be on the test.

And it’s also what leads us to our social problems as well. Social skills also require tapping into our instincts, in this case our social instincts. These largely revolve around empathy but also include theory of mind, rule deduction, and so on.

And it’s not just a matter of accessing those instincts. It’s a matter of acting on them, or rather, getting out of their way so they can act for you, with the rational mind reduced to a supervisory role.

And acting without thinking and trusting your instincts are inimical to the high IQ mindset. We feel like acting purely out of emotion (in other words, without thought) is a a sure recipe for total disaster and just about the most embarrassing thing ever.

And there’s so much wrong with that, I don’t even know where to begin.

It will have to wait for another blog entry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.