Two areas in which many modern people are lacking development are memory and muscle. The urban, modern person is told to constantly make use of new technology which substitutes for these both. Why remember anything when Google can do it for you? What use is muscle mass in the twenty first century when cars, forklifts, and other machines are used for many tasks that in the past required bodily strength and endurance?

There is no substitute for developing memory and muscle—that is learning. While we may, over the courses of our lives, make use of many tools which require some specialized learning, training of both memory and muscle is essential to be an effective human being, all around. Through cultivating these, we build discipline and endurance which can serve us in any times—difficult or "easy". ¹

The fragmented mind

Without training memory, our minds are fragmented. By "training memory" here, I mean being able to recall and reproduce useful bodies of knowledge. By a fragmented mind I mean having uncontrolled attention and will with nothing firm to grasp—a vague idea of what so-and-so said, or why such-and-such is famous, or even how such-and-such is put together. A day may be driven by thinking what is for lunch for the first four hours of the day, punctuated by recollections of images and sounds from some TV show, followed by esoteric technical details of some dry read. Then a social interaction may mean checking a phone for some news—programmed anxiety. Rest might be found in distraction—whether through music, alcohol, food, chasing "experiences" or some other mechanism.

The hyper-literate scatter brain

Many modern people have knowledge of a variety of processes—e.g. where to look up some information. But this is different from mastering a systematic body of knowledge. Indeed you might know the specifics of how to use a few different dictionaries, but this isn't the same as developing mastery of some language and being able to recall words learned and sentence structures for effective communication.

It is easy for many of us to waste hours and hours "surfing the web", consooming content—whether through videos or reading articles or even books.

The main idea bad thing here is that rather than building up knowledge or training, we are passively allowing the environment to fragment us our further. Being able to recognize thousands and thousands of symbols/songs/etc substitutes for the mastery of bodies of knowledge and we instead entrap ourselves into being stupid N-gram models. ²

You are not too smart for muscle

In English, we have expressions like "brains over brawn" or even "work smarter, not harder" which extol the strength of the "genius" or "braniac" who can outsmart the dumb brute. Indeed, the Anglo world (and the Western world more broadly) celebrates its big-braned heroes: Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Lovelace, Turing... (depends on what domain you're in, but we've all heard of at least some of these people through schools, libraries, etc).

Much of this talk is to support the mythos of the "technological savior". Life was terrible before XYZ technologies, they say. ³ And so many people and billions of dollars are put forth towards a cure for cancer, with relatively few people investigating the discipline of fasting, including its spiritual purposes.

Likewise, many "inventions" or "innovations" of the present era do not really improve anything—they are just many people happen to use whereas more generic, older, time-tested ways of doing things suffice

• A piece of paper with a list of exercises can replace a "fitness app"
• Walking can allow you to spend time memorizing/recalling information, learn about your environment, and give you exercise while cutting transportation costs
• Skilled use with a single cooking knife means you do not need a bunch of highly-specific tools

Instead of following the above suggestions, the modern person often lives in fear and hopes upon technology for deliverance. They plug in product instead of training skill. Training skill often means repetition, developing muscle, refining movements, and so forth.

Conclusion

I once semi-jokingly said of myself, "I lose 60% of my abilities when I"m away from a computer". What a nerd!

Critical reflection on what we know how to do and what bodies of knowledge we possess may reveal... ...well, we have a lot of work to do.

I write this post to motivate myself to do better being a competent human being, and I hope it is useful for some others that may come across this too. We cannot depend on the US dollar, today's fashionable technologies, and the latest pop psychology to give us peace. A disciplined mind and body will do better to prepare us for the challenges of the world than a comfy job we might happen to have at one time and place.