Health Homework (29) Stop adapting to bad situations; use your adaptive abilities only for necessary and positive circumstances
One can trap oneself into a situation of endless-but-managable suffering while praising oneself for constantly “adapting”, thereby wasting one’s positive and constructive talents on a miserable life
This page is the latest instalment in the ongoing series of ideas, reflections and suggestions titled HEALTH HOMEWORK.
“Being good at adapting and holding adaptability as a core value created opportunities for me to accel and also to be trapped—even abused—within systems and relationships that were highly demanding and burdensome, whether those were occupational, educational, or romantic.”
Adaptation and adaptability are generally considered positive/beneficial traits and actions; the ability to adapt to the environment is praised as a central power and virtue in biology (eg, Darwin’s evolution by adaptation), medicine and fitness (eg, metabolic flexibility) and philosophy (eg, Nietzsche’s “order of rank” and Will to Power).
Indeed, with the popularization of Nietzsche’s quote “what does not kill me makes me stronger” we equate pain with growth and advancement, but we’ve generally failed to qualify the appropriate circumstances in which this is both true and worthwhile; no doubt that Nietzsche either did or would have clarified and contextualized this aphorism in his more subtle and distinguishing discussions, notably in his distinction between master morality and slave morality.
ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, WE FIRST REALIZED THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS DISTINCTION in our last few months of living in Europe…
…after Europe had transformed from a pleasant “adult playground” of higher culture, easy travel, and amazing aesthetics to —under the justification of the Covid Plandemic— a miserable police state of drone surveillance, mandatory vaccine passports for food and travel, and the start of the social credit system, which —as the final straw that forced us to leave— was forcing us to use identification cards simply to discard our trash, which occurred to me as a repulsively unacceptable insult. We had loved living in Europe since 2013/2014, but suddenly the entire idea and ideal of European society was being destroyed by Europe itself—more specifically by the European Union, which was now obviously under the control of a small unelected group of technoglobalists.
Doug Casey: The European Union evolved, devolved actually, from basically a free trade pact among a few countries to a giant, dysfunctional, overreaching bureaucracy.
Once we saw it for what it was, we had to accept it as it was; the proverbial writing was on the wall, and we could either accept reality and take action to escape from conditions that had become unacceptable, or we could live under plandemic tyranny, which for us was not an option. For the early years of our European experience, we adapted to the goodness of Europe; once the pandemic coup d'état1 occurred, our adaptations were to a negative situation and thus our positive attribute of adaptability/flexibility was being used against us—a situation that was unacceptable.
To constantly adapt to a negative situation is to have one’s positive attribute of consciousness function against oneself.
Further and perhaps worse, one can trap oneself into a situation of endless-but-manageable suffering while praising oneself for constantly “adapting”, thereby wasting one’s positive and constructive talents on a miserable life, a miserable job, or a miserable relationship.
Your talents and abilities—including adaptability, flexibility, patience—should be used to your personal advantage (ie, creating an enjoyable and productive life) and/or for metapersonal goals that you’ve intentionally chosen, defined, and delimited.
delimit: To fix the limits of; to demarcate; to bound.
The Adaptability Trap
I personally have held adaptability as a high value, mostly per my philosophical perspectives (best articulated by Nietzsche, per the brilliant review by Professor Richard Schacht [Cassette:9780938935278]) and intellectual drives; indeed, my decision to attend medical school was based less on professional advancement and more on personal development (actually wanting to be less emotional and compassionate) and intellectual/educational immersion in what I saw quite accurately as the most difficult task I could achieve. Being good at adapting and holding adaptability as a core value created opportunities for me to accel and also to be trapped—even abused—within systems and relationships that were highly demanding and burdensome, whether those were occupational, educational, or romantic. High adaptability (inherent and willed) combined with emotional and conceptual codependency* (to be defined and distinguished in an upcoming discussion) is a recipe for overwork and overdedication.
*My re-interpretation of codependency is a collage of concepts from Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child, Robert Greene’s Mastery, and Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft that I will eventually write out.
We can waste our time and emotional resources with bad friends, just as we can waste our careers and intellectual resources with bad jobs; we can also pause to reevaluate our situations and occasionally notice that a sweet situation may have turned sour.
RECENTLY, I HAD TO REALIZE THIS AGAIN IN MY PERSONAL LIFE, specifically in several personal friendships.
We can waste our time and emotional resources with bad friends, just as we can waste our careers and intellectual resources with bad jobs; we can also pause to reevaluate our situations and occasionally notice that a sweet situation may have turned sour. During the course of 2020-2023, I had to—unwillingly and with some difficulty—separate and depart from several friendships when I realized they had become either stale/outdated, offensive, or subtly abusive.