Get Lean. Find Problems. Plank.

When you order Chipotle or make some chicken pasta, you need to watch something. Before eating, you open your laptop and aimlessly scroll to find the perfect video to enjoy your meal with. In this series, I find videos on YouTube and movies I've watched, then give a review so you can save them for your next meal.

The Country Where It's Illegal to Be Fat

This video takes place in South Korea, and it talks about the culture of taking intense measures to look your best. People even call it the plastic surgery capital of the world. I just want to say that this review isn't shaming South Korea, but rather discussing the need to look perfect.

This video shows us how people are making their looks a massive goal to improve on, which, in some way, I understand. But the measures they are willing to take are a bit extreme.

When you think logically about how to improve your looks, you usually start with the basic advice: go to the gym, lose weight, eat healthy, fix your skincare, and work on finding your purpose.

Have you ever heard of the ice cube diet, taking Ozempic for being slightly overweight, or being fat-shamed because you have muscle, even though you won bodybuilding competitions? The interesting thing I learned is that it's more about being as lean as possible, not having a good frame, muscle, and tone. They promote being super skinny as the baseline for being attractive.

One of the most interesting things I took away from this video is that there is no promotion of trying to be healthier. There are just baselines that you have to achieve. You can't be over 50 kg, you need a small face, no acne, etc. There is no advocacy for eating more protein, going to the gym, or finding a healthy lifestyle. It is just about doing whatever it takes to look attractive. When Will goes to the doctor's office and immediately gets prescribed weight loss drugs simply after they take his weight and height, it shows that being slightly overweight is treated like a disease that needs to be cured.

I understand that the more attractive you are, the better people treat you. People laugh harder at your jokes, give promotions more easily, compliment you more, and admire you more. However, then your entire identity becomes your physical appearance, and you take those extreme measures in order to keep looking this way. Eating ice cubes, getting plastic surgery, and taking weight loss drugs can't be the only ways to look attractive.

The Calhoun Effect

This is a shorter video, so I won't explain the whole thing in depth. But essentially, this video is about an experiment where they placed four male mice and four female mice in a closed environment with the perfect living conditions: no scarcity of food, no predators, and no escape.

This video demonstrates how a perfect society isn't a good society. See, in the end, all the mice die, even though they have everything they possibly need for survival. The problem was a lack of problems. There was no objective anymore. All they were doing was mating and living, and that's why it eventually became chaos.

I randomly clicked on this video, but it also opened my eyes to something more philosophical. I'm glad that I have problems, because without them, I don't know what my purpose for living would be. Having issues is what makes you move forward. If you don't have an issue to tackle, you eventually get bored and lose a sense of meaning.

Even though this experiment was done on mice, we have an intrinsic goal of having a purpose in society, and that's why this experiment failed. Being perfect and having everything makes life boring. The fact that when you wake up, you have to fix your physique or work on social skills makes life worth living.

ANYONE Can Be Mentally Tough. It's Easy.

The reason why I love this video is that he does the whole video planking while advocating for it.

Most people say, "Oh, you should do this, and you will see the benefits." The fact that he was training and doing a plank every day, and then decided to make a video while planking, shows the benefits he talks about during the video.

The reason why planking is an amazing exercise isn't because it can help with posture, core strength, and flexibility. It's because it's basically a fight against yourself. When you feel like your body can't hold on any longer, it's not that it can't. It's your mind telling you to stop because it doesn't like the pain.

What I learned from this video is that you have to train your brain like a muscle. The same way you go to the gym and progressively overload your dumbbell bench press, you make your mind tougher and more resilient in tough times.

You have to make it an addicting video game. Try your best every day to increase your plank by 1-10 seconds. It's not about energy; it's about willpower, and that's why I want to try this out for myself.