What has helped me deal with this is keeping perspective. A great quote for this is one by ancient Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius from almost two thousand years ago.

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and unfriendly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.” –Marcus Aurelius

Keeping this mind doesn’t solve the problem. What it does is let you think about your every day struggles with others differently. It won’t make the pain go completely away, but it can lessen it.

Several years ago, I wrote some articles on Marcus Aurelius and his wisdom. One of these is below:
The Wisdom Of Marcus Aurelius: How To Gather The Strength To Survive In Adversity

Rather than sit idly by, I decided to go online and share some fitness tips I had learnt in the previous years. After all, I would quite often get approached by friends, but even random guys, asking me to share my secrets on how to get big and strong. At the time, there was not much of this type of material online.

Even worse, most of the stuff that you could find dealt with losing weight. I had the opposite problem. I was always a skinny guy, and needed to GAIN weight instead. So I decided to write about that. Little did I know that at the time, the big explosion in blogging was on the way.

Millions of people were starting their own blogs. Thousands were starting their YouTube channels. My content got lost in this flood.

So after a while blogging, I decided to shift the topic of my blog. I thought long and deep. What is my competitive advantage? The ability to learn things quickly, combine disparate domains, and excel in different areas. Thus, Renaissance Man Journal was born.

On the way, I wrote about ancient philosophy and the lessons for today, psychology, goal setting, project management, and a vast variety of other things. Some of my favorite topics were ones on problem solving, such as first principles thinking, thinking by analogy, and similar things.

For a while, my articles on first principles thinking, Renaissance Man, gladiator workouts, and even the fall of the Roman Republic, ranked on the first page of Google. Usually, pretty high up. Over time, they inspired other people’s writings. Some of these were acknowledged, but more often they were not.

For some reason, at some point most of these articles ended up buried in the rankings, usually falling off Google altogether. This despite the fact that articles that borrowed heavily from my thinking still ranked among the top pages for those keywords. Unfortunately, my traffic declined. Never big to begin with, it slowed down to a trickle.

At some point I discovered a platform called Medium. Actually I discovered it twice. First time I tried putting on some articles, got no reads, and left. Years later, I rediscovered it again. This time I stuck around.

I had never made a dime off my blog. Rather, I spent thousands of USD maintaining the blog, and buying materials to inspire my articles. On Medium, for the first time I was getting paid. It was never big amounts, but at least at my peak earnings, they covered the costs.

I thought I was getting somewhere. On Medium, I attracted readers, and was starting to make some OK cash. Nothing to write home about, but it gave me more motivation. My best year was probably 2021, with the beginning of 2022 also being good. All of 2022, I got a steady, predictable income every month. One month it was a bit bigger, another a bit smaller, but at least it was there.

Then 2023 came. My readership on Medium tanked. So did my earnings. They went into the dumpster. Just to give perspective, in the past few months, I barely got out of single digits in USD per month for ALL my articles. That doesn’t even cover the cost of a single book. While back in the day, most of my articles would at least cover the cost of the material used in producing them (although maybe not the time), now I was once again losing heavily.

Such has been the arc of my career as a writer. It feels like I am back at square 1. Oh well. Coupled with personal problems, work problems, and other problems, these past years have not been very good to me. I am also getting older, starting off the years of a slow decline. I am not the young buck anymore, working hard to gain weight and muscle.

It used to be striving to get better. Now, it’s about keeping what I have, if not trying to prevent from losing it too fast. This has reflected also in my writing. It used to be all about self-improvement. Now, I spend most of my time musing about metaphysical subjects. Thus is the arc of a person.

Hard to believe how fast the times go. When I was watching Back to the Future 2 as a kid, the year 2015 was something way into the future. Now, it’s the distant past! Still can’t believe it.

What will 2023 bring? Unfortunately more of the same as in 2022. 2020 was a crucial year that set up a path, which we haven’t gotten off of. Many of the themes of dystopian movies have started to play themselves out.

Global pandemic. Internal strife and riots. Devastating war in Europe.

The past few years haven’t looked good. And the trend isn’t changing.

What was up in 2022?

At the beginning of 2022, I picked out 7 worrying trends to watch out for in that year. I was right on the money. Some of these turned out even worse than I expected.

With Covid, I expected a last hurray for the virus, and then things going back to normal. That’s what happened. While the virus is still here, it seems to have mutated into a less lethal form.

This is similar to what happened a hundred years ago to the so-called Spanish flu. It’s still with us a century later. However, it’s now just a mild endemic virus that most people easily survive through.

This is what will most likely happen with Covid. The virus will keep on mutating, and it will be with us for a long time. The good news is that it will only be a minor nuisance.

The other trends are still here and are keeping people worried. I don’t need to go into details on how dangerous climate change can be. NASA says that 2022 was the fifth warmest year on record. This will continue.

Solving this is of paramount importance. If the temperatures keep on increasing, and we start hitting climate tipping points, we are in for a whole lot of hurt.

Generally, on the world stage we are seeing more polarization. We witnessed it in Brazil, where Bolsonaro supporters stormed the governmental institutions in the capital. We see similar trends in other parts of the world as well.

In the US, the Republican Party is still worryingly on an authoritarian path. It has not disowned the Big Lie of Donald Trump about the election. Conspiracy theories float around not just the base, but many of its lawmakers.

On the other hand, wokeism is still here. It has even captured many venerable science press institutions such as Scientific American. The extremes have lots of power now.

One trend I saw that was going to be huge for 2022 was the fact that authoritarians were getting bolder on the world stage. The problem is, I underestimated how bad this was gonna get.

Putin unleashed probably the most devastating conventional war since World War 2. According to estimates, Russia is running out many of the weapons (including missiles) it had stockpiled. That’s how bad it has gotten.

All the stuff they stockpiled to fight all of NATO is now being spent in one country. Imagine the devastation Ukraine is going through.

What will happen in 2023?

Almost none of the problems I described in 2022 have gone away. In fact, many of them have gotten worse. The war in Ukraine will continue. I foresee an increasingly worsening situation in Russia. Putin has not only unleashed hell on Ukraine, but doomed his own country too.

The world’s economy is in the dumpster. It’s plagued by ever increasing inflation. I don’t recognize the prices anymore. Every time I go to the store and buy something, I am surprised at what I have to pay. It’s a huge rise from what I was used to a few years ago.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. We are in the early stages of an AI revolution. In the following next few years, artificial intelligence will transform large parts of how we live. There are positives and negatives coming from that.

In the last few weeks, I have been playing around with ChatGPT, and it’s amazing what it can do. You ask it a question, and it gives you a pretty good answer. Of course you have to watch out. For some things the responses are wrong. However, it does very good on technical matters.

And even bigger things are to come. The GPT-4 algorithm is slated to arrive in the early stages of this year. It will be even more powerful than all the algorithms we are seeing now.

We will need to start getting used to doing things a bit differently. Unfortunately, as the nature of society is changing so is the dark underworld.

Cybercrime has been plaguing us ever since the advent of the internet. However, as the technology advances, crime is getting more sophisticated as well. Experts estimate that cybercrime will cost the world around 8 billion dollars in 2023! That’s a staggering number.

This has a huge impact on you. Let me illustrate with one example. Stealing cars usually requires the physical presence of the robber. However, now with the cars being full of sophisticated electronics, the bad guys can simply hack them from afar. In fact, cyber-attacks on cars could be among the top five cybercrimes in 2023.

The 2020’s are proving a pivotal decade. Much is at stake. What we do now will have a huge impact on how the climate crisis turns out. Developments now will also be crucial for the shaping of the international world order, but also internally within countries.

While I don’t have a crystal ball and can’t predict events to a 100% certainty, I can guarantee that 2023 will be an interesting year. Let’s hope for the best.

An earlier version of this article was originally published on “Medium” here.
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This is my story: As a kid I was always pretty skinny. I was athletic (but did need to do some early work to become athletic as well), but wasn’t very big. I did grow to be relatively tall (6’1 or 184cm), but even at the beginning of university I was weighting around 70kg (155 pounds). This is not a lot relative to my height. Usually the rule for ideal weight is your height in cm minus 100 (so for me this would be 184-100=84, so 84 kg). So at university I decided to do something about it. I managed to get up to around 77kg to 79kg (170 to 175 pounds). This is the weight I hovered around for a few years. Then after a few years I decided that I wanted to bulk up and got up to around 85 or 86kg (around 190 pounds). This year unfortunately I tore my ACL and needed to get surgery and during this process I lost a lot of weight and muscle. As I am writing this, I am about a month after the surgery and am rehabbing, strengthening the knee and the quadriceps muscle and teaching myself how to basically walk again. After I get further in the process, I will try again to bulk up. I am writing this blog as a way to keep myself focused and also to gather some information in order to help me. I will try to share some things that I learn in the process and maybe help some other people who are thinking of gaining weight, gaining muscle and living a healthy active lifestyle.

Over my life’s journey, I learned a lot of things and will try to share them with you. For many people who are trying to gain weight, it is a hard task to actually find information on how to do it. This blog will try to bring as much information on this as possible, so as to make it easier for underweight people to gain weight. However, this blog will not only be about gaining weight, but also related things like healthy living, fitness, sports and other things (even people trying to lose weight will find some relevant information for them). So thanks for reading and hopefully this will help you achieve your goals!