DAY 001: DAY OO1【DADBOD.REHAB】 Welcome! Is it January 1? Or just the day you decided OK, fuck this?
Either — or neither — is fine; it doesn’t matter. By which we mean that while it surely matters in some objective metaphysical sense, and perhaps matters a great deal in terms of your (or others’) preception of the narrative of your life, and might even matter for entirely different reasons to your grandma, or your cardiologist, or your parole officer, et cetera (and so on (redundantly)) — it doesn’t matter for the PROGRAM.
This is the DADBOD.REHAB program. And you are in it. You are “in a program”. You are doing the program right now.
You don’t have to be in this program. You can get out of this program now. Or whenever. To do so, just stop here. Stop reading, or listening, or watching — stop doing whatever you are doing to ingest this information.
Hey, you’re still here, now, doing this. So you chose to do this program.
Great! That’s the best possible start to this program. (It’s also kinda the only possible start, but set that aside for now).
That is because if you forced a trained-model fuzzy-logic LLM to take speed and do this entire program and summarize it in one sentence it would be:
Intent precedes action. Before you do something, you should intend to do it.
And then you might be all like, First of all, I asked for one sentence, not two, you dumbass AI. Secondly, that’s fucking obvious!
Indeed, it is. By which we mean, yes, the AI is a dumbass, and yes, it is obvious that you should intend to do something before you actually do it.
It is equally obvious, however, that this is often not the case.
You intended to have two beers and go to bed, but the game got interesting and you actually had six. You intended to eat a salad and a plate of black beans and Mexican rice, but you worked late and were starving and actually stopped for a drive-through fast food meal that had triple the calories and a third of the nutritional benefits. You intended to be in bed asleep 7 hours before your alarm, but… blah blah something something, weren’t.
There are many many huge, life-altering decisions that you make in life that should also be preceded by understanding and intent — should you buy a motorcycle? should you have another kid? — but those don’t matter for the DADBOD.REHAB program. What we are concerned with is the mundane everyday actions like those above, where impulsive (bad) choices are made in reaction to some set of stimuli in real-world situations, and are not preceded by intent, or even defy your best intentions.
But you’ve made thousands and thousands of such choices in your life, whereas this program has only five minutes per day.
So for this first day, we will ignore all of those past actions and focus on one intention/action only: your intent to continue this program tomorrow. That’s it. No workout, no dietary restrictions, no goals or checklists. Not today, anyway.
The only task for Day 1 is to form the intention to continue with the program tomorrow…
…and more specifically, to do so by either:
a.) saying it out loud, or
b.) writing it down by hand
…and then to actually do it, thereby making the intention successful.
There are reasons both scientific and broscientastic for having to say it out loud or write it down, but they don’t fit into today’s five minutes, and will be covered later.
You might say something like, “I still say that this program is probably bullshit, but let’s find out; I’ll continue tomorrow,” or just write “I will continue tomorrow” on a scrap of paper, read it, and then throw it in the trash.
Done? Great. See you tomorrow.
P.S.:
We’re not yet to the part about not being a fat dumbass who eats doughnuts mindlessly without intent — we’ve just implied that we’re gonna talk about that kind of thing. So it might be a great time to go get some Krispy Kreme or Häagen-Dazs, while the gettin’ is good…