Re-Post: On Getting Older and Living Up To Values

November 28, 2019 by Joe Gray in Lifestyle, Memoirs, Personal Development, Psychology, Thoughts

Something no one told me about when I was growing up was that as you get older you start to identify and develop your values. Then, as you are doing this, you also start to look at yourself and if you are critical you realize that developing your values is complicated and that living up to your own values is very difficult. So difficult that you find that you are forever in a loop of evaluating your actions, determining how shitty you are compared to the way you want to be. Then you either try to adjust your value system to justify your actions or you demean yourself for being too weak to live up to your own values.

A Pleasant Haunting

September 04, 2019 by Joe Gray in Memoirs, Religion, Music

I have a complicated relationship with "The Church".

There are two types of churches that I attended growing up. One was the mainstream small-town Christian Church. It had youth groups, Sunday school, basketball hoops, and a few hundred people would show up each Sunday. I was in a youth group that was a religious version of the Boy Scouts called Awanas. We memorized Bible verses, had sack-races and I'm sure there was some kind of music involved. It was not an unpleasant experience and I was pretty good at memorizing lines from the Bible. Later I would despise the idea of rote memorization and to this day do not put much effort into memorizing things. The idea of memorizing information that someone else thinks is important is offensive.

Pretending Entertainment

August 18, 2019 by Joe Gray in Balance, Cultural Musings, Gaming, Lifestyle, Psychology, Thoughts

I used to work for a large video game store. One where you might Stop to buy Games. I mostly sold bullshit. Grown men coming up and saying "I wanna pretend I'm driving a car. Is there a game for that?" Pretending and having imaginary friends was once relegated to children but now, it seems, that children do not grow up. Looking for any excuse to feel accomplishment in virtual worlds to distract from the reality of a failure to accomplish personal goals is the purview of men who've been neglected by their parents and devalued by society. Getting self-esteem from simulated successes creates a fog of delusion that, if cleared away, reveals an inflated ego ready to burst.

Re-Post: A New Lifestyle: How I lost 45 lbs and kept it off.

October 03, 2018 by Joe Gray in Lifestyle, Personal Development

Original Post Date: March 9th, 2018

I changed how I think about myself. I lost 45 lbs in about a year. I try not to eat for relief from boredom. I eat when I'm hungry and I know better what that feels like. I try to never eat fast food. I make salads most nights and pair it with fish, chicken, potato salad or something decent. I almost never eat candy and I never drink soda except maybe a mountain dew or sprite on a very rare occasion. I barely ever drink beer or liquor. This article is about how I lost the weight but more importantly, it explains why.

I'm not a workaholic!

August 21, 2018 by Joe Gray in Balance, Lifestyle

"Your grandfather died on a toilet at work at 55. He had a heart attack because he was a workaholic."

Someone told me that once or at least that is how I remember it. The idea of the dangers of being a workaholic has always stayed with me and I became sensitive to the idea of "working to death" at an early age. My grandfather was a successful businessman and inventor. Supposedly he helped invent the first color printer or something like that. In attempting to write this out I realize that my knowledge of the man is muddled and I am probably making some of this up based on old memories of conversations with my mother. None the less it is a related memory.