Someone brought out that picture of the plate with the badly cooked steak and the three-yolked fried eggs with the butter slathered over everything and… Yeah.
The original poster had something like “This is what THEY want to take away from you.” And the poster is some kind of “health” person exercise-bro. You know, the type of dude that has so many muscles he can no longer touch the top of his own head.
And it’s like, “Nobody’s trying to take that away from you. You are perfectly free to load up on protein and fat and sugar and caffeine and salt and… You can eat whatever you want! Nobody gives a fuck. If you want to eat stuff that’s not recognized as being food… you can even legally get it as long as it’s packaged as a supplement.”
For reals: The food and drug association doesn’t control what’s labeled as a supplement. People pack that shit in their garages using a funnel and a scoop and you can get anywhere from 100% the daily value to 7000% to 0% with all the fillers and what-alls they add. Like, there’s a dude that’s right now facing criminal charges for making a “supplement” that contained FECES from his nephew that he was selling as a cure for autism. Like, ableist people fed literal human shit to their children at like $1700 a pop.
So yeah. Want to eat steak everyday? If you can afford it, do it.
Want to eat a dozen eggs and have super hard poops? Go ahead.
Want to eat a whole stick of butter at every meal? Sounds super gross, but knock yourself dead. Literally maybe.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Eat what you want to eat.
And yeah, while you have the freedom to eat whatever you want to eat, other people have the freedom to judge your diet and your lifestyle. Welcome to humanity.
It’s the same with the “zOMG they want to take away our gas stoves!” drama all those dudes were diving into.
Someone said “Hey, even when they’re not in use, gas stoves are releasing a dangerous amount of toxic gas into your home” and those guys were like “They want to take our stoves!”
No, bruh, they want you to understand that your gas stove is releasing a dangerous amount of toxic gas into your home. You have the choice to switch to an electric stove and maybe stop your little kid from having a learning disability or something or save you and your family from developing cancer in the not-too-distant future.
Your life, your choice.
It’s the same with all the actors and what-nots suddenly taking up cigarette smoking. I personally think it’s the dumbest trend ever and that they’re all going to regret it when their skin starts aging like soured milk and their organs start failing and they realize that their quality of life has been severely curtailed… but whatever. They’re grown up making grown up choices.
It’s sad that a lot of them are so young and lack the life experience to realize they’re screwing themselves up, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
I lived through the days when you could walk into a restaurant and be asked “Smoking or non-smoking” and the only difference was that they’d take the ash tray off the table. I lived through the days of anti-smoking campaigns that featured people talking through a hole in their neck with their faces wasted away to almost nothing and those pictures of blackened lungs that looked more like pieces of steak left too long on a grill and burnt to shit. I lived through all that.
I have never been a cigarette smoker and never will be. They taste gross. Maybe that scent when someone first lights one is somehow enticing, but after that they smell disgusting. That stench permeates your clothes, your hair, your SKIN just by walking past someone smoking a cigarette. It’s very unpleasant and I’ve never had a desire to get involved.
“But that’s addiction! They can’t help themselves!” Yeah, and I have total sympathy for people of the older generation that started smoking when they were like 13-years old and didn’t know that smoking was bad. People from a time without seatbelts and child car seats weren’t even a concept of the future. People that were told by doctors that smoking cigarettes could help their asthma.
Those people get all my sympathy, because they were sucked in by the lies of big corporations and they were already addicted by the time the truth came out.
But people born in modern times? Pshaw. You know that shit’s poison and you chose to start using it because you somehow think it makes you look cool.
And okay. Your life, your choice. It’s sad that you’re going to die younger than you otherwise would have. It’s sad that your looks are going to fade faster than they otherwise would have. It’s sad that you have chosen to lower your quality and length of life to fit into a fad.
Eat your terribly cooked steak and burnt eggs, bruh. Nobody gives a fuck but you.
You think that people are going to tell you that you shouldn’t eat that shit because you know that that shit is unhealthy. Your internal turmoil is not my problem.
Light your cigarette with the flame from your gas stove as you ash into your terrible looking eggs as you get ready to saw into your burnt to shit steak.
Your drama is your drama. Your cholesterol is your cholesterol. You could die tomorrow and only the people that know you will care. That’s called life.
Nobody’s forcing you to eat bug protein. Nobody’s forcing you to eat Greek yogurt. Nobody’s forcing you to eat a salad or cut your hair or dance when you don’t want to.
We are all getting tired of the way you try to force your life choices on the rest of us though. The way you use your lifestyle choices to grift with children as your target demographic.
“You’re not a REAL man if you don’t eat a diet of steak, eggs, potatoes, and protein powder. BUY MY VITAMINS AND SUPPLEMENTS!”
“You’re a PUSSY if you don’t have a gas stove and use sandpaper for toilet paper. MAN UP!”
And I get it. Kids are looking for role models, and the word on the street is that “parents just don’t understand.” And there’s the Internet and the algorithm ready to introduce the fresh faced youth to the kind of psyche damaging nonsense that lets you buy a big house and a fancy car before you’re 35.
I get it. You want money and prestige and power and… Yeah. You sell evil to line your pockets. I get it. We all get it.
And it upsets you that the bulk of people don’t want it. That people are beginning to understand that your “healthy lifestyle brand” sells an unhealthy lifestyle that results in colon cancer and heart failure. That your need to live beyond your means and flash cash has resulted in you spending more than you make and that if you don’t continue to bring in the money… you’re going to have to sell your house and car and declare bankruptcy because at the end of the day you have nothing and are nothing.
You’re a burnt steak and three sad looking eggs slathered in butter on a plate.
I like a good steak. Which is one that’s not dripping in oil with a pat of butter plopped on top like a silly hat. I like salad and cherry tomatoes. I like sunshine and butterflies and bumbly bumblebees. I like breathing clean air and drinking water that doesn’t taste like chlorine and sadness because YOUR life choices have resulted in a dying planet.
We live on a rock hurtling through space, alone and lonely with no friendly neighbors in sight, yet through some twist of fate this rock managed to gain an oxygen layer and develop vegetation and animal life.
We live within a delicate balance that with all our science and high ideals we still don’t completely understand. We need the bacteria that make up our biomes. We need the insects that pollinate the flowers that create the seeds of the trees and vegetation that give us fruit and vegetables and oxygen.
We need the wolves and the beavers and the birds and the bats and the mosquitoes we hate but that do so much to make the world we live in.
We need so much that we don’t understand or appreciate. And we destroy so many things that we don’t realize we’re going to miss when the world we need begins to die.
And all those nihilists that wah-wah about how nothing matters because the Earth is nothing but a rock hurtling through space and all current life is meaningless… They’re right.
The human race could wipe out itself and all other life on the planet, and it won’t mean a thing to the Earth itself. Because the Earth is a rock hurtling through space, and even if we managed to BLOW IT UP… those pieces would be sucked into the gravity of another planetary body and add mass to somewhere else while the largest chunks that remain of this Earth would gather more bits of rock out there and in time a new planet would develop.
But the LIFE that the Earth was blessed with would be over and gone. Because the chances of a viable environment developing and life growing from it was so infintesimal that it really could be seen as miraculous. A true wonder of the universe.
So dude: Eat your badly cooked steak and your sad looking eggs and SHUT THE FUCK UP. Nobody cares.
We all have real things to worry about. And in the grand scheme of everything happening? You’re a bit of cosmic nothing.
Gobble down your sticks of butter and cry about it.
Pax.
~Harper Kingsley
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