Uncover the history of the future.
Read the real story of DeFi, in the words of the 25 people who made it happen.
Summer to winter. Idealism to memes.
RWAs to… what’s next?
Somewhere in these pages, you might find a clue
Gm lads -
Did this month's Achilles in honor of the greatest TV show of all time - Lost :)
It sounds like a silly thing to dedicate one to, but I really cannot even quantify the impact the show has had on my life...
Background
I first stumbled across Lost after the first season, when I was just out of high school.
I binge-watched the entire thing and then immediately started re-watching it on a loop :)
I introduced my mom to it and she became obsessed with it too...
The later seasons admittedly jumped the shark and got kind of silly, but that first season is legit the best season of television in history, even beyond True Detective Season 1 (the 2nd best season of television ever, imo).
It was a huge phenomenon at the time too, and I remember going off to college and watching each new episode with like 12 other kids in my dorm every week in the lounge area...
I was even on the old Lost message boards back then, speculating about all the lore and esoterica regarding the island and etc :)
My favorite character back then was Charlie, but later on it would switch to Sawyer, who is the one I identify the most with now by far (second favorite is Desmond).
As the seasons went on I just kept watching all of them on a loop on DVD- literally hundreds of times through, just always playing in the background, on repeat- and the show got me through some incredibly hard times.
There is one episode called 'The Constant' where the character Desmond is stuck in two different places in time, and needs to find the same person in each- his 'constant'- to survive. And it is one that has outsized significance to me...
In my early 20's I had this weird horrible health scare where I had two really severe seizures - in both cases the paramedics had to come (one of them was in a movie theater with my two buddies watching Sherlock Holmes- was a horrible experience).
In retrospect they were probably brought on by a mix of variables stemming from my own idiocy and, uh, *biochemical experimentation*, as it were, but at the time we had no idea what was going on, and I remember my mom telling me that if I ever got lost in a seizure and didn't know where I was, or etc, that she would be my 'constant'... (was very sweet of her to say, and is quite affecting to think about now, too, as she died just a few years after that).
Luckily I quit being such a idiot though and that issue never happened again.
But through all sorts of other tough times - Lost was always there in the background providing inspiration to push onward. Much like Tolkien (my other favorite piece of art).
Indeed, life went on a massively upward trajectory from there, and later on I met a beautiful little blonde-haired, blue-eyed foidette, and introduced her to it, and she fell in love with the show as well :)
And... if said foidette and I ended up having any hypothetical kids (not something I normally talk about on the TL but let's say hypothetically), I would without a doubt introduce it to them eventually too :)
The Show's Significance
I ultimately think Lost is so affecting and poignant because it portrays something that everyone nowadays feels, and understands implicitly or subconsciously at least- which is that we have lost something in modernity.
The characters are portrayed as having these bland, rather meaningless lives before they landed on the island - slaving away in cubicles, stuck in traffic, etc.
They are profoundly unhappy, and then they crash on the island.
And while ostensibly crashing on the island is a disaster, they all end up far happier and more fulfilled.
They live in nature 24/7, sleep under the stars, swim in the ocean, forage for fruit, hunt wild boars for their meat, and have all sorts of adventures, and life and death struggles of various kinds.
In this regard they achieve a sort of Nietzschean self-overcoming or ascendance through their lives on the island.
It is a profoundly 'vitalist' message.
What We Can Learn From It
For years I remember wishing in my head that I could live the life of the characters on the show.
I was aware of how silly it was, but I just felt like regular modern life was so stale and artificial and bland and etc by comparison - so divorced from nature, from decisions having life-or-death consequences, and from those aspects of life and existence that really define us as actual living, mortal beings.
And ultimately I came to the conclusion that the only real response to this is to LARP such an existence as intensely as one can.
None of us will ever really live in a world like the island, or like the stories of Homer, or like our ancestors many hundreds of years ago did when life was still vital and dangerous and heroic.
HOWEVER... we can still do our best to cultivate a life today that is as close to that model as possible...
In my own case, I ultimately moved 4000 miles away- to a little slice of the tropics about as similar to the island as one can get in the modern world.
I swim in the ocean, sleep under the stars, run through the trees, sit around campfires, hike through the jungle at night, and for the more martial/thumotic side of things I do combat sports (and am hoping to add bow-hunting and sailing soon too).
Basically I LARP Lost as hard as I possibly can every day :)
And while again, it will never be the same as the truly vitalist lifestyles of our ancestors, it is infinitely superior to the cubicle-traffic-suburbs existence that is the default path in our day and age.
So yeah... in conclusion...
I truly think Lost is the best show of all time...
And if you have never seen it I cannot recommend it enough :)
...
And then... as always... the Achilles was two miles of carrying a 70 lb dumbbell in each hand while wearing a 70 pound backpack...
And then the 'canon' version also includes 70 weighted 70 lb pullups, however I am still recovering from this muscle tear in my upper stomach I got from a BJJ tournament earlier this year, so I again did 600 delt raises of varying weights instead (hopefully this is the last time I'll have to sub those in).
And yeah, normally I knock these out in about three hours, but it was insanely hot this day and I did it after a 24 hour fast so it literally took me 4 hours and 6 minutes this time(!)... probably my worst time in as far back as I can remember....
But yeah, appreciate you tremendously my friends!
Please RT/comment/etc if you enjoyed! :)