Freedom, Responsibility, & Accountability

Easter, fundamentally, is about freedom.

But with freedom comes responsibility. And, responsibility, ultimately, requires accountability.

In practice, accountability relies on feedback loops and structures: we have to be accountable to something greater than ourselves, and we have to reflect openly and honestly about our actions as we thinker our ways through our days. Religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions that thrive and support human development effectively share one central theme: people practicing these faiths (yes, at the margin, we all have faith in something) all "[c]ame to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."

In the face of opacity--defined as incomplete wisdom in the art of living--we have to sort out for ourselves and think strategically about how to engage the gift of freedom responsibly. Without accountability, we tend to fall victims to addictions it seems. When it comes to m=1 my-thologizing and n=1 self-experimenting, we need execution frameworks to help us capture our open laboratory results in manners that nudge and/or prod us to react appropriately. For example, if we engage in nutritional or exercise bricolage without mechanisms for analyzing our feeding and moving experiences--simple rules like 'poor aftertaste signals potential toxins in our meals' or 'chronic pain indicates improper training techniques'--then we miss opportunities for accountability that could help us stumble (semi)-blindly in new, improved directions for energy intake and expenditure decision-making. But these types of important execution frameworks are largely unexplored frontiers for most of the mainstream science community. Luckily, Seth Roberts has lead the way, as one prominent trailblazer, towards thinking more critically about tools and meta-rules that can empower us to conduct research on our own bodies, and then share our results collectively, yet I suspect there exists lots of room for growth in this area.

Starting with the insightful message that Zach's grandmother shared--"I don't know how to get to the freeway, but I can tell you the way that I go to get there"--we can create small-scale accountability communities that offer timely feedback and support. Of course, these self-organizing groups (uno, dos, tres, et al.) are already forming and performing, but integrating these activities with academic health and medical science in a more comprehensive, rigorous fashion seems potentially fruitful, at least to me (and some of my colleagues), so I am sure this thread promises to be a valued presentation topic and discussion item at the Ancestral Health Symposium. For starters, it looks like Skyler Tanner will be respecting accountability using Quantitative Self and Qualitative Self measures like body fat %, caloric needs, body weight, food intake, mood, and body composition (via photos tiled side-by-side for data points, among other things) to test a hypothesis on his own body, just to see what happens, and then will present these clinical findings at the Symposium's proceedings to learn more about the boundaries of freedom that demarcate his own individualized Patient of One case when it comes to eating and moving ancestrally.

This is the Ben Hogan "find your swing in the dirt" health/fitness/medicine tinkering stuff that I view as extremely promising and exciting.

It's engaging the gift of freedom responsibly; it's living life fully.

It's what Easter is all about, fundamentally.

To good health,

Brent