1.
Exercise as medicine
Physical activity produces cellular stress, and certain molecules counterbalance this damaging effect. When mitochondria — the powerhouses that supply energy in cells — ramp up production during exercise, they also produce more by-products called reactive oxygen species (ROS), which, in excessive amounts, can damage proteins, lipids and DNA. But these ROS also kick-start a horde of protective processes during exercise, offsetting their more toxic effects and fortifying cellular defences.
During exercise, the body has learnt to benefit from a fundamentally stressful process. “If stress doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger,” says Ye Tian, a geneticist at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
There is already evidence that exercise itself acts like medicine. In 2022, it was found that mice with pancreatic cancer had elevated levels of CD8 T cells — which destroy cancerous and virus-infected cells — when they did 30 minutes of aerobic exercise for 5 days a week.
2.
Debt reduces options
As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.
What are the odds that I will experience one or more of the following: Wars, recessions, terrorist attacks, pandemics, bad political decisions, family emergencies, unforeseen health crises, career transitions, wayward children, and other mishaps?
One-hundred percent. The odds are 100%.
When you think of it like that, you take debt’s narrowing of survivable outcomes seriously.
The other is you think about the kinds of volatile events that could do you in.
Financial volatility is an obvious one – you find yourself unable to make your debt payments. But there’s also psychological volatility, where for whatever reason you can’t mentally endure your job any longer. There’s family volatility, which can be anything from divorce to caring for a relative. There’s child volatility, which could fill a book. Health volatility, political volatility, on and on. The world’s a wild place.
I’m not an anti-debt zealot. There’s a time and place, and used responsibly it’s a wonderful tool.
But once you view debt as narrowing what you can endure in a volatile world, you start to see it as a constraint on the asset that matters most: having options and flexibility.
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“Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations. If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won't exist because you'll have already shut it out...You can hear other people's wisdom, but you've got to re-evaluate the world for yourself.” - Mae Jemison
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” - Mahatma Gandhi
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