I was out on a date with someone recently when she marveled at my ease in parallel parking.  Because she was younger than me, we were representing Generation X and Millennials respectively, she was accustomed to help from the now legally mandated back up camera installed in all new cars.  I never gave it much thought, but I am proud of my ability to quickly pull up, look over my right shoulder and with no one helping me, not even a high tech and expensive backup camera, maneuver into a tight parking space between two other cars. 
 
I work in the field of fitness, nutrition, and thirdly, wellness.  Wellness is an inadequate word for it, so I like to think of it as the good life.  Getting enough sleep, moderating or avoiding drugs and alcohol, getting health checkups, and socializing are “good life” concepts.  Agency, or the ability to do things, like park a car or cook a meal, is a another “good life” concept we should be thinking about.  I’ve seen many clients who literally could not get out of a chair without help become strong enough with 6 months to do a push up on the floor.  I focus on improving my clients’ agency, their strength and ability to do things- like place a suitcase on a luggage rack, get up and down off the floor, walk a few flights of stairs, or safely pick up a heavy box. 
 
I don’t drive a new car. Following the advice of financial gurus like Dave Ramsey and Clark Howard, I drive an older and long-paid-for 2007 Honda pickup truck, built when backup cameras were only a dream of science fiction,  I pondered the parking situation later and concluded that the backup camera is metaphor for a bigger problem.  We’re losing the ability to do more and more things, we’re becoming helpless.
 
Technology and change have their place, but often change for change’s sake, sold as progress, ends up hurting us in the long run.  Outsourcing and the drive towards further and further specialization hurt us when we can no longer act.  Agency is the ability to act, and we’re losing it by handing more and more of our power over to others and increasingly, to machines.  Without personal agency, we become passive, weak, and even helpless.
 
We don’t cook, join, gather, learn, master, build, or know as much as we used to.  Supplements are becoming substitutes.  The daily trip out to eat a fast-food breakfast ends up rendering us incapable of cooking our own scrambled eggs, the simplest of dishes.  Don’t laugh, I’ve known several who couldn’t.  The costly trip to the nail and hair salon every month racks up more and more credit card debt for millions.  Social media or online gatherings replace socializing in person, and  we shy away from or become apathetic about in-person interaction, hiding behind screens instead.  Video games replace in-person sports in rec leagues or real outdoor challenges like trekking, camping, mountain biking, or hiking.  How many families gather every evening to cook, eat together, pray, and talk?
 
Learned helplessness is a psychological concept that social scientists like Martin Seligman and Steven Maier described decades ago to explain what happens when someone gives up on finding a resolution to a difficult situation.  Unlike many psychological concepts learned helplessness is not psychobabble.  Learned helplessness is closely related to agency, in that someone who has agency takes action and is not helpless. 
 
Animals are the same as humans when it comes to learned helplessness, we both can “learn” to give up, or be helpless.  Seligman showed in his research that you can teach animals to give up. Dogs in his research who were repeatedly exposed to shocks eventually gave up trying to get away.  People in another similar experiment eventually gave up on getting away from a repeated sound.  Luckily, we aren’t animals though, we’re humans and we can rise above this helplessness.  
 
But we do give up too soon, too often.  The good news is that this paralyzing situation can be overcome.  In practical terms, things like cognitive behavior therapy, journaling, or even working with a mentor can help us to reframe thoughts.  Taking small, constructive, and concrete steps towards change can help us “unlearn” learned helplessness. 
 
Learned helplessness is associated with low self – esteem, frustration, passivity, despair, dissatisfaction, a lack of effort, and giving up.  Sometimes it comes from prior trauma. People who have learned helplessness have given up on taking action, or building agency, to change things, including bad spiritual habits, better known as sins or vices.   When agency declines, we feel helpless, and the problem is that our society seems to encourage helplessness, but we were not created to be helpless.
 
On the contrary, by emphasizing our own free will, our own ability to act, our own agency, we can co-create something better in life with God’s help.   On the one hand, we need God’s help, he’s the ground of everything and we need to work with what reality gives us.  On the other, we’re free individuals with the ability to act. 
 
Some people, Seligman showed, have what he called learned optimism, the opposite of what he called learned helplessness.  These are people who have learned that they have at least some control over any situation.  No matter what happens, these people seem to react the complete opposite way from a helpless person.  Our goal should be to build learned optimism. 
 
Building learned optimism requires avoiding 3 things:

• Complaining- not because there’s nothing to complain about, but because it doesn’t help.
• Criticizing- not because there’s nothing to criticize, but because it doesn’t help.
• Procrastinating- because taking small and decisive action is key.

 
Building learned optimism (and unlearning helplessness) requires:

• Thinking constructively. Ask yourself, “does this help me achieve my goal?” If not, don’t do it.
• Re-framing situations.  Take every situation and ask yourself, “are you certain things will always be this way?” and “What is possible here?”
• Micro-achievements.  Focus on the small things that eventually build up to bigger wins.

 
Be optimistic and unlearn helplessness.  No matter the situation, be the strong person who sees what could be, and work to make it happen.   We’re going to be one way or the other, we may as well be the optimistic ones. 

Helplessness can be learned, but luckily it can be unlearned too. 

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Read next:  Stable Families and Victims of Crime

“Love the house you live in, otherwise it may fall down and land on your head.” – Greek Proverb
 
When I started traveling the world about 20 years ago, I became sad and jealous. The USA, my country of birth, didn’t have much of a culture (I thought) compared to the places I was visiting, like England where they had afternoon tea, Scotland where they had bagpipes, France where they had the French language, beignets and ancient cathedrals, and Ireland, the land of Irish pubs and Celtic music.  America’s McDonald’s, bland pop music, sitcoms, mega gas stations, and smug political correctness didn’t seem like much of a culture to me.  Culture was something unique, historical, local, even sacred, and worth fighting for.  Back home seemed to be more abstract, ahistorical, unrooted, profane, secular, abstract, and gnostic.  Why did my own homeland not seem to have anything unique about it, other than big corporations and a global homogenized vibe?
 
I credit New Orleans with opening my eyes to what we did have culturally in the USA.  Throughout my 20s, and early 30s, I loved going to New Orleans.  I loved the food, the architecture, the walking, the old mossy oak trees, the laid back southern vibe, Cajun music and Cajun and creole food.  And I loved the Louisiana southern accent, which seemed to be a cross between Brooklyn, New York and the south.   That got me thinking more and more.  The Southeastern United States has a distinct culture.  I didn’t know exactly what it was, what it meant, or how even to articulate it at the time, but I knew there was something there. 
 
What I realized is that the South, where I grew up, still has a culture, not intact completely, but it’s still there and hanging on by a thread.  Like all cultures, say Sunni Islamic culture, or French Canadian culture, it has a lot to love about it, but it’s not above criticism.  The reason the south, and southern culture matters is because people, all people, need a culture.  Cultures imply “givens” or ways of life and something to belong to.  Cultures infer and identity.  Because the primary health and sociological problem of our time is social isolation and social disintegration, culture is the last chance for saving humanity. 
 
To express this philosophically, cultures allow people to “exist” in the world, they provide what in German would be called a “lebenswelt” or a “lifeworld”, a world experienced by people together.  For example, if you and I belong to the same culture, with the same values, customs, and traditions, we live together and experience the world together.  This is real community, and this is what makes life worth living.  So culture brings people together, allows them to live in a founded world, and exist together in a community. 
 
Philosophical critics of modernity have even called modern life characteristically a state of “non-being.” In contrast, culture allows people to live, to exist.  Participating in a culture bestows a sense of identity, of relation to nature and to others, and a sense of belonging to the “chain of being” from God down to his most seemingly meager creations.  Culture makes people happier and healthier, takes the harsh edges off of the inevitable sorrows of life, and gives people, especially the poor and less fortunate, a life to live. 
 
Starting earlier but really ramping up with the Boomers in the 1960s, America went the extreme direction of individualism and materialism to the maximum degree.  Since the 60s and on into the 70s, 80s, and 90s, culture has disappeared for most people.  As this has happened our society has only become more extreme.  I don’t mean to blame everything on the Boomers, because there’s plenty of blame to go around, but now millennials can’t sit under the shade of a tree that Boomers never planted.
 
I was typical of younger people in that I wanted distance when I was young, if not to rebel, then to halfway rebel and understand from a distance what I was brought up in.  The situation for young people is much more challenging and different now (I’m 45), because there’s nothing as far as cultural expectations left for them to rebel against.  When I was a young person in the 80s, there were still some remnants of a national culture left, and southern culture was pretty much intact.  By traveling, reading, and distancing myself somewhat from my own upbringing I ironically came to appreciate it more.   
 
You may be wondering what I’m referring to when I refer to “southern culture.” The powers that be, who are quick to loathe differentiation, localism, and who are enthralled to materialism, secularism, and consumerism and making a one-world economy that they can control and benefit from, are not fans of any unique culture that doesn’t show them ultimate allegiance.  They want control, and culture, is a type of resistance.  Southern culture is just such a culture, and this is why it’s often maligned in popular media.   
 
Why...you may ask do they hate southern culture?  Because the south, despite all the attempts at negative stereotyping and despite its role as a useful scapegoat in American culture, is the last humanist cultural resistance in the USA to dehumanization, secular fundamentalism, materialism and consumerism.  In the south, God still matters, small towns and counties matter, neighbors still matters, our music still matters, our dialect and food still matters, our history matters, and we care about all those things and more.  The south resists and the south knows that a culture can’t be built on any other foundation than the sacred.  It isn’t even aware of all these things, and certainly doesn’t articulate it well, but deep down and subconsciously it is aware of the need to fight and resist subjection.
 
The best and easiest way to describe a culture is to first start from its founding.  The reason southern culture still exists somewhat intact, is that the south believes in God.  The south is the most religious part of the country.  Without a belief in a God, or in gods, a “lifeworld” or culture cannot exist.  God (or the gods) creates the world, and then we live in it.  This is how culture works. 
 
As far as our nation itself is concerned, the majority of the founding fathers, and certainly the most influential ones, were southerners- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.  Patrick Henry uttered his famous words, both as a Virginian and as a southerner – “Give me liberty or give me death” and southerners hold to those words still to this day.
 
The catholic principle of subsidiarity is important here.  Subsidiarity refers to things being done best when done on the local level.  The south has always clung, albeit imperfectly, to this truth, our greatest loyalties in life as southerners are to our families, then friends and neighbors and local areas, then states, and then nations working out from there.  This is why Robert E. Lee, despite his disdain for slavery, correctly chose to support his home state of Virginia in the Civil War.  The modern world posits the opposite and tries to promote a “global community” of anonymous people and even more anonymous problems, but a “global community” is an oxymoron.  If it’s global it’s not a real community. 
 
So the south is a culture founded by God, sustained by localism, with a hierarchy of values.  A hierarchy of values is important.  For example, the market is important but it’s not the most important thing.  When the market interferes with sacred values, the market must take second place.  This is how a real culture works.  When people are more important than speed, then a person values a conversation over the next appointment to rush to, and this too is how a culture works. 
 
We hear quite a bit about community- community health, community wellness, the global community, community banking, etc.  but these are mostly amorphous platitudes.  A better word for an “international community” would be an international cooperative, not community.  In communities, people live together and crucially they know each other.  In cooperatives, on the other hand, people cooperate, even though they may sure few values and be relatively anonymous. 
 
People who don’t care about their ancestors won’t care about their descendants either.  This is playing out broadly speaking in the USA as statues of ancestors are being torn down and founding generations are being slandered and written out of history, while at the very same time the hopes for the future generations are dimming.  The country’s young people as a whole are more depressed and suicidal, have less hope and faith in the future, are reproducing less, marry less, and know less and less about their own history.  They will probably never achieve the middle class stability that their parents had. 
 
This is why a return to culture is the right thing to do, morally speaking, because to honor mothers and fathers and their ancestors is always right.  But building up culture is also the right thing to do for purely utilitarian reasons, it creates healthier and happier homes. 
 
Culture is important because it gives people a place to stand, it creates communities, and it gives people a reason to live.  I’ve been blessed and fortunate and lucky to get to travel to somewhere around 45 countries, and I can see more clearly now than I used to.  What little culture we do have left we should cling to with all our might, because it’s our only hope.  I’m not denying that national culture can have a place, but the US is too big for that to make much difference.  The hope lies in building up local cultures, and for me, that means southern culture.  My roots are deep here and go back to the very beginning of British settlement in America.  Some excellent books on Southern (and American) Culture are- I’ll Take My Stand : 12 Southerners on the Agrarian Tradition,  Albion’s Seed by David Hacket Fisher, Born Fighting by Jim Webb.  But dust off those old cast iron skillets, plant some Collard Greens, sit on the porch longer than you should, open up the Hymnal while you sit around the piano, and break out the guitar and fiddle. 
 
The modern world is rootless, globalized, atheistic, sterile, and isolating.  To embrace culture, the real culture of the sacred in the public square, is to reject the modern world and it’s ills.  It’s not always easy to live this way, but to live itself is not easy.  Love your history, your culture, customs, and traditions.  If you need to, then restart old ones and begin new ones.  Do what you can, with what you have, to make something bigger for when you’re gone.
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I write about:
Fitness- movement.
Nutrition- food.
Wellness- the good life.

I love helping people and trying to make the world better. Have any questions? Drop me a line.
Scott

P.S. Check out Front Porch Republic to learn about a wonderful organization defending local culture.

Co-creation is the most important concept I’ve ever learned.  In any endeavor, strive to co-create and you’ll never go wrong. 
 
Materialistic Objectivism
 
Some people believe that the world is nothing but a big bang, a random collection of molecules and atoms thrown together, and nothing more.  This is the materialist view of life, that we are “nothing but” the cells that happen to make us up. We are our physical material and nothing else.  In this way of thinking, everything can be objectified.  There can be in this worldview no good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful, true, or anything worthwhile.  It just is.  Materialism is objectification, because all are objects, not subjects and there is no free will or creation.   Materialism is nihilistic, because it destroys the life of the spirit, it destroys the subject. Materialism destroys us.  Looking at life purely through the lens of science is materialist objectification and it’s dangerous to us and to society. 
 
Post-Modern Subjectivism
 
An opposite point of view, equally as troublesome, would be that the self, and the self alone, creates the world.  You and I, under this point of view, create our own reality by ourselves.  Our cells and biology according to post-modern subjectivism don’t define us at all.  Most modern people think this way.  We are the subjects, and in this way of thinking the fact that we “exist” precedes what we actually are, in our “essence” like man, woman, child, etc.  This is a radical and diabolical form of subjectivism whereby every person has their own version of “the truth.”  From a spiritual point of view, this is a type of pure spirit, or gnostic spirituality, ungrounded by physical reality, by nature, by tradition or revelation, or by the incarnation.  The post-modern subjective world of radical individualism is the world we are trying to live in now, though it’s obvious that it’s not working and is causing a lot of pain and misery.
 
A 3rd Way: Co-Creation
 
A 3rd way of looking at things, one which I recommend because it conforms with reality and will lead to a harmonious and happy life, would be called “co-creation.”  In this view, there is an objective reality present in nature, and it us up to us to work with it to co-create our lives.  Co-creation combines the previous two points of view, it is both objective, in that it recognizes material reality, but on the other hand it is also subjective, in that it also recognizes the sovereignty and free will of the individual subject.  Co-creation creates harmony.  This harmony, through co-creation, could also be called logos in Greek, or the order of the universe.  When we connect with logos, we are connecting with God, the creator of nature. 
 
We are not doomed in life, though we may have been born with some challenges.   We may face major hurdles in material reality.  But we can always take action to slowly make it better, or deal the best way possible.  On the other hand, you and I cannot do whatever we want.  It’s dangerous to think this way.  I’ll never be an NBA basketball player.  Not gonna happen.  The key is to create with what is there and make things better. 
 
When we become co-creators we are both object and subject, and this is harmony.  The spirit is saved, but so is the body.  When Wordsworth wrote a beautiful poem what he was doing was re-uniting the language of the physical with the language of the spiritual.  He co-created through the logos, and what we got to enjoy was the beauty of his work.   I hope we all strive to do the same this year.
 
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.
‘One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.’

- William Wordsworth

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The brain is a muscle, an extremely complicated one, but a muscle nonetheless.  Muscles operate on oxygen.  If you exercise regularly, particularly with aerobic exercise, you’ll have more oxygen flowing to your brain muscle. You’ll function better mentally, have better memory, have less stress, depression, and anxiety. More aerobic fitness means more oxygen is flowing to the brain, which equals a healthier brain.