Employment

2022 was a year with a lot of changes to my employment. At summer I decided to quit working on my own massage point, and started doing massage as a subcontractor. I was really hopeful that now I would get clients without having to worry about getting them myself.

Turned out that clients still weren't flocking in like I was kinda led to believe by the CEO. The company wasn't doing it's marketing very well, and the subcontract terms got worsen which was the last straw to get a steady paying job and quit the subcontract massage work which I will never do again – you need to do high volumes to get a good pay because of the 35% comission, yet my arms couldn't take even half the volume of full employment hours.

The job I got is in a cheap-store chain which has been much more pleasant than I thought. The application was for a cashier position, but I've ended up getting shifts where I do much more other upkeep tasks instead of full days of cashier shifts, which suits me well.

3-4 days a week at the job and then a regular bi-weekly massage gig plus some occasional home visit - this feels like a very good configuration for the moment. I will never do massage as full time even if I could, because of physical load, but it works really nice as a side income on top of steady income.

Diet

Last few months I've changed my diet to cut out all seed oils and including much more unprocessed meat and animal fats and eggs.

"Why the hell are you doing this?"

Short answer is: seed oils cause inflammation and animal fat doesn't actually kill you.

Long(er) answer: This topic is such a mess thanks to 70 years of nutrition science which is based on Ancel Keys' diet heart hypothesis about animal fats which he managed to institutionalize as the de facto reason behind heart desease. Since then mainstream nutrition science is a pile of confirmation bias canceling and ignoring studies that doesn't support the "right theory". Actual clinical trials are rare, and the few rigorous ones don't show benefits for reduced animal fat intake. On the contrary there's plenty of research on the toxic oxidization products of polyunsaturated fats – plentiful in vegetable oils, especially seed oils.

Interestingly enough, since cutting seed oils and adding animal fat and meat, I've had more energy and initiative which is consistent with the info on the video about seed oils' oxidation products damaging the mitochondria of the cells. I've always been flegmatic and have struggled greatly to just get things done but this is greatly reduced to a degree that @rrusina has taken a note on it. Now that's just my anecdote so I would suggest doing your own research and making up your own mind about it. The Big Fat Surprise from Nina Teicholz is a good place to start.

How did we get it so wrong?

When there's a single government funded institute responsible for giving health advice, there is a high margin of error when health policy is centralized to few people. It was a game of politics for Ancel Keys' who managed to convince his theory to be adopted at an institutional level. And when he managed to make it the de facto theory, the theory got the funding of the government and from there it's really hard to stop. This is because government funding functions in an economical vacuum where market feedback has no consequence for funding.

Here's a great video about the history of fat in more detail:

The very beginning of the diet-heart hypothesis was dishonest by Ancel Keys who had data from 22 countries but selectively chose countries for the famous 7 country study which draw a nice line showing more heart decease per saturated fat consumed. Not to mention the very problem of associative and epidemiological studies to begin with: associations don't prove causation and the subjects fill in their food intake by memory. This is the basis modern mainstream nutrition by institutions is based upon.

Bitcoin

2022 was a pivotal year on my understanding on Bitcoin, and I used hundreds of hours on researching it. It was actually a tangent of it that led to all the diet stuff I explained above. And I gotta be honest, digging through all different kinds of cryptos early on was really a distraction from the real thing: Bitcoin. Second thing I gotta be honest: you probably don't understand Bitcoin very well. Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but based on my own experience, there never was much of deep knowledge about Bitcoin on Hive. Probably because this is an echochamber of its own with people wrongfully comparing it to Bitcoin, thus pointing the apparent flaws of Bitcoin in order to justify a position on Hive. Just because you're in "crypto" doesn't mean you understand Bitcoin. Instead people take the shortcut heurestic of "Bitcoin is the myspace of crypto".

The thing is, that Bitcoin is different from anything we've seen and takes extensive knowledge about monetary networks and computer networks to get a grasp on it – with so many more domains of knowledge that tie into it. There's no short cut to understanding it, you gotta do the work yourself.

So the best thing you could do to yourself whilst in the bottom of the hype cycle, is to not buy bitcoin but learn bitcoin.

The Bitcoin Standard is a good place to start. You can actually download it for free here, endorsed by the author himself on Twitter.