The Matrix premiered 27 years ago today, on March 31st, 1999.
I didn’t know that at the time because, also on this date in 1999, I was tore up on Bud Light down in Panama City Beach with a couple of buddies and an unrivaled beachfront view of the Gulf’s sugar-white sands from our third-floor balcony.
We were paying under 99 cents a gallon at the pump.
Living in 1999 was like fantasy island, wasn’t it?
I watched The Matrix with my girls a couple months ago and it stuck out to me when Agent Smith told Morpheus that the machines built the simulation at the peak of our civilization.
Around the time the movie came out a lot of us heard that and thought, huh? This is the peak? We’re going to space, bro!
In 2026, hoo boy does Smith’s line go hard.
What’s this got to do with getting in shape and losing fat?
Not one blessed thing.
It is, however, a warning about getting too comfy in your happy routine, assuming you’ve got it all figured out, and expecting the good parts of life to last forever with roses and cakes from now on.
Age is coming for all of us.
And with things getting shakier than ever out there in the world, I often find myself confused and a little sad at how people are so ready to outsource everything about life.
I mean the most basic, essential, and personal things you have, like your health.
The health-care system looks a lot like a pipeline from your GP to a treasure-chest of drugs that you must use in perpetuity to be “healthy”.
There are use-cases for certain pills, no doubt. But the overwhelming urge is to medicate everything, to treat every complaint as a problem that needs solving like a broken machine, even down to easily-fixable lifestyle illnesses.
If you need a lifetime subscription to a drug which depends on the economics of complex supply chains just to maintain a healthy weight, what are you even doing with yourself?
Folks will shell out 30 grand for a year of this stuff and turn up their noses at a $50/month gym membership… or even doing some calisthenics at home while not shoving Doritos and Mt Dew into their faces.
Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t understand, food is easy, willpower doesn’t work, nobody is responsible for anything, I have emotional trauma, someone once looked me in the eye and I had to cry while hyperventilating into a bag.
Agent Smith had another banger line in The Matrix that is apt here:
The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.
Outsourcing is fine and all when it frees up genuine capacities of energy and time.
But outsourcing your abilities has limits.
Many of your human capacities need to be used in order to stay a full-fledged human being. Aristotle wrote about this.
You are not a brain in a vat with robots to wait on you. Your body is you.
Allow it to wither away on the couch, while you interact with the world through a web of touch-screens and pharmaceuticals, is no way to live.
Whose life is this you’re living? Is it your life, or is it the life that is handed to you by machines (literal and metaphorical)?
Living how I preach it means you’re taking care of your health, starting with consistent habits of activity, eating with care, and mental focus.
Even as you get older, you can become more independent, more resilient, and less reliant on the Everything Subscription model of modern society.
The best thing is, whether we’re heading to a Machine Hell dystopia or a Butlerian Jihad (Google it), there’s no outcome where you are worse off by actively maintaining a healthy, thriving body.
Matt Perryman