DrQuickbeam

Oh yeah and a chiropractor will not resolve issues like this. Find a physical therapist that works with athletes and kinetic mobility/recovery stuff. Most PTs work with old people, post op, or chemo patients and are too gentle/slow in their approach to younger folks who need to retain their bodies.

Core strengthening can help with back pain, but in this case it’s different. Walking on soft or variable surfaces causes less impact pain to sensitive nerves. People with poor flexibility or damaged discs in their back feel more pain from walking on hard, flat surfaces. The quality of shoe support / insoles can help with this too. If you have back pain when you walk, you start to compensate for it with an uneven gait, turning your pelvis inward or outward or tightening your hips. Over time this will cause tight muscles that will pull your spine out of alignment and exacerbate pain. Uneven terrain will force a break in these habits and encourage mobility and stretching in tight hips, hams and back muscles. This can be improved off a trail by doing mobility exercises like 3d lunge matrix, kinetic hip flexor and hamstring stretches. I would add that while you can prevent most back pain by doing core strengthening, wearing supportive footwear and doing these kinds of flexibility/mobility practices, it is always better for your body to have variability in how it exerts itself, than doing the same exercises over and over. Hiking is great for this because the terrain and the way you tackle it changes a lot each time you hike.

Make a small spray paint stencil or vinyl sticker that represents your crew, or inspires people to think differently, and put them around your town or natural areas in subtle, cleverly inconspicuous locations.

Explore your area with Alltrails, or a similar app, finding new hiking or biking trails.

Urban exploration: creep through abandoned buildings, climb fire escapes to reach the rooftops, use catwalks under bridges to cross roads and rivers, scurry through large water drain pipes and abandoned steam tunnels.

Start a lucid dreaming competition with your friends, and share your experiences every morning. As you all develop more dreaming skills, you can share them with each other, and slowly become the masters of your dreams.

Come up with scavenger hunts that guide people into the coolest, hidden areas of your town, using clever clues, and share them online, similar to geocaching.

Pick up rubbish off the ground, one area at a time.

If it doesn’t exist publically in your country, get equipment to either test air or water quality at several spots around your community, and then share them online through posts, or by hosting an Ushahidi map. Encourage others to chip in.

Get your gang to volunteer together to help homeless, elderly or disabled people once or twice a month. You will both bond with your buds and gain new perspectives from the people you work with.

Arrange spontaneous dance parties in public with little flash mobs made up of your mates. Try to get strangers to join in on the fun. Disperse after one song, so you don’t get in trouble.

Learn to identify the 10 most common trees in your area, then the 10 most common flowers, the 10 most common weeds, the 10 most common birds and the 10 most common insects.

Explore local theater, try to find weird niche performances at churches, swingers clubs, primary schools, corporate retreats, futurist festivals, government events, and street corners. Make sure to cheer loudly and throw flowers.

It’s far from perfect, but the European parliament is vastly more functional than the American Congress, just based on the amount of legislation that is crafted, compromised on, and passed. These laws, which have to be adopted by all the countries in the EU, are the most prosocial and environmental in the world.

With these elections increasing the size of conservative coalitions, there will be more of a push against things like green regulations, immigration quotas, and support for Ukraine.

More conservatives are being elected because right-wing nationalist/populist parties across Europe are fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hate, the burden of inflation, and EU regulations that might squeeze the ability of farmers (or other laborers) to make a profit, in order to sell their Make (insert country name here) Great Again rhetoric and whatever religious/corporate/fascist power dynamics that rhetoric conceals.

I’m thinking an RPG Maker style game. You play as Morpheus, the god of dreams. Each level is a different person’s dream. When you arrive the dream is a nightmare fueled by past experiences and internal feelings. You have to journey through the dreamscape and find these factors and resolve them to heal the psyche of the dreamer and turn the nightmare into a good dream.

An example would be a dream where the dreamer is delivering a presentation in front of a classroom naked while the other kids and teacher make fun of them. As that scene plays out, you walk around the school and discover little tidbits about the dreamer. Some of these tidbits are external factors that led to the dream, like memories of people making the dreamer embarrassed for being themselves. You could resolve these by fighting and defeating them in the form of nightmare creatures. And some of the tidbits will be internal factors, like feelings of insecurity and defense mechanisms like reinforcing ideas, that give power to the twisted logic of the dream. These, you have to heal by pointing out the flawed logic and encouraging the dreamer to accept themselves. Once you do everything, you go back to the classroom and find the dreamer giving a TED talk to an enraptured and admiring crowd.

I mean, hypothetically. That is the end result of the neoliberal, or late capitalism economic philosophy if applied on a model. But economic systems in practice are never the philosophy, and are only there in the first place to support the governance of a nation state. I spend half my time in Italy, for example, where the laws protect both the big international brands and the mom and pop shops.

My point is that we are the citizens that make up the government that designs the governance rules for our nation-state. Capitalism is not a government, or people, or the entire story when it comes to commerce and trade systems. We can shape it and use it, like any other framework.

Likewise, regardless of your economic system, greedy people will try to accumulate power, bend the rules to benefit themselves, and extend those benefits across borders if they can. Powerful egos will warp people and rules around them like gravity. All governance systems that strive to be just, collaborative and promote the quality of life of all its citizens have to both put strong rules in place to check the power-hungry, and constantly monitor and adapt to keep them in check.