Serious question. What thing(s) do you think should be admired about this subculture? Just curious. I have a hard time finding anything positive about this industry these days.
Well to me bodybuilding really is an existential pursuit. One starts with a vision of what they wish to be, and has to achieve that vision via unwavering determination, hard work, pragmatic thinking, (the ability to asses one's strengths and weaknesses, and come up with practical soloutions to them,) and the ability to push yourself beyond the point that your mind wishes to go.
To put it a better way...Bodybuilding is as much a mental challenge as it is a physical challenge. The body cannot act independently of the mind, or vice versa. It starts with a vision, as delusional as it may seem, and is accomplished by "living into" that vision.
This is similar to various esoteric concepts, or even existential philosophy. The entire concept of Magic is predicated upon "bending reality to one's will." To phrase it in Christian terms, we would use the word, "Faith." In existential philosophy, one only needs to look no further then Nietzsche's writings on the concept of "The Will to Power."
We all have things that we are insecure about, or unhappy with. What bodybuilding can teach someone, is that you don't have to accept things as they are. One can achieve many great things with no more then a solid game plan, insane work ethic, a little bit of talent in the area they are trying to succeed in, and the willingness to stick with it despite being mocked, or whatever other set backs they may incur.
This can hardly be summed up in one post...but IMO there are many parallels between what one can take from bodybuilding, and the rudiments of success in just about any endeavor in life.
See when one spends too much time in the realm of GETBIG...and all they see is all the garbage that this "Sport" is seeped in...then it is easy to forget what brought us here in the first place. Not that these problems don't exist, but rather they serve to jade our opinion, and we wind up only seeing half of the picture.
M!
"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired"
Franz Kafka
