As I was reading about a new lifestyle called the "cavemen" lifestyle, I was reminded slightly of Chuck Palhaniuk's The Fight Club.
In The Fight Club we see white-collar, city men, emasculated by a lifestyle that's marked by over-consumption and blind dedication to convenience, reverting to a paleolithic form of manhood.
Men belonging to the managerial and entrepreneurial class are shown huddled inside a dingy, underground, club.
Their objective is to fight one another with their bare fists and bodies, without the mediation of any technology, not even a head or a chest guard or a pair of boxing gloves.
There are no winners or losers, but just pulped up males who don't whimper under the assault because that's how the manly man is shaped--through enduring pain, instead of crying "mommy" at the slightest inconvenience.
The goal was to restore to emasculated men their masculinity which, as the fantasy figure of Tyler Durden claims, has been sacrificed at the altar of "credit cards" and "technology".
The Fight Club was more or less a masculine take on civilization and its discontents.
But what did the fight clubbers eat?
We don't know. What they dispense with are bottles of expensive, gourmet condiments that line their refrigerator shelves.
A new breed of "cavemen" focus less on masculinity, aggression and ludditism and more on food and exercise.
They argue that the human body is adapted to the conditions of the hunter-gatherer societies of the pleistocene. In other words, our bodies are meant to consume food bordering on the raw and the unprocessed, and to activities like walking, running, sprinting and lifting.
Many of the modern day physical and mental maladies happen on account of an unnatural swerving away of our life styles from that which is natural.
The goal of the neo-Paleolithic is to build "fortitude". In the process of building fortitude, the cavemen gain in muscle, leanness and mental peace.
Most of the cavemen make a living from Internet-based professions, while some like Nassim Taleb are in finance.
Their typical diet consist of raw meat or meat from grass-fed animals, some fruit, now and then, avoidance of bread. Their typical exercise consists of hard-core, non-fancy body building with iron balls, rough dumbells and heavy stones, among other implements.
Then they walk a lot. Taleb, who lives in New York City, avoids office-spaces and does his work while walking, often from the Village to Harlem.
They also fast. Some go without food for 36 hours, exercise on an empty stomach and have one large meal every two days or so.
Cavemen insist that the Paleolithic lifestyle, especially their dietary habits are worth emulating because scientific evidence shows that P-men had stronger bodies and better skin. Scientists say this is true--P-men were far fitter than their modern counterparts, but they also had shorter life-spans.
Unlike the members of the fight club, city-based cavemen are not nostalgic about the Paleolithic era, but would like to adopt the Paleolithic diet and mental strength to survive the demands of modern-day living.
The Paleolithic fortitude is what is much sought after.
All this impresses me, but there's something missing in the picture--the women! Where do the women fit in in this hunt for the Paleolithic?
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