How to Become Your Own Experimental Animal
+ watch Lesson 1 for free
Hello, it’s Kevin.
You can now watch Lesson 1 of my course “Principles of Posture” for free. Links below.
You get access to Lessons 2-10 when you become a paid subscriber.
We ourselves want to be our own experiments and experimental animals.
– F.W. Nietzsche
I recently wrote an essay Self-Experimentation is the Future on why you need to be able to figure things out for yourself. People seemed to quite like the idea. But if you read it you might be left thinking “Ok yes I need to start self-experimenting, but how?
I love the Nietzsche quote above but the problem with philosophers is they are often good on the what and why, but not so much on the how. That’s fine, of course, they have their own roles and purposes. But our job is to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
So how do you become a self-experimenter?
First you need a meaningful problem you want to solve, and second, a method for going about solving it. You could choose a million things to experiment with, and you probably already self-experiment with something in your life even if you don’t explicitly call it self-experimentation. But you have to start somewhere. Somewhere concrete and practically useful is best.
For me I chose: The Posture Problem. After years of self experimenting with different techniques, gimmicks and practices I found a method that works and then - being a good Twitterer – made an online course showing other people how to do it.
The course is called Principles Of Posture: A Practical Guide For Self-Experimenters. The goal is to activate your bio-mechanical “posture springs” which we all have but aren’t using properly. There are 10 videos, with 10 principles and 10 experiments. You can watch lesson 1 on the link below.
But the course was NOT what people expected. Everyone wants a set of fixed answers “sit like this, stand like this, buy this chair” etc because they assume that if they are told what to do, then they can do it. It turns out when it comes to posture this is a delusion.
I sold the course as a specific solution to the posture problem (a guy’s gotta eat) but it’s more like a general system of self-experimentation applied to posture and movement. So you can take the framework and do what you want with it.
I don’t how successful it was solving the posture problem in the do-it-yourself online course format (that’s why it’s now part of the members inner circle on here) but there is a workable system of self experimentation in there.
Master it with your posture and mind-body relationship first, and then apply to your own thing later. You do have a “thing” don’t you?
Ok here are links to the course Introduction and Lesson 1. Enjoy!
Cheers,
Kevin
