i’m reading a thing about peptides that e▒▒▒ gave me. it’s from new york mag. a physical magazine: what a concept.
as i read it, i couldn’t help but see no problem with it. i saw no problem with it at first, and that’s what makes it dangerous. because it’s just at first. and then you start to think of problems.
but i think the point with something like this is how obvious it is that it’s wrong. like, guys, hello. can’t this be one of those things where it’s obvious that we shouldn’t be doing it?
the peptides.... bro, come on. i shouldn’t even need to get into all the reasons why someone....
i don’t want to make a moral judgment here.
i think what i'm trying to say is that from the scientific perspective, from the evolutionary perspective, it seems obvious that we should not inject peptides into ourselves.
and shit, i think it’s a good point to think about insulin, insulin being a peptide... but this also brings me to this thing of medicine being for a specific population. exogenous insulin peptide is useful for diabetics, but most of us don’t qualify for it. it's just like how dbt doesn’t seem to work in a universal population (yet), or at the very least that our feeble attempts at bringing it to the whole population have been so unsuccessful as to actually do harm.
(aside: one of the hypotheses is that dbt is designed for people with bpd, and the intention was never to use it on everyone. i think that’s what makes it so successful for people for whom it is indicated.)
(aside aside: there was something those researchers said about how dbt with only its didactic content, minus the therapeutic relationship, gives you a sharp little tool that is inert at best and harmful at worst. someone could pick it up and just start fucking stabbing themselves with it. 'oh, a negative emotion? people get dysregulated by these? let me... fucking...' who knows.)
with peptides, you’re trying to go up from your baseline. i think that’s a big mistake, and it’s hubris, and it’s temptation,
and people probably will die if they haven’t already. cells, at least, are certainly dying. people are certainly killing parts of their body, and luckily their bodies are most often strong enough to bounce back on a systemic level, but shit, man... death is death, right? like, this dude got necrotizing pancreatitis after taking peptides. and then the person who injected it into their achilles and got sharp pain and kidney stones....
in any case, it seems obvious that it’s a bad idea. and again, i’m not trying to make a moral judgment here. i’m keeping morality out of it. it’s just.... this is just humans not knowing what we do. and who am i to talk, really?
the thing about peptides is that yes, the body actually does use these things as chemical messengers. we do use peptides, and we do make them, and we do have receptors which receive them and then activate some shit inside each cell, like turning up transcription of certain genes. it seems like an elegant thing to do, to inject peptides. our bodies already know them well. they are our chemical messaging friends.
science has helped the peptide industry by defining what each of these peptides does. and right there is how
the whole thing behind looksmaxxing is making money, right? like... clavicular making shit tons of money from streams and clips and interviews and then all the income he’s getting from partnering with peptide companies.
peptides get denatured in hot temperatures, and the speculation about how the humidity in china is going to disrupt the chemical structure of these peptides before they are shipped to some sixteen-year-old suburban white princess in america, and she’s going to die of a stroke cuz it caused a dvt in her leg and it got thrown up to her brain—i know it’s more likely for it to be pulmonary embolism—i digress.
group setting (aside: the collective unconscious doesn’t exist in as free a way on the internet anymore. it’s been hijakced. it looks the same, but you can tell on a fundamental level that the algorithms have fucked it up. and the ads. why are there ads? we’re so fucked. it’s so over. how do we tap into the collective unconscious anymore? we need more group settings. we need more groups in general. we have got to have more groups.)
peptides. how many are there, and what do they do, and what will they do when they are given exogenously?
we know negative feedback is a big thing in the body, and i have to imagine there will be negative feedback happening when you supply exogenous peptides all the time. when the peptides are supplied exogenously, your brain will not know the difference, and it will do negative feedback anyway, and it will tell your body to stop making the peptides endogenously. your body is going to stop making its own peptides, and the cells that make that peptide will no longer have a job to do, so they’re going to sit around all day and become couch potatoes and fucking atrophy, and then the part of your brain that sends the signal to those cells is going to be none the wiser.
let’s take, for example, testosterone. or estrogen. they both have the same mechanism of creation, basically, basically, basically.... basically. so the hypothalamus makes GnRH... gonadotropin releasing hormone (a peptide). that goes down to your anterior pituitary, which makes LH and FSH... luteinizing and follicle-stimulating hormones (peptides). those go down to your testes or ovaries, link up with some receptors down there, and the cell is like, ‘message received,' and starts making estrogen or testosterone (peptides).
anyway, the point is, the point is, the point is....... say we start giving you supplemental testosterone. your brain will detect it, and it’ll tell your anterior pituitary to make less FSH and LH, so your testes/ovaries will get less stimulation, and they’ll shrivel up like potatoes.
negative feedback. when your body makes something, the only reason it stops making that something is if there is a sufficient amount already in your body. but the brain is not able to see WHEHREREREREEE the peptide comes from. you could smuggle in any kind of peptide, and your brain would see it and be like, ‘okay, we got enough.’ it’s going to assume that you’re getting it endogenously, and it’s going to tell whatever cell in your ballsack to stop making testosterone........ cuz we got enough.
so then, bruh, what happens when you keep supplying peptide and peptide and peptide? your body could end up having too much of it, right, and our bodies are good at keeping us in homeostasis....
i think that’s a whole separate point from any of this other stuff: the homeostasis of it all. by injecting peptides, you’re putting yourself into a new homeostasis that your body is going to want to maintain. it’s going to want to keep things pretty stable. but now you’re relying on something exogenous to maintain homeostasis, and your body is going to get mad at you and freak out, and it’s going to start yellling at your balls to start making more testosterone, but your balls are gonna be like, ‘bro, fuckkkk, idk, i can’t do it,,,, you’re overwhelming me...’ and your balls will only be able to make so much, but your brain is going to be screaming out, saying, ‘what the fawkkkk, dude, we used to have so much more testosterone, why are y’all slacking,
, i think we’re really sick,’ and it’s going to start making you sick so that you’lll... idk, seek support, find a doctor, something to get out of this situation, because we’re freaking out. it’s going to tell you, long story short, to inject more testosterone. the negative feedback loop inside your body ends up altering your behavior.
this is why we need to stop taking peptides: because of negative feedback and how our bodies want to be in homeostasis. you can make everyone’s lives easier (that is, all those who live in your body) if you keep homeostasis from things that are pretty simple. it’s better not to make yourself rely on exogenous stuff, right? unless it’s easy to come by and you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg and take a lot of weird risks that haven’t been taken by any of our ancestors............ you know?
it’s like, we gotta, at a certain point, start listening to evolution more, guys. we have to start trusting that the diet our body asks us for is going to be more or less sufficient to get us the nutrients we need. we gotta trust that our bodies in general know way more about how to sustain life than our directing minds, poisoned by language and ego.
let yourself listen to those signals. and fuck, dude, yeah, i know, when you’re sick, when you got shit wrong with you, the signals can get warped, and it’s not so easy, and i’m speaking from a place of privilege here, because my body more or less knows how to ask me what for what it wants, and i’m privileged enough to be able to respond to the signals of my body. i can afford food when i’m hungry; i have running water for when i’m thirsty; i have a right hand for when i’m horny; i have a washer and dryer so i don’t get soiled, bacteria-infested clothes; i got a toothbrush so my mouth doesn’t get infested, either....... i got everything i need to meet my needs.
but look at the things i’m putting into myself exogenously. look at the social support i get from the internet. look at how it’s disrupting my need to get it elsewhere. it’s bringing me to a homeostasis, and when it gets taken away, my body is going to be like, ‘wait, put it back... we needed that... you weren’t talking to enough people, so we needed that, put it back!!!!’
you have a lot to learn about yourself by examining the things you put in exogenously. your body is doing a lot of shit right now. but
you, the directing mind? you, the girl reading this? the one who’s been infected by language enough to understand what is being said here? what are you putting into yourself exogenously? you’re putting this in, first of all, for better or worse.
i think it’s good to talk about these things, because it really is a slippery slope. reading that article, i was getting like, ‘huh, okay, peptides don’t sound too unreasonable, actually.’ and that’s the danger. that right there is the danger, especially when you’ve written an article so long that it’s divided in the magazine itself, split in half, and the second half doesn’t appear until forty pages later. someone might put it down and be like, ‘huh, peptides.... yes,’ and not get to the part where it makes you think critically.
and even the author is implicitly suggesting that they are now peptide-pilled. the final line of the article is about how they looked in their fridge and saw peptides sitting next to an onion, and they thought, ‘it’s not a bad idea to lose some weight after the holidays,’ so they injected them. like hello,,,, hellllo.... we need some more alarm bells sounding, i think. can we take shit more seriously sometimes?
and it’s tough because i don’t want to be like, ‘peptides are morally wrong.’ i really do think that the people taking them should keep taking them if it makes them happy. i think it’s just good to know about negative feedback in this case.
your bodymind wants
stability above all else. and if it’s telling you that it wants more dopamine right now, that what’s happening inside is not enough, you gotta check your exogenous shit, brother. that shit is taking you into a homeostasis that i don’t really know if you’re choosing.
you’re not using free will when you decide to inject peptides, when you decide to smoke weed, when you do anything exogenous. when you add anything. shit, even when you eat food, you’re not using free will. you’re responding to millions, maybe billions, trillions—shit, let’s just call it an infinity—of signals from inside of your body, taking the average of all of those, and acting in a certain way in every second.
because i’m not going to not have dinner tonight. i won’t be able to not do it. i could fast, of course, i could fast, and it would be fine, but at a certain point, the body is going to make me get food. it’s going to change my thought process in such a way that will convince me to do it, just like it changes my thought process to tell me that it needs weed. it changes the thought process to change my behavior to add more of the exogenous thing that i seem to need, that there is seemingly not enough of...... all this exogenous shit, bro...
but isn’t life about the exogenous stuff? isn’t part of being alive, being porous? my mom always told me to be a sponge, not a brick, and part of being a sponge is taking in all the stuff around you. it’s like pinocytosis all the time. you’re constantly sampling from your environment. and then sometimes you take a big bite. sometimes you fucking eat.
i need to jerk off.