Riding a Bicycle is Not the Meaning of Life.

hey in case you hadn't guessed apart
from suffering from severe jetlag and overall fatigue and exhaustion this has been the first week of a new semester at University and I have a whole stack of books here that I'm expected to read in a very short span of time and then I'm very unlikely to read any great percentage of putting together a short video now reflecting on my own experience with long-distance cycling a lot of people react in a sort of defensive way when you get into the practical nitty-gritty of the meaning of life I have experience doing long-distance cycling and I have gone on long distance bike trips in Thailand and Laos I've never really talked about that on this YouTube channel before it's it's something I have in common with durianrider which won't have much in common but I do have experience going more than 100 kilometres a day on a bike in that part of Asia obviously never as a serious athlete or not as someone even aspiring to be an athlete and you know at the end of my engagement with that sport or hobby I really felt that it was a waste of time although obviously the effects in your physical fitness can be dramatic so it's gonna put together a video reflecting a little bit on the pragmatics of the meaning of life and the art of long-distance cycling in the tropics my own motivations how I felt about it before after enduring I know this is of special interest to some vegans and I I this idea was put in my head because of my most recent video I did comment on the fact that I made a long-distance cycling trip in the north of Laos on dirt roads connecting some obscure villages then afterwards I reflected boy I've never I've never talked about that online before neither in writing nor nor on YouTube videos I think so for some people who know me that that might come as a surprise I don't know for some not so much in the other side of this is you know of all the subjects I've ever received hate mail for online I probably received the most intense hate mail for two subjects one being a casual comment that playing video games was a waste of time back when I had a blog on veganism I received really vitriolic response how dare you say playing video games is a waste of time and it was a similar extreme response to comments about smoking marijuana as a waste of time and as something that causes brain damage which is scientifically proven by MRI scans that is not an opinion sadly the brain damage caused by alcohol and by marijuana use is now something we have mapped out and quantified quite precisely in the medical sciences although people are very strong motives to ignore this evidence as with all the evidence the eating meat is bad for you people go into a similar sort of denial so seeing something as a waste of time is not the same as saying it's evil it's not even saying it's bad or the wrong choice for you if if you have the time to spare I had a period of doing long cycling trips I had a girlfriend who had broken up with and actually even before the breakup I went on a really long bike trip I went from vientiene the capital city of Laos to Chiang Mai by bicycle and at that time I knew that she and I were going to break up in the future so I had that to sort of think about but actually the reason for that bike trip was I relied on a Macintosh at that time you could not use a Windows computer in the languages I needed I was using languages like Cinelli's and Burmese and particularly the literary forms of those languages as they're used to write classical vocabulary from antiquity so if you want to be able to type Pali in Sinhalese or in Burmese with the ligatures and orthography associated with a tradition at that time it was impossible on a Windows computer and it was just barely possible on a Mac dog this face to say I relied on this maca Tasha had and when it stopped working for herself her reasons the nearest Mac store I could go to was him Chiang Mai so I undertook that journey going west along the Mekong but I mean I was not a serious athlete although I did do more than 100 kilometres a day when I went on bike trips you know I had no serious aspirations to ever become a competitive cyclist or even even a serious hobbyist in that sense and you know when something went wrong when for instance it started raining I would stop riding my bike and I would take the bus I'm in torrential rain in the tropics you can't fight against on a bicycle so you know if you're actually trying to cover the distance in a number of days and then maybe get back to your job or your life you know you're not on vacation then what is starts raining you're gonna take the bus and other such things um one of my main reasons for riding a bike at that time was self-defense and that may seem paradoxical at first because riding a bike is not like practicing kung-fu or boxing but I did get a lot of exercise you get full body exercise riding bike and the particular type of bicycle I rode and the way I had it set up I actually had a lot of weight in my arms I would have my weight in my arms and my feet and very little of my weight on the bike seat it's a preference for a writing style so really you know the triceps and your wrists and I would have a lot of weight carried in my arms which again I think serious cyclists avoid they don't want to fatigue their arms but um doing long distance like that it kept me in shape where I felt I was ready to react if I was in a violent situation suddenly it wasn't my only exercise sometimes I had access to a gym when I was living in Southeast Asia as sometimes I didn't when I didn't I would try to have a couple of free weights around but mostly I'd rely on long-distance cycling and doing 200 push-ups push-ups per day 200 push-ups per day and that would keep me in shape where I felt I could handle a situation if someone come at came at me with a machete and that did happen eventually you know there are violent situations you deal with and there are violent situations that you prevent simply by being prepared and alert there's no doubt that I had dramatically less violence in my life simply because I never drank alcohol never went to nightclubs never went at the sorts of places where I would be exposed to violence but even if I was walking through the streets at night whether the streets of pnom pan or vientiene or Bangkok the fact that I was alert and sober is a huge difference anyway one of the main reasons for riding a bicycle was just that other reasons were the ability to basically explore villages you otherwise wouldn't see in Laos and Thailand sorry coming back to the main thread of my argument here I remember I was breaking up with this girlfriend and you know in the time leading up to the breakup and immediately after the breakup I would do a lot of thinking about that I would meditate on the break-up and the associated emotions and what it meant to me and where I was going with my life well riding this bicycle long distances and you learn to think in a very strange measured way when you're going fast long distances on a bicycle because you're shifting your focus or shifting your attention between the road beneath you and the road ahead of you and things to either side you're you're sort of scanning the environment around you at all times in a particular way and you can't allow yourself to get lost in thought so it's a very strange frame of mind you have to maintain while riding a bike you're never relaxed but you're also never stressed out um I think that's why some people find the sport so addictive this this sense of alertness that you learn to cultivate while riding a bike but I remember one day you know just as certain is turning a page I was doing this I was doing one of these long-distance bike rides and I thought I'd nothing more to think about oh I've done so much thinking over so many hours of riding his bicycle long distance this is it I'm done thinking yeah I mean unless some other major events happen to me that I haven't thought through yet I have no more reason to do this I'm I'm you know this is just a waste of my time and I starting on that day I did switch up my habits I started going to the gym more and I I cancelled the long-distance bike rides now as I recall I think my trip to the gym was something like 15 kilometers each way so I ride my bike 15 K work help I'm about back that didn't last that long that was well was living in in the city of Han Chen but it's a different story each place that lived in Asia whether or not access to a gym and whether or not I had a bicycle with me and what I could do with that bicycle um I just saw a video from a fellow vegan on YouTube and he was lamenting his own sense of addiction to exercise and how it relates to his sense of identity and value and so on he describes himself as someone who struggled with anorexia and orthorexia this is not my opinion it's his own opinion of himself and he participated in the Thai fruit Festival and their ritual of blowing up toys to tap toy steps name of a mountain and Thailand and how for him at least it was an unhealthy obsession or became an unhealthy obsession I think it is worth questioning whether or not the bicycle and long distance cycling is becoming an unhealthy obsession for vegans in general it is just a method of exercise like any other but obviously for many people it symbolizes virility a second youth in some ways it symbolizes the same sort of illusion of Independence that a motorcycle symbolize for people a few generations ago and you know the reality of long-distance cycling in a sense is none of those things any little thing that goes wrong and you know your bike trip is over if you're unlucky your life is over I had a number of close calls where the bike could have ended my life or came close to seriously injuring me I still have broken bones in one of my wrists from a bike accident and actually that's part of the story of why I had that Macintosh computer with me and why I was struggling to type those Asian languages using my Mac before I broke the bones in my wrist in a bike accident I had actually decided after investigating it there was no point in trying to use a computer and I started this new period of my life working on these different languages because the software was so obtuse and counterproductive and said okay I'm just gonna do all this stuff through handwriting and during the whole period I did I mean I did write those languages by hand is a crucial part of language learning and practice by the way but I had excellent handwriting in the cinah Lee's Burmese lao tai cambodian it's insane i can't my ability to speak any of those languages was incredibly limited but I did cultivate handwriting and Pali Pali as the hill fraca Pali as the bridging language and all those traditions for me um so I did spend a lot of time doing everything but when I broke those bones in my wrist in a bike accident that then suddenly forced me to depend on typing and then to re-evaluate my priorities and I was learning because I didn't know when my wrist healed if I really have decent handwriting with my right hand again I didn't know to what extent had recover to what extent of chronic pain or lost ability to to write even in English but definitely in second and third languages I remember I was going down the side of a mountain in sorry it was in Thailand but near the Cambodian border it's a panel it's not really a mountain but it's it's a big hill traditionally called a mountain all I can remember as often the case when you're in a real emergency like that you know time seems to slow down your adrenaline kicks in or what have you I was coming down this mountain very quickly and I thought to myself you know what all of my attention is always focused on the road and managing the minutiae of the bike you know make sure it makes fine with a bike I really need to slow down and pay more attention to the beauty of my surroundings and I looked around and the view from the side of this mountain at that moment there was an ornamental pond this is a traditional ornamental pond it's been restored by you know Thailand's archeological committee but it's part of an ancient Cambodian temple or palace complex incredibly beautiful you know simple tropical beauty and I'm looking over at it for just a split second I thought to myself well that's exactly what I mean that's what I'm talking about I should I shouldn't just be staring at the road I should be actually taking my surroundings and when I turned my attention back to the road there was a huge gap open in front of me looking like the jaws of death had opened to swallow me whole because what the what the road building crew had done there instead of using poured concrete they had used slabs of steel reinforced concrete right for whatever reason the side of that hill it's irregular in highway construction and the slab of concrete had snapped so unlike a pothole you had a sudden break in the concrete and like teeth sprouting out of this mouth there were sharp spikes of rusted steel because it's it's the same stuff for make buildings out of its rebar it's it's steel reinforced concrete of course where the steel is exposed by the concrete breaking the steel gets rust it was a cartoonishly sinister situation and in the split seconds remain to me my ability to do anything was extremely limited I was on a proper racing bike not a hybrid not eternal by a racing bike with racing tires and I did with all of my strength in my arms you know control the bike because I went through that crash and I stayed on top of it so I didn't I know part of my skin touched the concrete that was the miracle of it but it completely caved in my front tire so in some ways had a very good recovery from that crash and managed it really well it's really just using her hands on the steering wheel and keeping yourself upright at any and any cost now I'm in the middle of nowhere near the Thai Cambodian border near this ancient temple I'm thinking oh my god my bike is now completely incapacitated my ability to repair it this kind of severe total destruction of my tire I didn't have the kit with me to to repair or replace that I had some you know tools with me and so on though what am I gonna do and so I went down the rest of the side of this mountain this small Hilton and there at the bottom looking up at me because from the distance they could either hear or see me as this happened were three guys local Cambodian guys you know Thai citizens but ethnically Cambodian um who were running a tire repair shop for motorcycle now you know they didn't they didn't usually handle racing bicycles but obviously they you know they were confident they knew their way around a bike so I wasn't reduced to hitchhiking or being room and there were no cars it was an obscure small road so it would have been a long time would have had to probably walk many kilometers carrying my bike to get back to civilization but that was that the Inc the decline or the incline of that hill it was very very steep that's why that happened to me at all at that moment why wasn't why was they even aware and if I've been thrown off that bike and gone down that hill or if I had gone over the side it wasn't a quite a cliff to the side but it was an extreme drop leading down to that ornamental lake that could have really been trouble these types of stories about injuries potential and actual may all seem like fun and games but I just want to insert a comment that these really were of some instrumental importance in my decision to stop riding a bike so if you follow my channel you know I'm currently divorced I was formerly married therefore I can remember when I was with my wife and with my girlfriend who became my wife she asked me at several points if I wanted to resume this this hobby of the sport if I was going to start running a bike long distance again and I told her no because I couldn't risk this kind of injury because she depended on me now the most extreme dependency of course is when we actually had a child together when she when my wife was pregnant with a newborn baby I couldn't afford to be sick for one day or to be absent for one day every day and every minute mattered but even when you're not in circumstances that demanding or extreme right now I'm at university if I were riding a bike around and I had an injury that took me out of classes for just two weeks that actually really would have a devastating effect on my life even though right now I live alone there's nobody else depending on me I remember she was really struck by that Office's she'd had other boy in the past before me and she said she'd never been with someone who thought of things that way before but for me it would have been irresponsible to start cycling again because my girlfriend depended on me later because my wife depended on me later because my daughter depended on me and to a single man or to a teenager with no responsibilities what might seem like a relatively trivial injury really is not trivial at all as soon as you have responsibilities in life as soon as other people depend on you probably the one incident where I came closest to actually dying again happened in a few split seconds but it was in the city of yunchan now this also is a political component to it vn chen when there was a visiting dignitary from vietnam the whole city would shut down and everything would change one-way streets would change direction flags we put up here and there intersections would change they would really reorder traffic in the downtown core of the city so that when the vietnamese official arrived whoever was in the government of Vietnam maybe an army general some other representative would be able to roll down the Main Street in their car and all of the school children from the local communist schools would be in uniform waving Vietnamese Vietnamese flags in unison to welcome the dignitaries that would be this formal communist ceremony showing respect and admiration and normal life for most of the downtown core the city would would shut down so on my bike on one such day when the city had been reordered and none of this is properly signed or explained anyone I went down a street and this is in the same area where the French Embassy is and where a number of other government buildings are where the street is almost like a tunnel because there were high security walls on either side of the street and not really any sidewalk and went down this street that unbeknownst to me I was unaware it was one way going against me just on that day wasn't the usual situation as I came down this street a bus came around the corner accelerating out of the corner dead at me so I wasn't on the edge of this bus I was going right into the middle of the bus face to face and the bus not only wasn't slowing down it was accelerating toward me and the bus driver looked up from the wheel at me and even though it was only a split second there was such an expression in the guy's face because he realized he was about to kill me I'm not describing it in more detail but you can use your imagination but this was a situation where a bus had come around a corner with no visibility with these high walls on either side and was accelerating towards me and I was I was myself moving head at a decent speed on my bike right into the bus and again I could see the expression on the bus drivers face we were that close and I realized there was no way I would have time to turn my bike or otherwise guide my bike out of the way and what I did by the way I never wore clip shoes if I was wearing clip shoes I don't know what I could have done to handle this I was wearing boots on solid steel pedals and I hopped up simply lifting my weight up with the strength of my legs I hopped off the bike off the pedals onto one side and my assumption was I would just leave the bike to get run over by the bus but as I did that as I hopped off the bike the bike then a half second later it lifted up off the ground and that was just because my weight had come off the bike so suddenly there's some springiness and the tires whatever you so you know my weight coming up off the bike then the bike itself lifted up and without having time to really look I reached out with my hand behind me and grabbed the frame of the bike and then as I was tumbling because I then left and you know half jump I fell to get to the side of the road so the bus wouldn't hit me I carried the bike with me and then I got to see as I looked up as I made my landing and scuttled the side of the road I got to see the expression the bus drivers face and he was totally elated because he had been so crestfallen just a half owned before thinking he was about to kill me and he was gonna have to explain to the police why he'd killed this white tourist in Delft yet I wasn't a tourist you understand but I'm sure for the purposes of the police report it was wrecked in town as such to my not only escaping unharmed but also the the bike being carried with me um look you know I had my reasons for getting involved with long-distance cycling and I had my reasons for giving up on it when I did also ultimately you know it is meaningless and it is a bit of a waste of time if you're living in Thailand you don't speak Thai I think obviously learning the Thai language should be a higher priority for you same for Laos and learning Lao and same for so many other countries if you're gonna move to the Netherlands you should learn to speak Dutch etc etc obviously if you have the time if you have the money riding a bicycle is a much more beautiful way to spend your time and money then many of the things that people do but you know there's this there's this ancient saying that's stuck with me even though I never really learned Latin or Greek equal this league no that's literally from any block of wood the full phrase implied meaning from any block of wood an idol can be carved anything no matter how simple or utilitarian can become a fetish can become an obsession can become an idol in your life and definitely I mean the bicycle can go from being a means of transportation to a sport to an obsession to as this one guy was complaining about going up toys to tap and tiling every day it can come to dominate your whole reason for going to Thailand if your reason for going to Thailand is to ride a bike up and down the same mountain every day that's a pretty meaningless existence and you need to re-examine your motives you need to be example why you went to Thailand in the first place and what you're doing with your life is it adult you know we all do I don't mean that in a mean spirited way we all need to re-examine our motives for things numerous times I said to someone recently you know in talking about video game addiction the point is not whether or not video games are inherently addictive obviously a bicycle is not inherently addictive and so on not inherently bad in any way 200 years ago you'd be surrounded by people very commonly meet people who ruined their lives with addiction to playing card games with a deck of cards nothing addictive about a deck of cards right indeed most card games become boring two small children very quickly most forms of gambling are boring to most people but some minority of people become obsessive about them and so on so you know equal of a signal from any block of wood an idol can be carved from anything no matter how seemingly harmless you know an obsession can take hold and take over and I was witness to example of that when I was doing my long-distance cycling just say I wasn't terribly serious but I would go on runs of more than a hundred kilometers in a day a guy from South Korea who was renting the apartment two doors over from me at the time invention capital city of Laos a South Korean guy who was basically a journalist based involved in journalism and photography and I think he was very unhappy with the job at that time already and he was a smoker he was serious bookie cigarettes he met me and he saw me riding the bike and he got inspired I no idea why he got really inspired to be involved with long distance cycling and like all of these guys you know he didn't buy one bicycle he bought three you know first he bought one bicycle that was expensive but then you know he got into the bike he and he learned that wasn't expensive then he bought another one the third bike he bought he's living in a third-world country he's living in Vientiane Laos where you can get cheap bikes made in Taiwan he ordered a custom-made bike from Bianchi you know bicycle manufacturer in Italy you've got this custom racing bike he was getting into buying the special jerseys and all this government stuff I didn't know I didn't want anything like that and he kept thanking me he kept saying to me that I had inspired him and that he would have never started riding a bike and ever tennis the last time I met that guy he had actually he was ranking in the top 500 you know he was only he was only number 400 or number 399 but he was ranking in the top 500 of competitive cyclists in Thailand cuz he started competing in races and rankings so so I saw this guy I mean I think he was having a classic sort of midlife crisis he oh he also quit his job but he didn't quit smoking so still smoking cigarettes he managed to to get ahead in that sport man as habits go it's one of the healthiest and it's one of the least destructive but ultimately we all got to face over the fact that riding a bike up and down a mountain is it's not the meaning of life