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  1. Leave Rand aside for a moment and put on a biologist's hat, to ask: "What makes this organism's life a happy one"? Roughly, it's going to be food, water, air, absence of disease, a degree of exercise, a feeling of safety, a degree of social interaction,... up to this point, we could be talking about lots of animals. If we think a free-roaming lion (or chicken) is happier than a caged lion (or chicken) we might even add "a degree of autonomy" to the list. Humans seem to need more. Consider, for instance, Maslow's attempt to come up with a list of human needs. He adds in the need for esteem and "self-actualization". We could quibble with the terms, but let's keep them for now. Perhaps some higher animals have similar needs, but how would a biologist answer this about humans: why do humans have these needs? A biologist would need to integrate these into an understanding of evolution. Humans need food; they feel hunger when their bellies are empty and satiated when their bellies are full. The link to life and to the survival of the species is clear. Similarly, the human body has evolved to find sex pleasurable, because reproduction is an essential component of evolution. IF humans really need esteem and self-actualization, how do we explain those? Or, ask: why are humans curious: what role does that play in the survival of the species? Consider someone who joins the peace-corp and goes off to some under-developed country. He's working with a team of people on a shared and achievable mission: perhaps they're helping to bore wells in villages. His day-to-day life is not particularly comfortable... it's a bit like camping out with bare facilities. He has to walk a bit, where he might have been driving stateside. As the months pass, he sees the fruit of his work: the wells and smiling faces of grateful villagers. At the end of the year, he comes back home, mission accomplished. Can such a year be something that he will always look back on as a happy adventure? If so, how could a biologist explain this, when we know the individual ate less and lived less comfortably than he would have done if he'd stayed home?
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  2. I'm sure that it was perfectly obvious to you and everyone else posting in this thread what Rand meant, of course, but you never know when some newbie is going to come along and get confused.
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  3. Jon, that is an excellent post and those were the thoughts behind my quest for clarity. I DO have "reasons, beliefs, etc" for why I like training. In the end they all seem like really complicated ways of saying, "because I like it." Short version: Strength training seems to be the one activity I am drawn to that explicitly requires my favorite virtues. Honesty, integrity, goal directedness and integration. Another very short explanation is that of "Strength training as a Kinesthetic concretization of philosophy" I.e. Art. We often think of art as a visual or auditory concretization of concepts so those concepts can be accessed perceptually. But training as a way of perceiving elaborate concepts like "what man could be and ought to be" doesn't happen for me "out there" on a wall or in a radio, it happens "in here," concretely and in my own body and I experience such concepts as "man the hero" on the perceptual level through the Kinesthetic sense. In a way, it is an artwork that has to be recreated each time it is to be experienced and it can ONLY be experienced by the one who creates it. Its art that is profoundly, uniquely, and selfishly MINE. And I couldn't give it away, even if I wanted to because sense perceptions can't be shared. ...or something like that. I also like watching other people strive for "man the hero." I was training the other day and I sat in a leg press machine my gaze fixed on a tiny old woman-- had to be 90 years old-- who was doing very laborous body squats while holding onto a set of blast straps to take some of the weight off her legs. That little old woman was trying so HARD and as I walked out of the gym I overheard her tell her daughter that she was bound and determined to be able to walk again before she dies. That's hardcore! That gives me hope for the human race. That insolent, defiance of her condition is the living example of what Dagny said to Galt, "We never had to take it seriously..." So... Those are a few reasons. Is that rational or emotion driven? I'm not sure, but I like it. Lol. By the way, my name is Bryan.
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