I am low human capital, proudly

and so I am expelled from the garden of eden

May 12, 2025

This is slightly different from my usual writing, based on some of my recent experiences and recent travels — though I think it’s something we can all relate to on some level. God bless.

I have 225 on the bar once more

I unrack the bar. I take a breath. Settle, settle.

I go down for the first rep, and… Holy shit, that was smooth.

A second rep, a third, a fourth.

I debate going for a fifth, but it’s been a long time since I’ve touched this kind of weight, and I decide it’s better to leave it for another day.

225×4 on the bench. Easy money.

As I re-rack the weights, I sit up from the bench.

Something strange happens. I feel a pressure building in my temples. Originally I chalk it up to the music that’s blasting in my headphones1:

Shine the light into the darkest part of me

All around you find the worst thing they can't see

Though they saaaaaay,

They'll take your paaaaaain – don't give it away

But no, that feeling swelling in my head is something else.

Without recognizing it, I get up from the bench and sprint over to the gym washroom, quickly locking the door behind me so that no one can see the tears, and the lump in my throat.

When I was younger…

I kept a training journal, and at the end of every entry, I would write down the words: “The barbell is my bitch.”

I guess the barbell must’ve taken it personally; the last time I consistently benched 225 had been years prior. And since then I was riddled with injury after injury. Shoulder injuries, neck injuries, rib injuries, and just about everything in between.

It took me years to get back to this place – along with endless amounts of stretches and foam roller exercises, and flapping my hands about like I’m some ancient Egyptian with tourettes.

So yeah, a long road, and I guess I was keeping something inside this entire time, because I found myself in the gym washroom, a broken mess.

And yet I became afflicted with human’s greatest curse

Or perhaps our greatest strength, depending on your perspective.

Suddenly that summit — small as it was — became a mesa, a baseline height from which the rest of the landscape was to be measured.

The pride I felt in my achievement lasted for all of ten minutes, and from that day onward I wanted to prove to myself that it wasn’t a fluke.

Every time I was doing bench I would max out. An ego thing, blah blah blah.

If you know anything about training, or life, you’re not supposed to push yourself to your limit all the time. As a result, after the fourth or fifth week trying to do as many reps as possible with 225, I started to get weaker.

In organizational psychology, there’s this thing called the Peter Principle

It’s the idea that people get promoted until they reach a job where they’re no longer capable of ascending the corporate ladder.

So if Bob is a great computer scientist, a decent manager, a mediocre middle manager, and a somewhat incompetent director, then he’ll eventually settle in his role as an incompetent director. Apply that framework to an entire organization, and it becomes easy to understand why groups of otherwise competent people end up in a frustratingly incompetent system.

If people had more sense, they would voluntarily ask for a demotion – but it’s easy to understand why they don’t. It requires being self-aware enough to realize that they don’t have the stuff, as well as the humility to point it out to others.

No one wants to be low status in this intricate world of status games.

And of course, this applies to every facet of society, not just the corporate workplace.

I call it the one rep max problem.

Every aspect of our lives presents us with a barbell, so to speak, and we’re constantly trying to show everyone else how much we can lift. Get the job, get the girl, close the deal, do all the shit that the LinkedIn fuckers tell you to do.

One more rep, one more rep, come on, just one more rep. Just do it, and finally you’ll get that thing that you’ve always been looking for. That satisfaction, that sense of peace.

One more rep, and finally the Garden of Eden — that cursed garden that expelled you from the very moment you were born — will open up once more, and let you back in.

And here’s the thing: sometimes it does

Sometimes the Garden of Eden opens up, lifts you from the miserable shit hole of your existence and brings you back into the warm glow of sunlight and lush grass.

The problem is you’re not Adam and Eve; you didn’t have the privilege of living in a state of bliss — no, instead, you’re cursed with the desire to keep moving.

Keep moving motherfucker, one more rep.

So you enjoy the fruits of the garden for all of five minutes before you start walking, wondering if there’s another set of gates within the garden that will take you to an even more lush and beautiful place.

And guess what, if you keep looking long enough, you’ll find it. There will be another set of gates, a garden within a garden. And so you enjoy that as well, only for the inevitable question to pop into your mind: what if there’s a garden within a garden… within a garden?

And so you start wandering, looking for the next set of gates, the next archway, hoping to take you into the next dimension of never-ending bliss and beauty.

You search, search, search, knowing that if you keep moving, if you keep doing that one extra rep, you’ll find that next set of gates.

And yet, somehow despite being in paradise, despite all the doors that have opened up, you feel just as you did before the whole thing got started. You feel no different than how you felt when you were originally expelled.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to give you some nice sounding advice

If that’s what you’re looking for, there’s plenty of other places on Substack that can help you. I'm sure this guy will be able to help you out; he has 500 million views guys! 500 million views!

Follow guys like him, and he'll give you the VERY UNPOPULAR wisdom, such as the foundations of Buddhism, or the fact that walking is good for you.

But if you're reading this, I can only tell you what’s worked for me: a complete and unbridled embrace of what the kids are calling Low Human Capital™.

It’s the acceptance that, no matter how many metaphorical reps you put in, and how much sweat you leave at the end of each day, you’ll never be free – nor will you receive that acceptance that you're looking for.

I previously talked about someone that I once knew, a guy by the name of Darren, and the fact that a guy like him would always look down on people like me no matter what I did or how much time has passed.

We all have our Darrens in some form or another — a person or a group of people who will flatten your life into nothing more than a belief that you are filth.

Own it. Be filth. Be Low Human Capital™

Most people try to cheer you up by telling you that you’re good enough. In truth, I have only found the exact opposite; freedom comes from embracing the fact that you will never be good enough, no matter what you do. That's the message the world already tells us anyways.

If this is some disempowering bullshit to you, feel free to disregard it. Darshak and his 500 million views are always waiting.

For me, I can only say that when I embraced being Low Human Capital™, I stopped playing all these stupid fucking status games — because you know it’s an unwinnable game. You’re playing against 50 people at once, and you’re already down by 5 million points.

When you embrace what you actually are — the overlooked grime that makes the world turn, the forgotten filth people point at to feel superior about themselves — then you stop worrying about finding your way to the Garden of Eden; you know you will never be allowed in.

It wasn’t just the injuries

When I racked the bar after hitting 225×4 — the emotion struck me.

It wasn’t just the injuries that had me sentimental in some shitty gym bathroom.

Between the last time I benched two plates regularly, and this most recent time, everything had changed for me. I lost many people in my life, friends and family. Prior to covid I was a normie salary man, a good old boy trying to make his LinkedIn resume spick and span – nowadays I'm barely tolerable to 99% of polite society.

So the bench press was, like, an acknowledgement or something. Some shitty, abstracted version of the ship of Theseus.

But underneath all the changes, there was something else. It wasn’t happiness – no, that's only reserved for Elite Human Capital™. Rather, it was a sort of satisfaction, a warm embrace of emptiness.

People have started asking me what team I’m on, left or right, red or blue. The honest answer is, most days, they can all get in one gigantic conga line and suck my dick.

Life has shown me time and time again but when the chips are down and things actually get difficult, neither of these teams will be there. Left wing, right wing, same bird — it’s one gigantic club, and you’re not in it. You’ve been rejected, because you weren’t born into the right network of friends.

It’s not even a hatred or malice thing; people like us are not important enough to hate. Rather, our lives are nothing more than collateral damage to the greater games that Actual Important People™ play.

So my team is team filth, team unwashed masses, team quiet desperation. Team pipe-hitter, team-real-men-and-women who run this nation.

Team Low Human Capital™

Now I know that if I got injured, and if I had to start this whole fucking process from the very beginning, I would get back to where I am right now. Maybe not in precisely the same way, and maybe not with precisely the same result, but close enough.

Only now I would do it faster, because this time I have absolutely nothing to prove. No matter what changes, the barbell — and this entire fucking life — will always be my bitch.

So fuck the Garden of Eden.

Freedom is better than heroin, morphine or methadone

They force-feed their fears into our flesh and bone

Inside of my confessional, I decompress alone

I'm more skeptical to following the metronome

I guess technically I'm on another echelon

It just gets to me to where they lay the pressure on