Constant Curiosity | #29

The Good Part, Health & Harry Potter

Greetings,

Let’s jump in!

---

🌤 This is the good part

A mantra I frequently come back to during challenging situations is: This is the good part.

I’ve found that oftentimes the most difficult situations are the ones I look back upon most fondly.

I remember the struggle of working to overcome a big obstacle far more than I remember the random sunny day.

This is the good part.

---

⛑ Health vs Well-being

Mark Twain famously said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Lately, I had a similar thought, “Don’t let your health interfere with your well-being.”

What do I mean by this? In the modern healthcare paradigm, we tend to focus on acute symptoms and metrics. Cholesterol, weight, blood pressure, etc. We think of these metrics as our “health.”

We then look for acute solutions to these problems, typically in the form of prescription medication.

The thinking goes, “if I get just get my vitals in the right place, I’ll be healthy.”

While I’m not a doctor, this approach seems completely backward to me.

The human system is designed by evolution to maintain homeostasis in a relatively self-governing fashion. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have ways to determine detailed vital metrics and certainly didn’t have prescription medication.

Contrary to popular belief, early humans lived quite long and healthy lives, assuming they didn’t die in accidents (it’s the accidents caused by the harsh environment that skew the average lifespan of early humans so low).

The right question is “how is my lifestyle harming my well-being?”

---

🧙🏻 The Meta of Harry Potter

I’ve been re-reading the Harry Potter series.

I’ve found that the Harry Potter intellectual property is alive in the collective consciousness in a way unlike any other fictional IP.

Harry Potter exists in: theme parks, movies, books, legos, video games, and toys that I’ve known and experienced throughout my entire life.

I dressed up in Hogwarts robes with a scar painted on my forehead to see a midnight showing of the first film.

I’ve built extensive lego sets of the Hogwarts castle that I played with and remixed for years.

I’ve explored the greater wizarding world in countless Harry Potter video games.

I’ve even entered the Hogwarts Castle, shopped at Diagon Alley, tasted butterbeer, feasted in the Three Broomsticks restaurant, and selected a wand at Olivander’s in the Harry Potter theme parks.

On top of that, in high school, I made a film project set in the world of Harry Potter (screenshot below).

This combination of experiences makes the fictional world of Harry Potter unlike any other fantasy setting.

The Wizarding World can be explored in so many settings and ways that it creates a magic of its own.

---

Thanks for reading and talk to you next time.

Best,

Isaac