Quiron Oboscista: A Prepper’s Advice to His 12-Year-Old Self

Quiron Oboscista: What a prepper would tell his 12-year-old self

There is a phrase that summarizes this text’s thesis better than any other: thought that is not translated into action is not thought. The author attributes it to Ayn Rand and uses it as a hammer against paralysis. The central idea is simple and brutal: human beings are the only animals that become who they are by choice, and not deciding is, precisely, deciding not to decide. Those who do not use their rationality, he argues, behave like sheep with a human body.

The text is presented as a letter to one’s own twelve-year-old self, an exercise in personal archaeology where the author reviews the habits that, in his view, pulled him out of a flaccid and antiestéticarful version of himself. There is no nostalgia: there are instructions.

Bootstrapping as a method: from barefoot to black belt

The concept that underpins everything is bootstrapping, taken from Heinlein: pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Impossible in physics, possible in biography. The author illustrates it with two of his own cases: he was a scrawny, sickly-looking kid, and after watching Terminator, he decided to be like Schwarzenegger and became a bodybuilder; he was timid and insecure and earned his black belt in karate. His conclusion is that a personal goal can go against the entire previous self and still be achieved.

The same pattern applies to James Cameron, who, according to the story, watched Star Wars as an ordinary worker and decided he wanted to make those wonders: he began studying film on his own at the UCLA library and taking apart used projectors at home to understand the cinematographer’s illusion. The message is that the environment does not determine; the decision does.

The status quaestionis: studying before deciding

The most operational part of the text insists on studying the status quaestionis before any decision, whether in health, money, love, real estate, cars, or sports. Those who study the status quaestionis of motorcycles do not ride motorcycles; those who studied the status quaestionis of real estate before 2008 did not get involved in it. The formula repeats like a mantra: systematic research before making a move.

This is coupled with an uncomfortable idea: life is managing loss and uncertainty. Companions, schools, girlfriends, friends, objects, loved ones, money in stocks that never return, youth, faculties, and memories are lost. In the end, the whole of life is lost, whatever one does. There is no comfort in the text, only constation.

Habits: the first day of a bad habit is the serious day

Youth appears as golden years for inscribing rational habits on a tabula rasa that is not yet written. The quote invoked is Aristotle’s: first we form the habit, then the habit forms us. Hence the warning about the first day someone enters a tobacconist’s shop to buy tobacco: it is much more serious than it seems.

The author adds a rule about time, attributed to Napoleon: space can be recovered, time cannot. Hence the obsession with avoiding time sinks, defined as the empty calories of time. In his specific case, comic books.

Body, art, and noosphere: the cultural part

The physical section begins with the classic mens sana in corpore sano and a list of disciplines: karate, shooting, weightlifting, brief and intense athletics, and hiking in the mountains with a map and compass. The justification is twofold: they benefit body, mind, and spirit, and they are dual-use, as they generate skills transferable outside of sports.

In the cultural realm, the text argues that art is to the soul what food is to the body, and that bad art is junk food. It then introduces a concept of his own, the noosphere, defined as the Olympus of the intelligent: one enters it by contributing something to the human cultural sphere, from the inventor of a daily product to a punk musician whose early death serves as a useful bad example.

The rebuttals: Stallone, beauty, and chance

The conversation drifted toward the role of physical beauty and talent in success. One side argues that Stallone had an attractiveness that peine doors and did not triumph solely by talent; the other responds that he was one among thousands of aspirants, that producers did not want him for Rocky, and that he filmed an adult scene to pay bills. The conclusion that prevails in this section is that retrospection beautifies: knowing the success, it seems it was written, and it was not.

The same pattern applies to other cases: who could have predicted that that boy would become the most famous bodybuilder in history, or that that kid from the Irish suburbs would become the most famous UFC fighter? The question that remains floating is whether the so-called law of attraction works or is simply snake oil.

Reading as a predisposed habit and suspicion of easy money

In the final section, a debated thesis appears: reading is like smoking, and only the genetically predisposed acquire the habit. In contrast, another stream argues that what makes a book valuable is not the book, but the critical capacity of the reader, and that observation and insatiable questioning do not require a library. Someone summarizes it crudely: one does not miss what one does not know is missing.

The other focus of the end is economic. A warning is issued against speculation and pyramid schemes, recalling the historical episode of the tulips: the crash comes the day no one pays more for a bulb. The debate on whether a specific digital money technology is the great economic paradigm of the era remains open, with positions defending it and others placing it in the wake of classic bubbles.

How many of these tips would withstand an honest examination twenty years later?