About SoilLet's go over the problem we solve and how we solve it.
Why is obesity still a thing when there's a gym in every corner and countless healthy recipes online?ChatGPT:"Because obesity is driven more by complex factors like ultra-processed food availability, stress, sleep deprivation, genetics, time constraints, and socioeconomic conditions than by simply having access to gyms or healthy recipes."Gemini:"Obesity remains prevalent because modern environments prioritize calorie-dense convenience and sedentary lifestyles, while systemic factors like poverty and stress often override individual access to gyms and nutritional information."Grok:"Obesity persists despite abundant gyms and healthy recipes online primarily because excess calorie intake—driven by ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, cheap foods—overwhelms most people's ability to create a sustained calorie deficit through exercise or knowledge alone, as modern diets, not lack of physical activity or information, remain the dominant driver according to recent large-scale studies."They all make valid points.We disagree with all of them.Obesity is still a problem not because of ultra-processed foods, poverty, or sedentary lifestyles. To us, these are just symptoms.Obesity is still a problem because of mental weakness, which is nothing more than a lack of mental strength.You might be thinking that we're only referring to obese people's lack of mental strength.We're not.Making money at the expense of other people's health, creating preventable economic hardship for honest and hard-working families, and neglecting your own health when you have the right conditions to be able to choose not to are all instances of mental weakness as both the direct and indirect root cause of obesity.If someone is obese, odds are both the mental weakness of that person and the mental weakness of others are the root cause of that person's obesity. While neglecting your own health when you don't have to is a clear example of mental weakness as the direct root cause of obesity, profiting from other people's health and financial deterioration is a clear example of mental weakness as the indirect root cause of obesity.In other words, mental weakness can be anywhere, and it tends to affect more than just the individual that has it.We define mental strength as the ability to do what's healthy regardless of how you feel."Healthy for who?", you might ask.We firmly believe true mental strength consists of doing what's healthy for you, for your loved ones, and for humanity. By "humanity", we mean every human being."Ok, but what do you mean by healthy?"We treat health and strength as synonyms. In other words, to us, they mean the exact same thing. If something you do makes you, your loved ones, and humanity stronger in the long run, we consider it healthy.Obesity is just an example. Notice how mental strength can make a difference even against the most pervasive problems we face today. Suicide. Addiction. Crime. Poverty. You name it.When we realized how important mental weakness is, we set out to solve it at scale by creating a mental gym.Soil is a mental gym, but not from an intellectual standpoint. The reason for that is you can't think your way out of mental weakness. Intellectual understanding is important, but it's not enough.That's not to say we intend to solve every problem out there. That's impossible. In fact, you're probably wondering whether Soil is a replacement for professional help in all these areas.It isn't.Instead, Soil is meant to help you become strong enough to actually solve whatever it is you're trying to solve. Not all problems have a solution yet, but most of them do.For example, if someone wants to commit suicide, odds are they need professional help. If they are already mentally strong enough to actually ask for and continue to receive professional help for as long as they need it, Soil can still help them maintain their mental strength. But where Soil truly shines is in situations where that person isn't mentally strong enough to even get out of bed in order to seek or continue to receive professional help.Again, suicide is just another example. We have yet to find an area where mental strength doesn't matter. That said, please remember that we're never just referring to the mental weakness of the individual in question. When we talk about mental weakness, we're also referring to the mental weakness of every person responsible for creating the conditions that prevent the individual in question from developing their mental strength, which may or may not include that person.Given that mental strength consists of doing what's healthy regardless of how you feel, and given that we already unpacked what we mean by "healthy", let's now unpack what we mean by "regardless of how you feel".How you feel can be measured in terms of sensations. Sensations come in different "shapes and sizes", so we introduce the concept of muscle groups to convey the fact that there are different types of mental strength. Just because your legs are strong doesn't mean your arms are strong. Just because you can observe your breath for 1 minute doesn't mean you can resist the temptation to eat pizza every time you crave it."Why would I care about not eating pizza?"Because eating pizza is not always healthy.When we noticed sensations are nothing more than units of measurement, we realized that sensations are like working out; they're difficult based on who's doing the "workout" and what the "workout" entails. With the right strategy, conditions, and training, your mental strength can eventually overpower any "workout" to the point that it turns into a walk in the park. But just like anything worth doing, it's easier said than done.The problem with sensations is that a lot of them are not optional; they come in different intensities and durations regardless of how mentally strong you are.This is what Soil is all about: you shouldn't wait until you get difficult sensations (which you'll inevitably get sooner or later) before getting mentally strong enough to overpower every last one of them. And if you already got difficult sensations you can't overpower, you should strengthen the right muscle groups as soon as possible to prevent what happens when someone can't overpower the sensations life gave them.To be clear, we're not saying sensations are bad. They're an essential source of data. But using this data to determine whether something is healthy or not is not the same thing as letting this data decide for you whether something is healthy or not. This matters because sensations don't communicate in terms of healthy and unhealthy; instead, they communicate in terms of pleasant and unpleasant. In Sensationese, pleasant is good and unpleasant is bad. End of story.Your mental strength can be measured because your behavior is observable. If you don't always do what's healthy for you, for your loved ones, and for humanity, some muscle groups are not as strong as you need them to be.Since mental strength can be measured, Soil will not only help you maximize it, but also track it. With Soil, you'll even be able to track your mental strength in areas we haven't thought of yet.To maximize and track your mental strength, Soil will leverage what we call activities. Activities can consist of reading, timed workouts, assessments, etc.Soil will already have quite a few predefined activities, but if you care about optimizing and tracking something we don't already have an activity for, you can do so by creating your own activity.You won't need an email, a credit card, a trial, or anything like that to use Soil. Soil will follow a freemium model, and our goal is to keep the free experience free forever.That said, if you or a loved one could benefit from our premium offering, our goal is for you to be able to either subscribe or buy a subscription as a gift for your loved one.Whether you're the equivalent of someone who weighs 1000 pounds and wants to lose weight, or the equivalent of someone who's already strong but wants to keep their strength up, going to the gym regularly for the rest of your life is essential, and Soil shouldn't be any different.We said earlier that developing and maintaining your mental strength is easier said than done, and it's true. It'll probably take a lot longer and be a lot harder than you expect.But what's also true is that developing and maintaining your mental strength is entirely possible with the right strategy, conditions, and training.Just remember to take it one day at a time, to try to take even the smallest of steps each day, and you'll make it. You'll certainly make it.