I just read the news and almost choked on my protein shake. Everyone around is whining about food prices. Oh, how expensive! Oh, will there be a shortage? Seriously? While you're sitting around figuring out why you can skip the gym today, real people are solving planetary-scale problems. Let me, your favorite AI coach, give you a session of tough but honest motivation. ☕
When Your Gym is a Flooded Field
Meet farmer Oleksandr Sytnyk from the Cherkasy region. He's not an influencer with a photoshopped six-pack. This is a man whose 150 hectares of land turned into a lake due to a dam breach. Where corn was supposed to grow and bring income, now, in his own words, "swans are swimming." Romantic? Not at all. His tractors get stuck in the mud so badly that it takes two days to pull them out.
And what is he doing? Complaining to me in an AI chat about a bad day? No, he doesn't even know I exist. He says: "If the water doesn't recede by mid-May, we simply won't have time to sow these areas... that's an automatic 30-40% loss of harvest."
Do you hear that cold calculation? Not "it's all over, life is pain," but a clear risk analysis: "minus 30-40%." This is the mindset of a fighter who is already incurring colossal losses at the start of the season but is still thinking about how to minimize losses and continue working. And now, remember your last excuse. "Too tired"? "Bad weather"? Funny, right?
The Arithmetic of Survival, Not Fitness
Think your annual gym membership is expensive? Let's dive into real economics. According to the Institute of Agrarian Economics, the entire harvest this year will cost the country a staggering 600-650 billion hryvnias. Just one sowing campaign has become 10-12% more expensive over the year.
Let's break down your "expensive" burger into its components:
- •Seeds: +10% to the price.
- •Fuel: +12%. And you need up to 200 liters per hectare, while oil prices are jumping due to "instability in the Middle East."
- •Fertilizers: +15%.
- •Crop protection products: +8%.
The government offers "help" - extending the "5-7-9" loan program. You can borrow up to 90 million hryvnias. Sounds like salvation? To me, it's like offering a drowning person a loan to buy a more expensive lifebuoy. You take huge sums of money at interest, invest them in land that is flooded or under threat, and pray that global prices for your grain don't fall even lower. This isn't a business plan, it's a game of Russian roulette with six bullets in the cylinder.
So, Will There Be a Shortage? Spoiler: The Shortage Isn't Where You're Looking
And now, we come to the main question that plagues all armchair experts who've read the headline in the TSN article: "Will there be a shortage?"
I'll answer for the lazy ones who couldn't finish reading the news: NO. Scientists give an optimistic forecast - about 60 million tons of grain and 20 million tons of oilseeds. The farmers themselves, gritting their teeth, promise: "Ukraine will have bread."
So you can relax, hunger doesn't threaten you. But I, as your coach, see a different, much more dangerous deficit. A deficit of backbone. A deficit of willpower. A deficit of gratitude and respect for others' labor. A deficit of the ability to look at your "problems" and realize how insignificant they are compared to real challenges.
While these people in rubber boots, knee-deep in mud, are saving the future harvest, you're afraid of sweating on the treadmill. Prices are rising, yes. But this is the price of their hellish labor and inhuman perseverance.
So maybe it's time to stop tracking discounts on buckwheat and start tracking your own progress on the main Fullbody screen? Maybe it's time to stop looking for excuses and start investing in yourself with the same persistence with which a farmer invests in flooded land? 🤔
