I can directly tie my mood to how much exercise I’ve had in a given week. It’s also easy, given how busy life feels, to let the proverbial frog boil in water when it comes to this.
My partner often comments when I’ve been a little grumpier than usual by saying, “you should go on a bike ride.”
It really works wonders on the soul (and the more physical heart and lungs) getting out for a spin in the fresh air.
There is something about riding a bike that lifts people's mood like nothing else. It's the closest thing to flying like a bird that most of us will ever see. It lets you experience your neighborhood in a different light.
Riding a bike lifts my mood certainly but it doesn't let me experience my neighborhood. I zoom past the neighborhood and at 15mph you can hardly experience it. You might have some vague ideas about architectural styles in the neighborhood but that's it. If the neighborhood has shops, you can't easily visit them without first parking the bike. You need to walk to really experience a neighborhood.
Nothing is forcing you to ride at 15mph. Walking doesn't let you go very far in a reasonable amount of time, either, and I'm one of those 10K steps a day sort of people.
> Walking doesn't let you go very far in a reasonable amount of time, either
Earlier today, I walked across several neighborhoods and through an entire large park to get to the city center for some shopping, all in the span of 40 minutes. If you feel like walking is ineffective at getting you places, you may want to consider advocating for walkable cities.
I don’t think it’s unique to bikes - lots of people have the same/similar feelings from other forms of exercise. There’s a runners high too. I used to row in university, and there was no better feeling (to me) than being in the middle of a lake in a tiny boat and clocking in 16/20k on a crisp winters morning.
It's not just the exercise it's the whole experience of being outside. Even if you drive to a park and sit on a bench for half an hour you will go back home in a better mood. Won't be as good for your muscles but being outside in nature had amazing effects.
You could even try the opposite, exercising in a spinning won't have the same effect.
Absolutely, as much as everyone says eating right, exercising and sleeping well are the answer I totally neglected myself. Boosting cardio and dropping some weight has been an absolute lifechanger
The fact that just by being on the bike for two hours, my brain doesn't go into negative pathways, but it just focuses on the road always brings me out of a slump.
I can also recommend easy, restorative yoga exercises, which is the lightest exercise there is, but it will help you with: sitting too much, improve sleep, stretch and reduce stress.
i keep up exercise for health reasons and because i do have a higher energy level if i'm in better shape.
however, both during and for two or three hours after exercising, the emotional effect is very negative. i feel much more anxious, prone to negative thoughts, self-critical, pessimistic, sometimes angry.
the benefits are definitely real but I feel like I am paying a very large cost to get them. i've tried lots of different forms of exercise and they all have this effect if i push to a reasonable level of intensity.
i'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience and managed to find a place where exercising makes them feel happy.
Have they all been in a gym environment? If so, it could be the reason. Going to the gym in the winter, I do get the benefits but it doesn't do as much for my mood as sports outdoors when the weather is nice.
Perhaps do more or less exercise, switch from cardio to strength or from strength to cardio. Monitor the negativity. Maybe, if you find the best trigger making it worse is good. Make it more obvious.
> The author Daniel Lieberman has put it well: Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do.
We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what. Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level. We have connective tissue that stores and releases energy. Our bodies can reject on the order of 1kW+ of heat steady-state through the magic of evaporative cooling.
Yeah, I realized this one time while watching a documentary on some tribes hunting methods. They were hunting by running after the animal until it basically dropped from exertion. Hunters didn’t sprint. They paced but continuously and simply followed animals foot prints and droppings. They said these hunters would run for many hours each time. And sometimes they’d even be unsuccessful.
> Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level
My flat feet (and those of my mom, and those of one of her parents, ad infinitum) would beg to differ lol
Also, most of the energy our bodies burn to run just turns into heat, it's all very inefficient... even if sweating itself works pretty well, and even if our heat tolerance is high assuming we have a source of fresh water
I had flat feet most of my life, until I started a 5x per week yoga practice (ashtanga based). One day about a year into it I noticed that I had defined arches, something I hadn’t expected at all. All those one leg standing balancing poses really develops your ankles, knees, and feet.
Some years later when I started running with typical arch supporting running shoes, picked out for me at a specialty running store where they record your stride etc, I developed pretty bad plantar fasciitis as soon as I started hitting 8k on my runs. Swapped them out for zero drop Altras and I haven’t had issues since.
All that is to say our feet are pretty well designed as long as you give it the strengthening it needs. You should take care of your feet, but not coddle them, is how I’ve come to view it.
My wife's a podiatrist. I can conjure what I've heard her tell a thousand people over the years: invest in arch supports. Shoot for the ones that run about $50 and are rigid. Don't start with the $500 custom ones, and skip the $10 soft ones you see at the pharmacy. Go to REI or a running shop or a sporting goods store and get those instead.
My knees freaking killed me when I was running. I started using the supports my wife bought for me and it instantly improved, and far beyond any placebo effect. Before: my knees ached after I ran 100% of the time. Now: they never ache anymore.
Counterpoint: I am personally skeptical about the long term value of arch supports. The reason is that while they can undoubtably help with short term pain, they also inhibit strength development and introduce an unnecessary dependency (kind of like a software library). I am not disagreeing with your experience or discouraging people from using supports to deal with injuries. I am just questioning making yourself reliant upon them.
About 20 years ago, I was riding my bike everywhere and hardly walking. I went on a trip to NYC and was walking 10+ miles a day. I developed severe shooting pains in my feet. Getting some supports helped dramatically and so I started wearing them whenever I wore shoes.
I did this for about 15 years and completely swore by arch supporting shoes. Then, one day I was playing basketball and landed on someone's foot going for a layup. My foot basically folded in half in the opposite direction of the arch. This was a major injury and I could not walk at all for a week and it took multiple years before I stopped feeling pain regularly in that foot.
After the injury, I completely stopped wearing arch supports. I had a theory that my feet had been weakened by using them and that this weakness was the underlying reason for the severity of my injury. For the last few years, I have averaged about eight miles of walking a day and mostly wear zero drop minimal shoes. I have developed the ability to run on concrete with them, though I do not particularly enjoy this (primarily because my running efficiency is poor).
If I were running a marathon, I would certainly wear shoes with padding, but I don't find much padding or support necessary or even desirable for brisk walking for hours at a time. And for almost 15 years, I never left the house without bulky supports.
Yep. I walk barefoot everywhere I can and if not, then I wear sandals. I was having terrible pain in my feet when I was wearing “shoes with support”, which went away once I started wearing sandals and going barefoot everywhere. If I run I run with glove shoes or whatever they’re called nowadays.
I used to wear custom orthotics for a lot of growing up and into my early 20's. I definitely feel like it was something that I really could have gotten away without having if I instead had better shoes, and strengthened the muscles more. Unfortunately even the physiotherapist I had when I was young advised orthotics and didn't seek to treat the strength issue. Of course I was kid and myself and my parents were just doing what the experts told us.
A lot of my problem also related to back pain when growing up, and I realized also in my 20's how much going to the gym helped with the back pain. As my back got stronger via strength training, I no longer suffered from back pain. Additionally I invested more in things like a good office chair at home and ensured I had a good one at work.
Overall I no longer have back problems and no longer require any inserts in my shoes.
How the hell do you find time for eight miles of walking a day? I mean, that's just shy of a third of a marathon! I can only assume you're independently wealthy, retired, or have no kids.
(Beleaguered parent of a toddler here struggling to find ANY workout time, or the energy for it! It's killing me, literally and figuratively)
I see you! Don’t worry, you’ll have time again. Micro workouts (like literally, a single set of something during a break at work) help some, but mainly I try to console myself with all the lifting of kids and playtime involving physical activity. You’ll have time to yourself again soon, though, as they get bigger!
And if you are overweight and sedentary DON'T RUN TO GET INTO SHAPE.
Walking, hiking, swimming, biking, and weight training. Mix all of it so you get cross training effects and distribute stress across many domains.
Running is, by the standards of the statistical hole America is in terms of obesity, an "advanced" activity. We're talking about something that involves a stress increase of 2.5x to 4.x over walking.
Now consider that an obese person with an extra 50 lbs of fat is on their body. Running will be an extra 200 lbs of stress on your feet, and none of that fat tissue is absorbing impact or stabilizing that impact. And on top of it, the fat will disrupt the neuro-biomechanical flow of your neuromuscular system, making you less coordinated and therefore also harder to absorb the impact.
As I said elsewhere: use GLP-1 to get the fat down and simultaneously employ a gentle ROUTINE activity program that morphs into more and more exercise and exercise variety.
My feet seemed to get better after I started running. First time without pain in some time. Even walking made them hurt before. It’s taken a few months to build up though.
BMI of 29 starting so not obese but overweight and running has me down at 27 now.
Peter Attia in his book "Outlive" recommends exclusively zone 2 training for sedentary beginners: half an hour, 3x a week, of light to moderate exercise (e.g. on a stationary bike), for half a year or so before more strenuous exercise is added.
Isn't this similarly hard on your joints to running, though, which is part of the problem with running when you're overweight? Or am I overestimating the joint impact?
Better yet, get stability/motion control shoes. Don't skimp on running shoes and be prepared to try a few different types for extended periods of time before you settle on one.
I found that there is only one type of shoe on the market that prevents me from getting injured (Asics Gel-Kayano). Everything else - low drop, high drop, HOKA, Brooks, Nike, even Asics' own GT-2000s - is a quick route to knee injury for me. And I don't need arch supports when using the Kayanos, even though I am a very clear overpronator.
Matches my own experience, first season of cross country in HS I had neutral shoes and they were perfect, went back for new shoes next season and they put me in motion control shoes which gave me instant knee pain.
Absolutely. And what works best is incredibly personal. My wife tends to run in Nikes because others don’t fit and move just right for her. Meanwhile, I’ve never found a pair of Nikes I could stand, but Brooks Adrenaline give me superpowers.
Don’t ever get what someone else likes instead of what you prefer. Your feet aren’t theirs.
My friend has fixed his flat feet by focusing on yoga poses that engage the “knife edge” of his feet (ie: the outside). It took some time but he reckons it’s very noticeable. Maybe worth a try?
I’ve read in a few places that the flat feet comes from wearing shoes that don’t allow your toes to splay, which causes the muscles that create the arch to atrophy. Not a scientist and have never had flat feet, so can’t confirm, but I recently started wearing zero drop shoes and definitely feel a healthy soreness as my feet get stronger.
Also when you run don't land flat-footed or heel-first. Land on the front part ("ball") of your foot, this lets your calf muscle absorb the shock, rather than sending the shock straight up your tibia into your knee.
This was a total game changer for me when running. I would always develop some sort of knee pain at some point but since making a very minor change to how I land my foot, I am running without any.
Make sure to start and transition slowly though as there are warnings about injuring your Achilles and other muscles in your calf if you start off too aggressively.
Evolution is also just optimizing you to live long enough to reproduce and then help your kids get well set up. So, it is fine if your legs start to go in your 40’s. You can help chase down the antelopes ‘till then, then go weave baskets and watch the fire for a decade or so, then die in your 50’s.
Actually, it doesn’t seem like a horrible life, but I think we’re hoping to stick around a little longer.
> Evolution is not perfect. We are still better at running long distances for long stretches of time than any other animal.
Not really. We are on par with many animals, or rather they are on par with us, with some tradeoffs on both sides (e.g. humans are better in hotter weather).
Wolves, wild dogs, horses (and other fast hoofed herbivores) are all roughly on par in pure ability to run.
What made us even more successful is the ability to plan and organize (wolves have this), sweat (only humans can do full-body) and use of tools.
Flat feet are often a problem of foot muscles and posture. Physiotherapy and strengthening your feet can most likely work wonders even if your family has genetic predisposition for the problem.
One contributing factor to human weight gain when given a non-limited supply of food is apparently the knocking-out of the gene that produces uricase, which pretty much every other animal has (and they usually don't get fat, even when given unlimited food supply). Not a single human has a working uricase gene. It has been hypothesized that famines throughout human history (there's your "evolutionary pressure") have contributed to this.
My point is that selection pressures do not always lead to optimal outcomes...
The article was published in 2016, and the authors extrapolated from 7 data points (!) over about 7 years of progress in the world record. This is obviously insufficient to project 30 years into the future.
I think it's sort of reasonable in this case, given there's very little investment in running on 4 limbs, while nation states fund track and field programs to the tune of millions of dollars. That the small number of 4 limbed runners are making progress against 2 limbed runners does indicate it might allow higher peak performance. Of course, 4 limbed runners have probably already plucked the low hanging fruit in performance improvements, but the researchers aren't projecting linear improvement
It's a tradeoff. Having two general purpose limbs is useful for all sorts of things, but not escaping scary things, so endurance can somewhat make up for that.
Ask anyone in the army how all those years of running drills have affected them as they got older. It’s not so rosy. Lots of knee problems in that group. Above average practice of running throughout life also increases likelihood of requiring pacemakers later in life.
US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.
And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."
People in the army are also regularly carrying an extra 50 pound ruck, 25 pounds of body armor, and enough other various and sundry items to add up to about 100+ lbs of total kit. That's probably what's destroying people's knees more than the running by itself
It's more that the military's goal isn't to produce adults that are indefinitely healthy, but rather a robust geopolitical deterrent that only requires its employees to be physical capable for about twenty years, after which their service life is over. Running is not the issue. Even a car designed for driving can be driven irresponsibly.
I can’t be sure, but my impression is that army drills (1) push uniformly (rather than let you improve at your own pace) and (2) often involve carrying your kit, which is 20-40lbs. Neither of these is similar to the kind of running GP describes, namely unburdened, at a comfortable speed, over ~arbitrary distances.
I was going to say, I don't believe that sitting on a chair for 40 hours a week is great but I've also never seen so many wounded and disabled people than with people heavily into sports.
Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.
I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)
I guess there are a lot of confounding variables in there, having taken up running a few years ago my resting heart rate is very low, and I'm far more aware of it than a non-runner. I suppose folks with a family history of heart problems may take up exercise to try and get ahead of it too.
To be fair, it was the weight not the distance that destroyed my knees and ankles. But still, I've aged a lot better than many of my friends and family who were more sedentary, so who knows.
Just because our ancestors did something doesn't mean it's automatically good for your health. After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy.
"After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy."
After surviving early years, people still used to get old. Infant mortality was just way higher bringing the average down. (And that those metrics often compare to poor peasants and our paleo ancestors were not peasants)
What data are you basing this on? My understanding is that historical life expectancy is only as low as it is because of the immense infant mortality rates. People who survived through childhood tended to live long.
> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.
> Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level.
I'm not sure from where you got this because any documentary/book/article and simply real life experiences related to this subject states the opposite (take a common animal such as a dog as an example)
This is not an obscure theory, it's called the "Endurance running hypothesis" [1], and it does seem that humans are one of very few species exceptionally well-adapted to very long-distance running (though dogs and wolves are another one). The idea is that ancient hominids in Africa practiced "persistence hunting"[2], where they would hunt e.g. antelopes and similar species by repeatedly chasing them down. The prey would sprint off when humans got close, but doing this repeatedly causes the animal to exhaust their energy or die of heat stroke, humans being much better adapted to running for many hours on end (this kind of hunting is known to happen to this day). It's plausible that persistence hunting also contributed to evolving our other super-powers, as it requires good spatial awareness, tool-use and communication.
Have you ever went running with a dog? Dogs can go fast over a short distance but they overheat quickly. People just keep on running way past the time the dog has collapsed.
“Real life experience” tells me I’ll run any dog into the ground if it’s over 50F. Cooler than that? The dog still better be part of a trained sledding team.
This is specifically about long distance running, where basically no animal can keep up.
A key hunan advantage was persistence hunting - track and run after a deer (or similar) prey. Tgey can burst outrun the human, burt hemshe keeps on running, eventually, often after double-digit kilometers, the human can just trot up to the exhausted nimal and kill it. That's what the tendons and evaporative cooling do.
There's a famous Uktramarathon race, iirc, the Western States 100, 100 miles in the Sierra mountains that was a horse race, until some people started running without the horse, and winning.
The evidence for exercise reducing all-cause mortality is more nuanced than many assume. It's crucial to distinguish between findings from RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) and observational studies.
A meta-analysis of RCTs with ~50,000 participants concluded that exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality or incident CVD in older adults or people with chronic conditions [1].
However, for specific high-risk groups, the causal evidence from RCTs is strong. A separate meta-analysis found that for cancer patients and survivors, exercise led to [2]:
- A 24% reduction in mortality risk
- A 48% reduction in recurrence risk
The commonly cited large benefits (e.g., 40% lower mortality) come from observational studies [3]. These are very susceptible to the "healthy user bias" or reverse causation—people who are healthy enough to exercise are already at a lower risk of dying. This makes it difficult to prove the exercise caused the benefit.
So, while exercise is strongly associated with lower mortality, the direct causal evidence for the general population isn't as definitive as it is for specific subgroups like cancer survivors.
There are positive physical and mental change that happen with more intensive cardio and with resistance training that you can't get from walking no matter how much you walk. And there's nothing herculian about those modes of exercise.
You're right of course, consistency is safer and more sustainable but ego is a bitch and nobody is ever bragging or impressed about an average adult being able to walk their dog daily, or doing ten 50kg squats twice a week, or even jogging a mile three times a week (except maybe your doctor, and probably only then if you're over 40).
True, but if you can afford to hike in the mountains, you can then brag about seeing a groundhog, a chamois, a valley, joining paths, waking up with the sun (never hike in afternoons because storms and night approaching).
Which is the best of both worlds: You don’t index yourself against an herculean performance, and yet you still do exercise. And walking 8hrs in the mountains actually does wonders to weight, MUCH better than my herculean 1000m-in-70-minutes climb.
I walk every morning and hit 80-80% of my max heart rate for parts of it. Walking can be quite good exercise, unless you live somewhere very flat. My V02 max continues to climb steadily 0.1/week like clockwork, and no running yet. Granted, it's got a ways to go, it's just barely above average, but still, walking is working.
The point is there are those for whom one of the only forms exercise within reach is walking but it isn't thought of as exercise. Not all people are able to do more intense cardio or lift weights. Regular walking can bootstrap the body toward other exercise.
Tai chi actually is another amazing tool - it is a dynamic calisthenics exercise that builds core strength, balance, and stretches connective tissue.
I find it interesting that the article is about exercise and the title picture is yoga. In fact near the top
> To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our metabolism, improve mitochondrial function, fortify our immune system, reduce inflammation, improve tissue-specific adaptations, and protect against disease.
Yoga is neither aerobic fitness nor weight training
note: I do yoga probably about twice a month (should do more) so I'm not dissing yoga. I'm only noting that the picture of yoga seems to have nothing to do with the article.
I do several styles of yoga. Most provide substantial strength training via moving and suspending body weight. All feel like they have exactly the increased heart rate of aerobic exercise. Flowing e.g. from standing to high plank to low plank to cobra to downward dog and back to standing N times in a row is quite the workout. Maybe there are gentle, stretching-only forms that would not, but I haven't found them. Slower and more careful, yes, but from an effort point of view, really not much different from the burpees or calisthenics I used to do in Crossfit.
If the proposition is "exercise is a miracle drug," my experience at least is that yoga 100% qualifies.
I think you might've misunderstood the parent comment. Yoga is exercise, no one doubts that, but it specifically is not aerobic exercise (like running) and it is not weight lifting (like gym).
There are different yoga styles - there is Yin Yoga which is more still, there is Ashtanga Yoga which is more Strength-Based. Something like a Hot Vinyasa or Bikram will definitely be a great cardio workout. So telling us that you are doing yoga is like telling you've eaten pizza. There is lot of different toppings mate :P
When I got laid off from my first job, I used the extra time to start going to the gym. Years later the habit has still stuck, and I actually think I was so incredibly lucky to get laid off. Working out has been such a massive improvement in all areas of life. Health problems went away, mental health got better, sleep quality got better, it truly is a miracle drug. It’s a shame that the habit is hard to form.
Worse, it never even attempts to answer the question the title poses. It gives some recent evidence that exercise is good for you, and then goes off on a topic so unrelated it can’t even be called a tangent.
The expectation that a healthier globe = global economy will be healthier for the US economy, even if it's not literally an interest-bearing investment vehicle?
For a long time I tried to start an exercise habit, but it didn't stick. I could jog 15 minutes every day for a month and instantly be sick of it a few days after.
I was only able to gain an exercise habit by addressing my mood and anxiety first. First, with my mental improvements I became actively motivated to exercise and didn't hate it anymore. I kept at it for several weeks, only stopping every so often due to fatigue. Eventually I did earn the habit of exercise. This wasn't intuitive to me, but the typical causality was backwards. Exercise was not what directly made me healthier, but being healthier (mentally) from the start allowed me to initiate and keep exercising, from which I earned even more health benefits.
A mental deficit in being able to form habits is arguably even worse than a lack of exercise, since you would try to apply the "exercise cure" advice and just burn out after a while like I did. It's not like you didn't exercise, but you could not internalize what all those people typically say must be the case if you just exercise a lot.
Even as my mood fluctuates I am now able to still go for a jog once in a while. These days I understand that if I had started off exercising in a state of low mood, I would have no chance of making it stick. The habit carried over from when I persisted at it in my limited window of improved mood.
The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still. It should come as no surprise that the inverse also tends to hold true.
On a tangent, I think that's part of why volunteering can be so rewarding.
This is an interesting comment because I've lived a lot of sides of this.
At my first job (where I kinda 'weaseled' my way into doing software vs my job title) it was an incredibly collaborative experience. It started with finding ways to make tools that helped my colleagues do monotonous tasks faster. Which then evolved into fun dialogue. "Hey can you make a button to do X" and we'd get to talk about it, I'd hack the feature together, hit publish and wait for the team to give feedback. "Oh I got this error" I'd get up and walk over. It wasn't perfect but I was never lonely and only as still as I wanted to be.
At my second gig, It started a little lonely but thankfully the culture was just laid back enough I got to socialize (thankfully it was a shop full of fun and interesting people!).
Third gig, Uggh it was very 'heads down' for most of my time there, nobody liked small talk except the conspiracy theory guy. I learned a lot about what I did and didn't like in company culture there. It did get a little better before I left...
Fourth gig was a dream. It was the second place where I didn't just get to collaborate with my team, but the first place where it was a lot of software engineers. We even had a teams room for nothing but sharing music and it was always heartwarming to see a reply to some obscure tune and someone would reply with something that yes you would absolutely appreciate given what you originally posted. And it was hectic enough that I did get a reputation for being a 'floor runner'.
Fifth Gig... well it was 100% remote. And in fact one day I was so focused on a problem I sat in the wrong position too long and permanently fucked up my left ulnar nerve... But that was such a good group, and Ironically I was able to -take- the lessons from #4 and #2 and turned them into traditions that stuck around even after I left (hell even after they fired everyone, we kept doing the 'game night' for a while...)
Won't say anything about my current place, that's all still a work in progress <_<
There were no restrictions on running or biking in the pandemic. Quite the opposite. Because indoor entertainment venues like bars weren't available, I saw way more people embracing the outdoors.
I am Canadian. Running, biking etc outdoor activities is impossible in our winters for 5-6 months of the year. Since gyms were closed, we also didn't have access to weight training which is also very essential.
Canadian here. This may be true for some (many) parts of Canada but certainly not all of Canada. For example, with proper gear you can run outdoors in Vancouver year-round. When I lived in the GTA, I routinely ran outdoors through late December and almost always resumed by mid-March.
Point being: dressing appropriately can extend your running season dramatically.
Even in your example, there's a 4 month period where it's impossible. Snow + ice makes it dangerous to be running outside during winters. I have friends who run marathon and one has had knee surgeries and therefore afraid to run in even a little bit of ice.
If you ever struggle to exercise consider: for thousands of years humans needed to walk and hunt and cook and run from predators just to survive. It’s sedentary lifestyles that are the anomaly.
Not exercising is a miracle NOT drug! Exercise is what your body is engineered for by nature and thousands of years of evolution. So exercising is the more normal thing, not sitting around :)
Get out there and have fun with it! Even walking you’ll get to see the sky, sunset, sunrise, and all the big houses in your neighborhood.
Exercise "simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life" makes sense, as most of our ancestors were blue-collar workers and farmers. I try to integrate more physical activity in my life, which seemed like labor before, but now feels like life-saving activity. For example, I am intentionally trying to fix/diy things with my house like painting my garage, mowing my lawn instead of hiring someone else to do it, and even learning woodworking and gardening. Even in the heat of the summer, I feel more invigorated working outdoor whenever I can, and helps offset the sluggishness I feel after a day of sitting, coding, and staring at the monitors at work.
The human body didn't evolve to do farm work, or mow lawns, or more generally to do "blue collar" work. Also, our ancestors weren't known for their exceptional lifespans.
If you exercise a lot, be sure to fuel your workouts. Eat a healthy calories surplus so your body doesn’t go into panic mode and sacrifice muscle and bone tissue.
I’m in my 40s and have exercised my whole life. But still did intermittent fasting (skipped breakfast). I’m a standard deviation below average bone density and have lost some cartilage in my knee from underfueled long runs (I was diagnosed with RED-S). Now I work with a sports nutritionist, and do a mix of strength, running, cycling with good rest days.
I’ve learned I’d rather have a bit of a belly now but very strong than underfueled and lost muscle/bone mass
I took up climbing a couple of months ago and for the first few weeks felt really rough, it took me that long to realise there were days when between the actual climbing and walking to and from the gym I was burning an extra thousand calories. I’ve since started making an effort to track how much I’m eating and how much I’m burning and feel tons better, if slightly full on the days I get home and realise dinner should be as much as I’d eat in a typical day before I was exercising.
I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.
This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
Maybe not a drug. But if the improvements in health come from bio chemical signals, it should be possible to activate those signals without engaging in exercise. Eventually?
Strictly speaking, any intervention other than exercise is going to give you a subset of the total stimulation. A drug acting on the tissues directly would bypass the neurological component, for example.
If the idea is to avoid the effort of exercise, perhaps it would be worth considering the possibility that the effort itself is essential.
If we were good enough to have drugs that could work with that precision we’d eliminate an enormous category of things. The side effects are usually the scary things. We have drugs that can cure the symptoms of depression and anxiety - they just so happen to be insanely addictive, cause respiratory depression, loss of coordination, and you quickly build a tolerance to them.
It would take a lot of different drugs to simulate what exercise does.
- Impact and stress strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons / ligaments
- energy use that leads to better sleep
- increased blood flow, development of new capillaries, stretching of blood vessels
- if you exercise outside, exposure to sunlight
- the release of all the associated neurochemicals
I have a suspicion that anything designed to mimic exercise would hurt as much as the actual thing given that so many of the benefits of exercise involve damaging bone and tissue then repairing it
Steroids. You will be growing muscle while sitting on a couch, even better than someone that naturally trains. However, you very likely will develop asymetries or other weird complications because you didnt properly work out.
My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.
On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.
Actually, that's not how steroids work. It's a common misconception that one can take "roids" and just sit on the sofa while munching on potato chips and get shredded and pack on muscle but in reality what the steroids do are to move ones natural limitations further away thus enabling larger muscle mass than naturally. But this still requires one to put in the work, i.e. the stimulus to trigger the muscle growth and to rest and eat properly.
They do work that way. Lots of studies show gains in muscle mass even with no excercise when people are on steroids. Consider average men who never excercise vs average women who never excercise. The men will have more muscle. That's what testosterone does, among other things.
That's part of why steroids were and sometimes still are used medically for people with cancer and other wasting diseases. It makes them eat more (they're usually strongly appetite inducing) but they also just help develop muscles even if sedentary.
(Of course it would be far more effective to also engage in high intensity resistance training.)
One completely random study result[0] supporting that couch + testosterone leads to bigger muscles. Maybe it is some puritanical thing, but not sure why this myth persists. Exercise + juice results in even bigger gains, but it is possible to increase muscle mass without hard work.
...The men in the testosterone groups had significant increases in the cross-sectional areas of the triceps and the quadriceps (Table 4); the group assigned to testosterone without exercise had a significantly greater increase in the cross-sectional area of the quadriceps than the placebo-alone group
Steroids are usually given to reduce inflammation and as immunosuppressants to stop the body from fighting back against whatever treatment is being given. The main method of weight gain with prednisone (the most common steroid) is water retention. Anabolic steroids are not commonly prescribed to cancer patients.
Cortico steroids usually result in muscle mass loss.
That's not how steroids work. Muscles need stimulus to grow even with steroids. What steroids do is make your body recover faster so you can train more often and build muscle right away.
> When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible.
Time is short, I’ll take the walk and lift the weights but if I can get the results faster using biological engineering, I’m willing to spend and accept greater risk to make it happen (both for metabolic profile management a la GLP-1RAs and muscle growth). There is no extra credit for making life harder than it has to be, and we’re all dead eventually.
I was struck this past week to the extent that even a mild physical impairment can cause. I overdid it last week on a run and I spent this week nursing a swollen knee. What kind of exercise to do without involving my knee? I lift weights sometimes, but I can’t do that every day, and it also does not give me the mood altering effect that a good run does. I was drawing a blank glumly in an armchair when my wife suggested swimming at the local pool with pull buoys (so that I can keep my knee immobilized).
After a few experiments that felt more like drowning than swimming I finally got the hang of it. But it left me seriously worried about exercise in my future. After all, joint problems are likely going to happen again in my future. And I started to wonder: how do disabled folks do this? It must be incredibly difficult (and expensive!). I really am incredibly lucky across multiple fronts to have the life that I have.
Cycling is really good as it doesn't strain joints, merely gently lubricates it. I broke my knee and was put on the bike real quick, as soon as I had enough mobility to make a full round, for rehabilitation.
Yup, +1 for cycling! For me, it's some ankle cartridge destruction from an old fracture that finally put a halt to my formerly extensive trail & XC running & recreational racing. But cycling is coming back to the core of my exercise program (Mountain/trails: really miss road biking but traffic & drivers' attitudes seem to hazardous now). And not expensive either - plenty of bikes on Craigslist good enough to not give you bad habits and still get good exercise, even decade+ old race bikes.
It is really all about working with what capabilities you still have, and maximizing those. Even that may provide enough healing & fitness to get back to a bit of previously constrained activities.
I really feel for people who have never experienced a good trail ride. It’s possibly one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever experienced. Even an ordinary trail ride puts a smile on my face.
It's difficult to overstate how much better my life has become after starting tirzepatide, consequently losing weight, and steadily increasing exercise as I've gotten lighter. If I were the richest guy in the world, I'd negotiate with Eli Lilly to make tirzepatide (or maybe the forthcoming orforglipron) basically free for anyone who wants it.
>Like someone already said: what if you get an injury going to hard at it?
There's no need to go hard, even steady walking for 20 minutes a day is healthy. And recent studies show that you don't need to jog or run, walking is almost as efficient and less stressful for your joints.
One of the best ways to exercise as long as you aren't a brain in a jar is to use an indoor rowing machine. Rowing will engage about 80% of your muscles.
Another great option is rebounding. Every time you land, every muscle in your body is exercised. It's also easy on the joints and you can do it inside if the weather is bad.
Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].
It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.
My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.
Older rebounders used metal springs and were harder on the joints. Newer rebounders use bungees for a softer, gentler and silent landing. Some people rebound while their partner sleeps a few feet away.
For me I don't think walking 20 minutes a day is enough. I did more than that right after graduation. It didn't change any of the metrics usually used for measuring healthiness: my resting heart rate didn't change, my VO2max didn't change, my weight didn't change, etc. it was when I started regularly running 2 hours per week (aka around 20 minutes per day) that I started observing my health improve. YMMV.
Humans evolved to run but rowing is much better in many ways.
I'm up to 1.3 million meters this year so far (C2 Model D / PM4). I've missed zero days since the first of the year. The only way this is possible is because the impact is whatever you want it to be. You can scale all the way to ~zero if you are having a really shit day and just need the mental checkmark. You can throw the MacBook on a chair next to the rower and watch some dopamine slop to keep you distracted for the 30 minutes. Whatever it takes. Achieving 500 calories/hr is not difficult even if you've never looked at one of the machines before.
Going outside in any capacity has a lot higher physical/mental barrier. Other erg machines like treadmills and stationary bikes are something that my particular monkey brain doesn't like as much for whatever reason.
The C2 machine is fine, I use it regularly in a nearby studio besides other training and it's perfect for training. If the studio wouldn't be easily available I would buy a C2. And, by the way, my wife too started to be an avid rower after giving the machine a try.
I was rowing on real boats during my school and university days, but sadly never found the time afterwards to get join a club and row in teams.
Rowing machines with a water container are en vogue, but they are heavier (if filled with water) need regular water maintenance and the training effect isn't better.
I think you might be underselling the C2. I only ever row occasionally, but it is my understanding that it is the BIFL model. The type most gyms will buy - way more utilization hours than you will ever hit at home.
I tried to outrun my depression but then I became too depressed to run. It's so frustrating to feel that exercise doesn't give me the boost it used to.
GLP-1 is a rare opportunity for our overweight nation to "get back on the treadmill" in both a literal and figurative way.
If you have been sedentary for a long time and are overweight, you obviously have too much weight for your muscular strength and connective tissues, which have concurrently atrophied with inactivity, in addition to reduced neuro-biomechanic maps in your brain since you haven't used the circuitry.
This all adds up to a high initial injury risk in starting exercise even if you have the mentally focus.
But GLP-1, if it is the miracle it purports, should be able to drop overweight people, even if it is temporarily, to the point where you can being exercise much more safely, and/or with more intensity and duration to get more benefits sooner.
On a macro level a universal health care system that is cheap and effective is really a generation or two away with heavily incentivized exercise, and not without precedent, if I am to understand what Iceland did.
We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive. These aren't 1-2% improvements at macro levels. 10% improvements, which in pharma land are considered exceptionally effective drugs, and a minimum, and 30-50% miracle drug levels of outcomes are on the table.
But our medical establishment is either drugs or surgery. The extent of insurance company inducements are "silver sneakers".
The perverse accounting involved in extreme obesity may demand a national level program of "Biggest Loser" (although, not to that insanity) for financial inducements to get people to lose weight, because the loss of "caring" for the obese (FORTY PERCENT of Americans are obese and it keeps getting worse each decade).
> We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive.
A safer option is rebounding. Every time you land, every muscle in your body is exercised. It's also easy on the joints and you can do it inside if the weather is bad.
Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].
It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.
My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.
I injured my knees by running more than my knees could handle. Instead of never exercising again, after a 2 month long break I started incorporating other forms of exercise in my run schedule. Now I run longer and have other parts of my body feel better.
There’s a hundred reasons to not exercise but you only need to focus on the one reason why you need to keep doing it.
I'd rather be outside exercising / having fun and get the occasional twisted ankle or whatever, then staying home sitting on the couch and feeling like crap.
Personally the only, very minor, sports injury I have had is jamming my thumb pretty badly when my skis came off (poor bindings). Was better in a couple of weeks - no big deal. I'm 64 and started skiing 6-7 years ago, now happily going down blacks.
I did partially tear my shoulder muscle off the bone (rotator cuff tear), but that wasn't due to sports - was due to carrying my daughter around for too long (as she got bigger/heavier) with one arm and the constant bouncing. Painful at the time, but not a big deal - got better in the end just by using it and building up the joint strength again. You could also twist an ankle at home tripping over the dog - stuff happens.
Due to age/genetics I don't have the best knees, but still run, just on a rubber running track rather than on the road/sidewalk which is too jolting. You adapt.
Hmm, what else ... I have an occasional inner ear balance issue (age again?) that gets brought on by too rapid head movement or jolts, so I just avoid that. I swim outdoors in the summer all the time, and just avoid the crawl since side breathing is the kind of thing that may cause it. Again, not even caused by sports, and swimming has to be about as safe a type of exercise as you can get.
Get out there and enjoy yourself, and get some exercise!
Now tell me how many years extra you live compared to the you that just eats healthy but doesn't exercise outside of 3000 steps a day (not bedridden, not intentionally exercising)
I think it's more about quality of life rather than extending it - enjoying outdoor activities (skiing is a blast!), enjoying looking good and being in shape, able to do all my own yard work and snow shovelling etc without it being an effort.
Now, while I choose to do things that I enjoy (and the skiing is purely for enjoyment, even though it requires a lot of energy), I will say that part of the motivation for wanting to keep in good shape is seeing what happened to my Dad who had an office job (professor) and didn't exercise at all other than a bit of walking to the grocery store etc, and in his old age had all sorts of pinched nerve and mobility issues due to lack of muscle tone and strength, and realized it was too late to do anything about it.
The vast vast majority of injuries are recoverable from and you will be able to return to what you did before. There are some bad ones, but even people with hip replacements, ACL tears and all sorts of nasty “career ending” injuries will be able to run/bike/play tennis/golf/weightlift.
It’s pretty well understood that stopping moving is incredibly bad for your body, and modern recoveries focus on pain management, pain avoidance and getting you moving again as quickly as possible.
Such platitudes are legitimately useless as nearly everyone who injured themselves while exercising immediately sees the error in their ways, but that doesn't help them undo the permanent damage they've done
Pretty much the worst thing you can do exercising is an ACL tear or an Achilles tendon rupture. Both of these are absolutely awful injuries to pick up (whoever designed the human body really phoned it in at the knee joint IMO). Both are usually solved with surgery, and will massively impact your life for 9-12 months. But the real fix to those injuries is to get back exercising again. If Tom Brady can play NFL football after an ACL tear and surgery, you can probably go back running with the right advice.
The only way to avoid injury is to not use your body at all but your muscles will atrophy and you’ll end up injured _anyway_ that way.
Most people who injure themselves exercising go to PT and then go straight back to exercising because they know how important it is and how good it feels.
You're physically lazy and unmotivated, we get it. Hiding behind "but maybe I can get hurt" is not going to make you better or improve your health. Go do something hard and stop being afraid of living life.
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt? This has to be as unhealthy as exercise is healthy.
Grateful, yes, appreciative, absolutely, motivated to do good, of course. Having to pay "back" (to whom?), feeling guilty? Absurd and corrosive
When you see how much suffering is allotted to those less lucky than yourself it’s natural to feel a little bad or guilty. It shows that you care about the wellbeing of others. Not helpful to beat yourself up but to shrug your shoulders and go “sucks to suck” is bad.
I've traveled to some of the poorest parts of the world. I try to donate regularly to the less fortunate. Yet, I've never felt guilt. What does guilt have to do with admitting the world is a cruel place?
Why do you donate? Do you owe them anything? No. Yet, you still donate. But how much do you donate? Why that amount and not nearly everything? Surely there are people in need!
You are right. I haven't thought about donations possibly not being altruistic, but there actually are such ones. Personally I would say we need separate words to distinguish egoistic charity/donations from the altruistic ones.
But how does donating to some poor people abroad benefits you?
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?
The author themselves said:
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
You mentioned "noblesse oblige" which is
> a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities
It seems that everybody is talking past one another in this exchange. The author acknowledges that guilt over this is unproductive and implicitly admonishes readers of means to help those less fortunate in the same paragraph:
> The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor.
One can simultaneously shed feelings of guilt over their fortunate socioeconomic position and give to those less fortunate. These two things are not mutually exclusive. To say that somebody should feel bad over something over which they had no control is nothing more than a secular version of original sin. I know I'd prefer to have a privileged class that pays it forward out of an intrinsic motivation to do good instead of a negative one like guilt... seems more stable and less prone to class warfare, but then again I'm no historian or anthropologist.
The author doesn’t say they feel bad about being lucky. Quite to the contrary, they are implying that one shouldn’t feel bad about it. One might feel a certain responsibility from particularly good fortune, however.
I am confused. Just in that small excerpt you quoted it reads "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either", explicitly rejecting the larger part of idea you are critizing?
Guilt? Maybe not. Feeling bad about seeing all the injustice in the world and wanting to change it is pretty natural.
The world is unjust and 99.9% of it is not our fault. It's caused by nature and other people and bad luck and history and bad systems. But nonetheless, many important institutions exist to make the world somewhat less unjust. This happens because people make it happen.
I think you might feel differently if you spent some time in sub saharan Africa. I went for the first time this year and was amazed at the warmth and generosity of the people I met. I was also shocked at how solvable most of their problems are with even just a little bit of money. Like I felt guilty, not in like a pay back way but in a "wow i can't believe how much time this lady would save if this village had can openers" kind of way.
I guess it is the same as taking a multiple-choice test, filling it out randomly and getting a perfect score.
Yes, you are lucky. But also: you should feel guilty about it.
Same with random things happening in your life and turning out well. If you don't know why they happened then who says you will be lucky the next time? Better feel a little guilty and try to understand how you can turn the odds your way (and perhaps also so others can benefit).
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way?
For the same reason you have survivors guilt. When you see the similarity in others, ie empathy, and you see a divergent fate from yourself (either positive or negative), you can feel an incongruence when real world picks vastly different outcomes. This is deeply human, and likely goes further back to primates or even mammals.
Conversely, this is the sympathetic effect that can trick people into buying lottery tickets because if they see a ”nobody” winning big, ”they can too”, despite the odds. Or the American version: working at Walmart and seeing a billionaire on TV and thinking ”that’s me, soon”.
Recognizing the luck of birth conditions isn’t any different. I can relate because they are extremely strong predictors of welfare and success, but it’s also not something I go around and dwell on or causes me any pain. I think most people who get frustrated with others recognizing their own privilege is it can undermine their sense of identity, such as ”everything i have is a result of my individual hard work, and those who have less are lazy”. You can build a false identity on either premise.
What on earth are you talking about? The text you quote says literally "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" and you're asking "How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?"???
Most communication isn’t a legal contract, and a lot of meaning is implicit, not just what is explicitly said.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the statements you mentioned, but "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" implies wallowing in guilt is a natural or even expected feeling. The person you’re replying to is questioning why someone would wallow in guilt in the first place.
You don't see why people might feel something (including guilt) upon realising most of their place in life comes from luck and factors beyond their control?
I don't know about the author specifically but in many different cultures people have different understanding about what being rich means.
There are many concepts in christianity, islam etc. on it and varies a lot. In some cultures being rich is viewed as a mission given by god to do something great with it for example. In others its said that property is owned by the god and you are just given some limited time to use it for the good of humanity and preserve it, So it's not something to be proud of and you may feel sorry that others were not given such a mission.
These things not only depend on the specific religion, i.e. Christianity vs Islam but also within stuff like Protestantism and Catholicism.
Lots of stuff that the current right wing American narrative freaks out on is just a school of thought among Christians, Jews and Muslims. Many time those people are not woke or PC or whatever, just Christians that are taught by their parents to be modest and avoid bing flamboyant on their wealth. Even when people are not religious, these things run deep and defines your worldview.
My family literally died on the boat coming to the USA, leaving only a 9 year old girl orphan, another leaving a teenage girl orphan arriving alone in the USA. Luck had nothing to do with it. Some brave ass tough as nails women did though. Honor the people that put in effort/sacrifice to get your here. They were real, not some nebulous magical 'luck'.
The writer didn't actually say they feel "guilty" about it, nor that they should feel "guilty" about it.
But that term triggers libertarian sociopaths. Any idea of care for others as a priority threatens their desire to be allowed to take whatever they can.
I can directly tie my mood to how much exercise I’ve had in a given week. It’s also easy, given how busy life feels, to let the proverbial frog boil in water when it comes to this.
My partner often comments when I’ve been a little grumpier than usual by saying, “you should go on a bike ride.”
It really works wonders on the soul (and the more physical heart and lungs) getting out for a spin in the fresh air.
There is something about riding a bike that lifts people's mood like nothing else. It's the closest thing to flying like a bird that most of us will ever see. It lets you experience your neighborhood in a different light.
Riding a bike lifts my mood certainly but it doesn't let me experience my neighborhood. I zoom past the neighborhood and at 15mph you can hardly experience it. You might have some vague ideas about architectural styles in the neighborhood but that's it. If the neighborhood has shops, you can't easily visit them without first parking the bike. You need to walk to really experience a neighborhood.
Nothing is forcing you to ride at 15mph. Walking doesn't let you go very far in a reasonable amount of time, either, and I'm one of those 10K steps a day sort of people.
> Walking doesn't let you go very far in a reasonable amount of time, either
Earlier today, I walked across several neighborhoods and through an entire large park to get to the city center for some shopping, all in the span of 40 minutes. If you feel like walking is ineffective at getting you places, you may want to consider advocating for walkable cities.
Experience it "in a different light."
I don’t think it’s unique to bikes - lots of people have the same/similar feelings from other forms of exercise. There’s a runners high too. I used to row in university, and there was no better feeling (to me) than being in the middle of a lake in a tiny boat and clocking in 16/20k on a crisp winters morning.
It's not just the exercise it's the whole experience of being outside. Even if you drive to a park and sit on a bench for half an hour you will go back home in a better mood. Won't be as good for your muscles but being outside in nature had amazing effects.
You could even try the opposite, exercising in a spinning won't have the same effect.
Absolutely, as much as everyone says eating right, exercising and sleeping well are the answer I totally neglected myself. Boosting cardio and dropping some weight has been an absolute lifechanger
The fact that just by being on the bike for two hours, my brain doesn't go into negative pathways, but it just focuses on the road always brings me out of a slump.
I can also recommend easy, restorative yoga exercises, which is the lightest exercise there is, but it will help you with: sitting too much, improve sleep, stretch and reduce stress.
i keep up exercise for health reasons and because i do have a higher energy level if i'm in better shape.
however, both during and for two or three hours after exercising, the emotional effect is very negative. i feel much more anxious, prone to negative thoughts, self-critical, pessimistic, sometimes angry.
the benefits are definitely real but I feel like I am paying a very large cost to get them. i've tried lots of different forms of exercise and they all have this effect if i push to a reasonable level of intensity.
i'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience and managed to find a place where exercising makes them feel happy.
Have you tried eating a snack after? Maybe you're hangry
This is actually good advice. Some people respond very, very poorly to being hungry and I've noticed some of them aren't aware of it.
Yep. I've found that feeling grumpy and irritated is a more reliable indicator that I need to eat than actually feeling hungry
What is a reasonable level of intensity for you?
> i've tried lots of different forms of exercise
Have they all been in a gym environment? If so, it could be the reason. Going to the gym in the winter, I do get the benefits but it doesn't do as much for my mood as sports outdoors when the weather is nice.
Perhaps do more or less exercise, switch from cardio to strength or from strength to cardio. Monitor the negativity. Maybe, if you find the best trigger making it worse is good. Make it more obvious.
Are you drinking alcohol ocasionally? I observed that there are two kind of pepole: - one who spend their spare time drinking - others who exercise
Both are fine for the soul :)
I like drinking while I'm doing it, and not after I've done it, but exercise is the other way around.
(OK only some exercise, and usually I already like it while I'm doing it, I just don't want to go out to do it.)
Some people exercise to get fit.
I exercise to work up a thirst.
I exercise drinking
I don't drink in my spare time , but I can understand you comment and :)
> The author Daniel Lieberman has put it well: Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do.
We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what. Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level. We have connective tissue that stores and releases energy. Our bodies can reject on the order of 1kW+ of heat steady-state through the magic of evaporative cooling.
Yeah, I realized this one time while watching a documentary on some tribes hunting methods. They were hunting by running after the animal until it basically dropped from exertion. Hunters didn’t sprint. They paced but continuously and simply followed animals foot prints and droppings. They said these hunters would run for many hours each time. And sometimes they’d even be unsuccessful.
> Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level
My flat feet (and those of my mom, and those of one of her parents, ad infinitum) would beg to differ lol
Also, most of the energy our bodies burn to run just turns into heat, it's all very inefficient... even if sweating itself works pretty well, and even if our heat tolerance is high assuming we have a source of fresh water
I had flat feet most of my life, until I started a 5x per week yoga practice (ashtanga based). One day about a year into it I noticed that I had defined arches, something I hadn’t expected at all. All those one leg standing balancing poses really develops your ankles, knees, and feet.
Some years later when I started running with typical arch supporting running shoes, picked out for me at a specialty running store where they record your stride etc, I developed pretty bad plantar fasciitis as soon as I started hitting 8k on my runs. Swapped them out for zero drop Altras and I haven’t had issues since.
All that is to say our feet are pretty well designed as long as you give it the strengthening it needs. You should take care of your feet, but not coddle them, is how I’ve come to view it.
My wife's a podiatrist. I can conjure what I've heard her tell a thousand people over the years: invest in arch supports. Shoot for the ones that run about $50 and are rigid. Don't start with the $500 custom ones, and skip the $10 soft ones you see at the pharmacy. Go to REI or a running shop or a sporting goods store and get those instead.
My knees freaking killed me when I was running. I started using the supports my wife bought for me and it instantly improved, and far beyond any placebo effect. Before: my knees ached after I ran 100% of the time. Now: they never ache anymore.
Counterpoint: I am personally skeptical about the long term value of arch supports. The reason is that while they can undoubtably help with short term pain, they also inhibit strength development and introduce an unnecessary dependency (kind of like a software library). I am not disagreeing with your experience or discouraging people from using supports to deal with injuries. I am just questioning making yourself reliant upon them.
About 20 years ago, I was riding my bike everywhere and hardly walking. I went on a trip to NYC and was walking 10+ miles a day. I developed severe shooting pains in my feet. Getting some supports helped dramatically and so I started wearing them whenever I wore shoes.
I did this for about 15 years and completely swore by arch supporting shoes. Then, one day I was playing basketball and landed on someone's foot going for a layup. My foot basically folded in half in the opposite direction of the arch. This was a major injury and I could not walk at all for a week and it took multiple years before I stopped feeling pain regularly in that foot.
After the injury, I completely stopped wearing arch supports. I had a theory that my feet had been weakened by using them and that this weakness was the underlying reason for the severity of my injury. For the last few years, I have averaged about eight miles of walking a day and mostly wear zero drop minimal shoes. I have developed the ability to run on concrete with them, though I do not particularly enjoy this (primarily because my running efficiency is poor).
If I were running a marathon, I would certainly wear shoes with padding, but I don't find much padding or support necessary or even desirable for brisk walking for hours at a time. And for almost 15 years, I never left the house without bulky supports.
I believe you are correct and I believe that what you are expressing can be generalized - and distilled - as the following:
Bracing a body part weakens that body part in the long run.
Anybody who has ever had a cast on their arm knows this firsthand.
Yep. I walk barefoot everywhere I can and if not, then I wear sandals. I was having terrible pain in my feet when I was wearing “shoes with support”, which went away once I started wearing sandals and going barefoot everywhere. If I run I run with glove shoes or whatever they’re called nowadays.
I used to wear custom orthotics for a lot of growing up and into my early 20's. I definitely feel like it was something that I really could have gotten away without having if I instead had better shoes, and strengthened the muscles more. Unfortunately even the physiotherapist I had when I was young advised orthotics and didn't seek to treat the strength issue. Of course I was kid and myself and my parents were just doing what the experts told us.
A lot of my problem also related to back pain when growing up, and I realized also in my 20's how much going to the gym helped with the back pain. As my back got stronger via strength training, I no longer suffered from back pain. Additionally I invested more in things like a good office chair at home and ensured I had a good one at work.
Overall I no longer have back problems and no longer require any inserts in my shoes.
How the hell do you find time for eight miles of walking a day? I mean, that's just shy of a third of a marathon! I can only assume you're independently wealthy, retired, or have no kids.
(Beleaguered parent of a toddler here struggling to find ANY workout time, or the energy for it! It's killing me, literally and figuratively)
I see you! Don’t worry, you’ll have time again. Micro workouts (like literally, a single set of something during a break at work) help some, but mainly I try to console myself with all the lifting of kids and playtime involving physical activity. You’ll have time to yourself again soon, though, as they get bigger!
AND YOU DON'T NEED TO RUN to start with.
And if you are overweight and sedentary DON'T RUN TO GET INTO SHAPE.
Walking, hiking, swimming, biking, and weight training. Mix all of it so you get cross training effects and distribute stress across many domains.
Running is, by the standards of the statistical hole America is in terms of obesity, an "advanced" activity. We're talking about something that involves a stress increase of 2.5x to 4.x over walking.
Now consider that an obese person with an extra 50 lbs of fat is on their body. Running will be an extra 200 lbs of stress on your feet, and none of that fat tissue is absorbing impact or stabilizing that impact. And on top of it, the fat will disrupt the neuro-biomechanical flow of your neuromuscular system, making you less coordinated and therefore also harder to absorb the impact.
As I said elsewhere: use GLP-1 to get the fat down and simultaneously employ a gentle ROUTINE activity program that morphs into more and more exercise and exercise variety.
"And if you are overweight and sedentary DON'T RUN TO GET INTO SHAPE."
This. Many people aren't in good enough shape to run. And if they do run their form is often terrible.
There was a website years ago at WasWayFat.com about a guy that lost a ton of weight just stepping on an aerobic stair in his home.
Wayback machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20170710225625/http://www.wasway...
My feet seemed to get better after I started running. First time without pain in some time. Even walking made them hurt before. It’s taken a few months to build up though.
BMI of 29 starting so not obese but overweight and running has me down at 27 now.
Peter Attia in his book "Outlive" recommends exclusively zone 2 training for sedentary beginners: half an hour, 3x a week, of light to moderate exercise (e.g. on a stationary bike), for half a year or so before more strenuous exercise is added.
It can be really hard to get cardio without running. I still agree despite that.
Rucking will get you your cardio
Isn't this similarly hard on your joints to running, though, which is part of the problem with running when you're overweight? Or am I overestimating the joint impact?
It is, it is so low-cost (running shoes) and available (walk out the door).
And doing it is close to the maximum calories you will burn per unit of effort and time.
Better yet, get stability/motion control shoes. Don't skimp on running shoes and be prepared to try a few different types for extended periods of time before you settle on one.
I found that there is only one type of shoe on the market that prevents me from getting injured (Asics Gel-Kayano). Everything else - low drop, high drop, HOKA, Brooks, Nike, even Asics' own GT-2000s - is a quick route to knee injury for me. And I don't need arch supports when using the Kayanos, even though I am a very clear overpronator.
Motion control were found to cause higher injury rates than either neutral/stability in this study https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/45/9/715
Matches my own experience, first season of cross country in HS I had neutral shoes and they were perfect, went back for new shoes next season and they put me in motion control shoes which gave me instant knee pain.
Absolutely. And what works best is incredibly personal. My wife tends to run in Nikes because others don’t fit and move just right for her. Meanwhile, I’ve never found a pair of Nikes I could stand, but Brooks Adrenaline give me superpowers.
Don’t ever get what someone else likes instead of what you prefer. Your feet aren’t theirs.
What the brand of arch support are you using?
Sole Supports work for me, but it’s different for everyone.
My friend has fixed his flat feet by focusing on yoga poses that engage the “knife edge” of his feet (ie: the outside). It took some time but he reckons it’s very noticeable. Maybe worth a try?
It worked for me, it's not even about specific poses, you need to consciously keep your ankle from collapsing and yoga helps with that.
I’ve read in a few places that the flat feet comes from wearing shoes that don’t allow your toes to splay, which causes the muscles that create the arch to atrophy. Not a scientist and have never had flat feet, so can’t confirm, but I recently started wearing zero drop shoes and definitely feel a healthy soreness as my feet get stronger.
Also when you run don't land flat-footed or heel-first. Land on the front part ("ball") of your foot, this lets your calf muscle absorb the shock, rather than sending the shock straight up your tibia into your knee.
This was a total game changer for me when running. I would always develop some sort of knee pain at some point but since making a very minor change to how I land my foot, I am running without any.
Make sure to start and transition slowly though as there are warnings about injuring your Achilles and other muscles in your calf if you start off too aggressively.
Nobody claimed we are intelligently designed.
Evolution is not perfect. We are still better at running long distances for long stretches of time than any other animal.
Evolution is also just optimizing you to live long enough to reproduce and then help your kids get well set up. So, it is fine if your legs start to go in your 40’s. You can help chase down the antelopes ‘till then, then go weave baskets and watch the fire for a decade or so, then die in your 50’s.
Actually, it doesn’t seem like a horrible life, but I think we’re hoping to stick around a little longer.
> Evolution is not perfect. We are still better at running long distances for long stretches of time than any other animal.
Not really. We are on par with many animals, or rather they are on par with us, with some tradeoffs on both sides (e.g. humans are better in hotter weather).
Wolves, wild dogs, horses (and other fast hoofed herbivores) are all roughly on par in pure ability to run.
What made us even more successful is the ability to plan and organize (wolves have this), sweat (only humans can do full-body) and use of tools.
Flat feet are often a problem of foot muscles and posture. Physiotherapy and strengthening your feet can most likely work wonders even if your family has genetic predisposition for the problem.
We're optimized for walking, not sprinting.
And if you think our moving->sweating is bad, check out horses and dogs.
Most energy used for any work (in the physics sense) ends up as heat, eventually.
I mean, would you prefer we add in some evolutionary pressure?
Note also that there are numerous champion runners with flat feet.
One contributing factor to human weight gain when given a non-limited supply of food is apparently the knocking-out of the gene that produces uricase, which pretty much every other animal has (and they usually don't get fat, even when given unlimited food supply). Not a single human has a working uricase gene. It has been hypothesized that famines throughout human history (there's your "evolutionary pressure") have contributed to this.
My point is that selection pressures do not always lead to optimal outcomes...
https://chatgpt.com/share/688e4822-4e44-8004-9625-21a254fa02...
How much of that is due to only using two limbs? Which also makes us slower I guess.
There is actually some evidence that, in a sprint, humans might be able to run faster on all 4 limbs than on 2
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27446911/
The article was published in 2016, and the authors extrapolated from 7 data points (!) over about 7 years of progress in the world record. This is obviously insufficient to project 30 years into the future.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27446911/#&gid=article-figur...
That record progressed
2.87 seconds over 7 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenichi_Ito_(athlete)If we check in on more recent progress since then, we find the current record is 15.66 set in 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20241222175947/https://www.guinn...
Another 7 years, for an improvement of 0.05 seconds, or about 850 years of linear improvement to reach Bolt's 9.58 seconds.
Anyone wanting to bet on beating Bolt by 2048?
>some evidence
https://xkcd.com/605/
I think it's sort of reasonable in this case, given there's very little investment in running on 4 limbs, while nation states fund track and field programs to the tune of millions of dollars. That the small number of 4 limbed runners are making progress against 2 limbed runners does indicate it might allow higher peak performance. Of course, 4 limbed runners have probably already plucked the low hanging fruit in performance improvements, but the researchers aren't projecting linear improvement
Don't sprinters start with 4 limbs on the ground? The advantage of the 4 limbs seems to be gone by the second step.
Trail runners often run with poles on up or down hills. Not sure about top speed, but from experience the poles definitely help with endurance.
It's a tradeoff. Having two general purpose limbs is useful for all sorts of things, but not escaping scary things, so endurance can somewhat make up for that.
Ask anyone in the army how all those years of running drills have affected them as they got older. It’s not so rosy. Lots of knee problems in that group. Above average practice of running throughout life also increases likelihood of requiring pacemakers later in life.
This is a gross simplification on both accounts.
US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.
And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39101218/
People in the army are also regularly carrying an extra 50 pound ruck, 25 pounds of body armor, and enough other various and sundry items to add up to about 100+ lbs of total kit. That's probably what's destroying people's knees more than the running by itself
Coupled with weeks if not more of regularly scheduled sleep deprivation so you never actually recover from any of those hard days.
It's more that the military's goal isn't to produce adults that are indefinitely healthy, but rather a robust geopolitical deterrent that only requires its employees to be physical capable for about twenty years, after which their service life is over. Running is not the issue. Even a car designed for driving can be driven irresponsibly.
I can’t be sure, but my impression is that army drills (1) push uniformly (rather than let you improve at your own pace) and (2) often involve carrying your kit, which is 20-40lbs. Neither of these is similar to the kind of running GP describes, namely unburdened, at a comfortable speed, over ~arbitrary distances.
I was going to say, I don't believe that sitting on a chair for 40 hours a week is great but I've also never seen so many wounded and disabled people than with people heavily into sports.
It's possible to do too much of anything.
Too much but also sometimes in a wrong way or with bad luck.
Army personnel in general is unnaturally beefy and I'm sure these running drills often are done carrying load, no?
Humans are evolved to run, but not to have heavy frames and not carrying material for fighting wars.
Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.
I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)
I guess there are a lot of confounding variables in there, having taken up running a few years ago my resting heart rate is very low, and I'm far more aware of it than a non-runner. I suppose folks with a family history of heart problems may take up exercise to try and get ahead of it too.
Older soccer players, and other professional sport players have physical issues BUT they train at extremes.
To be fair, it was the weight not the distance that destroyed my knees and ankles. But still, I've aged a lot better than many of my friends and family who were more sedentary, so who knows.
Just because our ancestors did something doesn't mean it's automatically good for your health. After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy.
"After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy."
After surviving early years, people still used to get old. Infant mortality was just way higher bringing the average down. (And that those metrics often compare to poor peasants and our paleo ancestors were not peasants)
What data are you basing this on? My understanding is that historical life expectancy is only as low as it is because of the immense infant mortality rates. People who survived through childhood tended to live long.
Pretty much. Here's an in-depth look at mortality patterns in pre-modern societies: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.
Longer than is generally thought, but not as long as we do today either.
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"We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what."
This appears to be the case and this idea is explained, in-depth, in the excellent book:
_Born to Run_
... by Christopher McDougall.
I highly recommend it.
A few books have changed my life, Born to Run is one of them.
> Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level.
I'm not sure from where you got this because any documentary/book/article and simply real life experiences related to this subject states the opposite (take a common animal such as a dog as an example)
This is not an obscure theory, it's called the "Endurance running hypothesis" [1], and it does seem that humans are one of very few species exceptionally well-adapted to very long-distance running (though dogs and wolves are another one). The idea is that ancient hominids in Africa practiced "persistence hunting"[2], where they would hunt e.g. antelopes and similar species by repeatedly chasing them down. The prey would sprint off when humans got close, but doing this repeatedly causes the animal to exhaust their energy or die of heat stroke, humans being much better adapted to running for many hours on end (this kind of hunting is known to happen to this day). It's plausible that persistence hunting also contributed to evolving our other super-powers, as it requires good spatial awareness, tool-use and communication.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
Have you ever went running with a dog? Dogs can go fast over a short distance but they overheat quickly. People just keep on running way past the time the dog has collapsed.
“Real life experience” tells me I’ll run any dog into the ground if it’s over 50F. Cooler than that? The dog still better be part of a trained sledding team.
This is specifically about long distance running, where basically no animal can keep up.
A key hunan advantage was persistence hunting - track and run after a deer (or similar) prey. Tgey can burst outrun the human, burt hemshe keeps on running, eventually, often after double-digit kilometers, the human can just trot up to the exhausted nimal and kill it. That's what the tendons and evaporative cooling do.
There's a famous Uktramarathon race, iirc, the Western States 100, 100 miles in the Sierra mountains that was a horse race, until some people started running without the horse, and winning.
The evidence for exercise reducing all-cause mortality is more nuanced than many assume. It's crucial to distinguish between findings from RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) and observational studies.
A meta-analysis of RCTs with ~50,000 participants concluded that exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality or incident CVD in older adults or people with chronic conditions [1].
However, for specific high-risk groups, the causal evidence from RCTs is strong. A separate meta-analysis found that for cancer patients and survivors, exercise led to [2]:
- A 24% reduction in mortality risk
- A 48% reduction in recurrence risk
The commonly cited large benefits (e.g., 40% lower mortality) come from observational studies [3]. These are very susceptible to the "healthy user bias" or reverse causation—people who are healthy enough to exercise are already at a lower risk of dying. This makes it difficult to prove the exercise caused the benefit.
So, while exercise is strongly associated with lower mortality, the direct causal evidence for the general population isn't as definitive as it is for specific subgroups like cancer survivors.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7273753/
[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2031
Walking is exercise. Never forget that.
Consistency over sporadic herculean efforts always wins out.
There are positive physical and mental change that happen with more intensive cardio and with resistance training that you can't get from walking no matter how much you walk. And there's nothing herculian about those modes of exercise.
long-term evidence isn't clear at all for the benefit of these
You're wrong about this. It's very clear, and some of the evidence is presented in the original article here.
You're right of course, consistency is safer and more sustainable but ego is a bitch and nobody is ever bragging or impressed about an average adult being able to walk their dog daily, or doing ten 50kg squats twice a week, or even jogging a mile three times a week (except maybe your doctor, and probably only then if you're over 40).
True, but if you can afford to hike in the mountains, you can then brag about seeing a groundhog, a chamois, a valley, joining paths, waking up with the sun (never hike in afternoons because storms and night approaching).
Which is the best of both worlds: You don’t index yourself against an herculean performance, and yet you still do exercise. And walking 8hrs in the mountains actually does wonders to weight, MUCH better than my herculean 1000m-in-70-minutes climb.
Walking is definitely better than sitting down all day, but that shouldn't be the goal. Weight training and more intense cardio are more important.
I walk every morning and hit 80-80% of my max heart rate for parts of it. Walking can be quite good exercise, unless you live somewhere very flat. My V02 max continues to climb steadily 0.1/week like clockwork, and no running yet. Granted, it's got a ways to go, it's just barely above average, but still, walking is working.
If you’re walking at that intensity you are more accurately hiking.
Re-reading what I wrote, I meant to write 80-85%
The point is there are those for whom one of the only forms exercise within reach is walking but it isn't thought of as exercise. Not all people are able to do more intense cardio or lift weights. Regular walking can bootstrap the body toward other exercise.
Tai chi actually is another amazing tool - it is a dynamic calisthenics exercise that builds core strength, balance, and stretches connective tissue.
p.s. dancing to underground industrial techno for a few hours is a great way to do calisthenics
I find it interesting that the article is about exercise and the title picture is yoga. In fact near the top
> To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our metabolism, improve mitochondrial function, fortify our immune system, reduce inflammation, improve tissue-specific adaptations, and protect against disease.
Yoga is neither aerobic fitness nor weight training
note: I do yoga probably about twice a month (should do more) so I'm not dissing yoga. I'm only noting that the picture of yoga seems to have nothing to do with the article.
I do several styles of yoga. Most provide substantial strength training via moving and suspending body weight. All feel like they have exactly the increased heart rate of aerobic exercise. Flowing e.g. from standing to high plank to low plank to cobra to downward dog and back to standing N times in a row is quite the workout. Maybe there are gentle, stretching-only forms that would not, but I haven't found them. Slower and more careful, yes, but from an effort point of view, really not much different from the burpees or calisthenics I used to do in Crossfit.
If the proposition is "exercise is a miracle drug," my experience at least is that yoga 100% qualifies.
I think you might've misunderstood the parent comment. Yoga is exercise, no one doubts that, but it specifically is not aerobic exercise (like running) and it is not weight lifting (like gym).
There are different yoga styles - there is Yin Yoga which is more still, there is Ashtanga Yoga which is more Strength-Based. Something like a Hot Vinyasa or Bikram will definitely be a great cardio workout. So telling us that you are doing yoga is like telling you've eaten pizza. There is lot of different toppings mate :P
Hiit yoga too. Also in a hot room too.
When I got laid off from my first job, I used the extra time to start going to the gym. Years later the habit has still stuck, and I actually think I was so incredibly lucky to get laid off. Working out has been such a massive improvement in all areas of life. Health problems went away, mental health got better, sleep quality got better, it truly is a miracle drug. It’s a shame that the habit is hard to form.
This article feels like a bait-and-switch. Why isn't it two articles - one on the benefits of exercise and one on US foreign aid policy?
At a minimum, I don't feel the HN post title properly reflects the full contents of the article.
Worse, it never even attempts to answer the question the title poses. It gives some recent evidence that exercise is good for you, and then goes off on a topic so unrelated it can’t even be called a tangent.
> This is a staggering return on moral investment.
What exactly is moral investment and why should government be in the business of making moral investments, especially for foreign countries?
The expectation that a healthier globe = global economy will be healthier for the US economy, even if it's not literally an interest-bearing investment vehicle?
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For a long time I tried to start an exercise habit, but it didn't stick. I could jog 15 minutes every day for a month and instantly be sick of it a few days after.
I was only able to gain an exercise habit by addressing my mood and anxiety first. First, with my mental improvements I became actively motivated to exercise and didn't hate it anymore. I kept at it for several weeks, only stopping every so often due to fatigue. Eventually I did earn the habit of exercise. This wasn't intuitive to me, but the typical causality was backwards. Exercise was not what directly made me healthier, but being healthier (mentally) from the start allowed me to initiate and keep exercising, from which I earned even more health benefits.
A mental deficit in being able to form habits is arguably even worse than a lack of exercise, since you would try to apply the "exercise cure" advice and just burn out after a while like I did. It's not like you didn't exercise, but you could not internalize what all those people typically say must be the case if you just exercise a lot.
Even as my mood fluctuates I am now able to still go for a jog once in a while. These days I understand that if I had started off exercising in a state of low mood, I would have no chance of making it stick. The habit carried over from when I persisted at it in my limited window of improved mood.
The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still. It should come as no surprise that the inverse also tends to hold true.
On a tangent, I think that's part of why volunteering can be so rewarding.
> The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still.
So becoming a software developer?
Most non-freelance software development I’ve done has been a group effort.
I’ve met a lot of my gym partners, biking friends, and climbing friends through software work.
Or taking up any white collar job! There's a reason I spend a lot of my free time swimming and hiking.
This is an interesting comment because I've lived a lot of sides of this.
At my first job (where I kinda 'weaseled' my way into doing software vs my job title) it was an incredibly collaborative experience. It started with finding ways to make tools that helped my colleagues do monotonous tasks faster. Which then evolved into fun dialogue. "Hey can you make a button to do X" and we'd get to talk about it, I'd hack the feature together, hit publish and wait for the team to give feedback. "Oh I got this error" I'd get up and walk over. It wasn't perfect but I was never lonely and only as still as I wanted to be.
At my second gig, It started a little lonely but thankfully the culture was just laid back enough I got to socialize (thankfully it was a shop full of fun and interesting people!).
Third gig, Uggh it was very 'heads down' for most of my time there, nobody liked small talk except the conspiracy theory guy. I learned a lot about what I did and didn't like in company culture there. It did get a little better before I left...
Fourth gig was a dream. It was the second place where I didn't just get to collaborate with my team, but the first place where it was a lot of software engineers. We even had a teams room for nothing but sharing music and it was always heartwarming to see a reply to some obscure tune and someone would reply with something that yes you would absolutely appreciate given what you originally posted. And it was hectic enough that I did get a reputation for being a 'floor runner'.
Fifth Gig... well it was 100% remote. And in fact one day I was so focused on a problem I sat in the wrong position too long and permanently fucked up my left ulnar nerve... But that was such a good group, and Ironically I was able to -take- the lessons from #4 and #2 and turned them into traditions that stuck around even after I left (hell even after they fired everyone, we kept doing the 'game night' for a while...)
Won't say anything about my current place, that's all still a work in progress <_<
Not that you asked, but physios have some great exercises for ulnar nerve issues, it might be worth seeing one if you haven't already.
Haha.. ouch.
No, they mitigate this by getting paid a lot of money.
> The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still.
That's pretty much what was done during the pandemic unfortunately.
There were no restrictions on running or biking in the pandemic. Quite the opposite. Because indoor entertainment venues like bars weren't available, I saw way more people embracing the outdoors.
Beaches, parks, and playgrounds were routinely closed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/newsom-beach-closing-c...
I am Canadian. Running, biking etc outdoor activities is impossible in our winters for 5-6 months of the year. Since gyms were closed, we also didn't have access to weight training which is also very essential.
Canadian here. This may be true for some (many) parts of Canada but certainly not all of Canada. For example, with proper gear you can run outdoors in Vancouver year-round. When I lived in the GTA, I routinely ran outdoors through late December and almost always resumed by mid-March.
Point being: dressing appropriately can extend your running season dramatically.
Even in your example, there's a 4 month period where it's impossible. Snow + ice makes it dangerous to be running outside during winters. I have friends who run marathon and one has had knee surgeries and therefore afraid to run in even a little bit of ice.
If you ever struggle to exercise consider: for thousands of years humans needed to walk and hunt and cook and run from predators just to survive. It’s sedentary lifestyles that are the anomaly.
Not exercising is a miracle NOT drug! Exercise is what your body is engineered for by nature and thousands of years of evolution. So exercising is the more normal thing, not sitting around :)
Get out there and have fun with it! Even walking you’ll get to see the sky, sunset, sunrise, and all the big houses in your neighborhood.
Exercise "simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life" makes sense, as most of our ancestors were blue-collar workers and farmers. I try to integrate more physical activity in my life, which seemed like labor before, but now feels like life-saving activity. For example, I am intentionally trying to fix/diy things with my house like painting my garage, mowing my lawn instead of hiring someone else to do it, and even learning woodworking and gardening. Even in the heat of the summer, I feel more invigorated working outdoor whenever I can, and helps offset the sluggishness I feel after a day of sitting, coding, and staring at the monitors at work.
The human body didn't evolve to do farm work, or mow lawns, or more generally to do "blue collar" work. Also, our ancestors weren't known for their exceptional lifespans.
30-60 minutes pushing a lawn mower is good low-impact exercise. Riding around on a lawn tractor with a beer, not so much.
Ah yes, the evolutionary pressure of being a blue-collar worker.
If you exercise a lot, be sure to fuel your workouts. Eat a healthy calories surplus so your body doesn’t go into panic mode and sacrifice muscle and bone tissue.
I’m in my 40s and have exercised my whole life. But still did intermittent fasting (skipped breakfast). I’m a standard deviation below average bone density and have lost some cartilage in my knee from underfueled long runs (I was diagnosed with RED-S). Now I work with a sports nutritionist, and do a mix of strength, running, cycling with good rest days.
I’ve learned I’d rather have a bit of a belly now but very strong than underfueled and lost muscle/bone mass
I took up climbing a couple of months ago and for the first few weeks felt really rough, it took me that long to realise there were days when between the actual climbing and walking to and from the gym I was burning an extra thousand calories. I’ve since started making an effort to track how much I’m eating and how much I’m burning and feel tons better, if slightly full on the days I get home and realise dinner should be as much as I’d eat in a typical day before I was exercising.
I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.
This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
VR boxing, sword fights or tennis. Synthriders is very nice
In this vein, Ring Fit Adventure is pretty cool if you have a Switch
Consider rock climbing
Maybe not a drug. But if the improvements in health come from bio chemical signals, it should be possible to activate those signals without engaging in exercise. Eventually?
Strictly speaking, any intervention other than exercise is going to give you a subset of the total stimulation. A drug acting on the tissues directly would bypass the neurological component, for example.
If the idea is to avoid the effort of exercise, perhaps it would be worth considering the possibility that the effort itself is essential.
not entirely true. you can have drugs that directly act on the respective receptors, either inhibit or excite them.
If we were good enough to have drugs that could work with that precision we’d eliminate an enormous category of things. The side effects are usually the scary things. We have drugs that can cure the symptoms of depression and anxiety - they just so happen to be insanely addictive, cause respiratory depression, loss of coordination, and you quickly build a tolerance to them.
It would take a lot of different drugs to simulate what exercise does.
- Impact and stress strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons / ligaments
- energy use that leads to better sleep
- increased blood flow, development of new capillaries, stretching of blood vessels
- if you exercise outside, exposure to sunlight
- the release of all the associated neurochemicals
I have a suspicion that anything designed to mimic exercise would hurt as much as the actual thing given that so many of the benefits of exercise involve damaging bone and tissue then repairing it
Steroids. You will be growing muscle while sitting on a couch, even better than someone that naturally trains. However, you very likely will develop asymetries or other weird complications because you didnt properly work out.
My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.
On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.
You get plenty of asymmetries working out too, it's natural. Don't think just weight lifting, think of: tennis, boxing, baseball
Actually, that's not how steroids work. It's a common misconception that one can take "roids" and just sit on the sofa while munching on potato chips and get shredded and pack on muscle but in reality what the steroids do are to move ones natural limitations further away thus enabling larger muscle mass than naturally. But this still requires one to put in the work, i.e. the stimulus to trigger the muscle growth and to rest and eat properly.
They do work that way. Lots of studies show gains in muscle mass even with no excercise when people are on steroids. Consider average men who never excercise vs average women who never excercise. The men will have more muscle. That's what testosterone does, among other things.
That's part of why steroids were and sometimes still are used medically for people with cancer and other wasting diseases. It makes them eat more (they're usually strongly appetite inducing) but they also just help develop muscles even if sedentary.
(Of course it would be far more effective to also engage in high intensity resistance training.)
One completely random study result[0] supporting that couch + testosterone leads to bigger muscles. Maybe it is some puritanical thing, but not sure why this myth persists. Exercise + juice results in even bigger gains, but it is possible to increase muscle mass without hard work.
[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101Steroids are usually given to reduce inflammation and as immunosuppressants to stop the body from fighting back against whatever treatment is being given. The main method of weight gain with prednisone (the most common steroid) is water retention. Anabolic steroids are not commonly prescribed to cancer patients.
Cortico steroids usually result in muscle mass loss.
That's not how steroids work. Muscles need stimulus to grow even with steroids. What steroids do is make your body recover faster so you can train more often and build muscle right away.
The article has an opinion on this
> When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible.
sooner than later glp + myostatin inhibitors seems to be a big winner.
https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/72/Supplement_...
yes and no. A couple thousand myokines at work here.
Even lactate, formerly regarded as simply a waste product, is one.
But sure, a cocktail may be possible at some point, beyond getting a blood transfusion from someone fitter and maybe younger.
Yes we could also in potentially in the future manage to block pain signals when we stick our hand on hot stoves and that should be super!
This is so bleak. Go for a walk.
Time is short, I’ll take the walk and lift the weights but if I can get the results faster using biological engineering, I’m willing to spend and accept greater risk to make it happen (both for metabolic profile management a la GLP-1RAs and muscle growth). There is no extra credit for making life harder than it has to be, and we’re all dead eventually.
Why? My best friend uses a wheelchair and has dexterity issues in his hands due to a stroke.
Exercise for him is (a) expensive and (b) really really really painful.
If he could take a pill that simulated this it would be amazing for his life.
I was struck this past week to the extent that even a mild physical impairment can cause. I overdid it last week on a run and I spent this week nursing a swollen knee. What kind of exercise to do without involving my knee? I lift weights sometimes, but I can’t do that every day, and it also does not give me the mood altering effect that a good run does. I was drawing a blank glumly in an armchair when my wife suggested swimming at the local pool with pull buoys (so that I can keep my knee immobilized).
After a few experiments that felt more like drowning than swimming I finally got the hang of it. But it left me seriously worried about exercise in my future. After all, joint problems are likely going to happen again in my future. And I started to wonder: how do disabled folks do this? It must be incredibly difficult (and expensive!). I really am incredibly lucky across multiple fronts to have the life that I have.
Cycling is really good as it doesn't strain joints, merely gently lubricates it. I broke my knee and was put on the bike real quick, as soon as I had enough mobility to make a full round, for rehabilitation.
Yup, +1 for cycling! For me, it's some ankle cartridge destruction from an old fracture that finally put a halt to my formerly extensive trail & XC running & recreational racing. But cycling is coming back to the core of my exercise program (Mountain/trails: really miss road biking but traffic & drivers' attitudes seem to hazardous now). And not expensive either - plenty of bikes on Craigslist good enough to not give you bad habits and still get good exercise, even decade+ old race bikes.
It is really all about working with what capabilities you still have, and maximizing those. Even that may provide enough healing & fitness to get back to a bit of previously constrained activities.
I really feel for people who have never experienced a good trail ride. It’s possibly one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever experienced. Even an ordinary trail ride puts a smile on my face.
It's difficult to overstate how much better my life has become after starting tirzepatide, consequently losing weight, and steadily increasing exercise as I've gotten lighter. If I were the richest guy in the world, I'd negotiate with Eli Lilly to make tirzepatide (or maybe the forthcoming orforglipron) basically free for anyone who wants it.
> Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do.
OTOH we have billions or more mechanisms (basically all of them) that assume that we exercise regularly, at least when we are healthy.
>Like someone already said: what if you get an injury going to hard at it?
There's no need to go hard, even steady walking for 20 minutes a day is healthy. And recent studies show that you don't need to jog or run, walking is almost as efficient and less stressful for your joints.
One of the best ways to exercise as long as you aren't a brain in a jar is to use an indoor rowing machine. Rowing will engage about 80% of your muscles.
Another great option is rebounding. Every time you land, every muscle in your body is exercised. It's also easy on the joints and you can do it inside if the weather is bad.
Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].
It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.
My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.
Older rebounders used metal springs and were harder on the joints. Newer rebounders use bungees for a softer, gentler and silent landing. Some people rebound while their partner sleeps a few feet away.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/fitness/forget-running-na...
For me I don't think walking 20 minutes a day is enough. I did more than that right after graduation. It didn't change any of the metrics usually used for measuring healthiness: my resting heart rate didn't change, my VO2max didn't change, my weight didn't change, etc. it was when I started regularly running 2 hours per week (aka around 20 minutes per day) that I started observing my health improve. YMMV.
> use an indoor rowing machine
Humans evolved to run but rowing is much better in many ways.
I'm up to 1.3 million meters this year so far (C2 Model D / PM4). I've missed zero days since the first of the year. The only way this is possible is because the impact is whatever you want it to be. You can scale all the way to ~zero if you are having a really shit day and just need the mental checkmark. You can throw the MacBook on a chair next to the rower and watch some dopamine slop to keep you distracted for the 30 minutes. Whatever it takes. Achieving 500 calories/hr is not difficult even if you've never looked at one of the machines before.
Going outside in any capacity has a lot higher physical/mental barrier. Other erg machines like treadmills and stationary bikes are something that my particular monkey brain doesn't like as much for whatever reason.
Any recommendations on a rowing machine?
The C2 machine is fine, I use it regularly in a nearby studio besides other training and it's perfect for training. If the studio wouldn't be easily available I would buy a C2. And, by the way, my wife too started to be an avid rower after giving the machine a try.
I was rowing on real boats during my school and university days, but sadly never found the time afterwards to get join a club and row in teams.
Rowing machines with a water container are en vogue, but they are heavier (if filled with water) need regular water maintenance and the training effect isn't better.
Edit: here's a good intro to using such a machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHHy0KpFKvE
I think you might be underselling the C2. I only ever row occasionally, but it is my understanding that it is the BIFL model. The type most gyms will buy - way more utilization hours than you will ever hit at home.
for those who are biochemically inclined:
Myokines aka exerkines
I hate exercise. The only thing I hate more is not exercising.
I tried to outrun my depression but then I became too depressed to run. It's so frustrating to feel that exercise doesn't give me the boost it used to.
GLP-1 is a rare opportunity for our overweight nation to "get back on the treadmill" in both a literal and figurative way.
If you have been sedentary for a long time and are overweight, you obviously have too much weight for your muscular strength and connective tissues, which have concurrently atrophied with inactivity, in addition to reduced neuro-biomechanic maps in your brain since you haven't used the circuitry.
This all adds up to a high initial injury risk in starting exercise even if you have the mentally focus.
But GLP-1, if it is the miracle it purports, should be able to drop overweight people, even if it is temporarily, to the point where you can being exercise much more safely, and/or with more intensity and duration to get more benefits sooner.
On a macro level a universal health care system that is cheap and effective is really a generation or two away with heavily incentivized exercise, and not without precedent, if I am to understand what Iceland did.
We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive. These aren't 1-2% improvements at macro levels. 10% improvements, which in pharma land are considered exceptionally effective drugs, and a minimum, and 30-50% miracle drug levels of outcomes are on the table.
But our medical establishment is either drugs or surgery. The extent of insurance company inducements are "silver sneakers".
The perverse accounting involved in extreme obesity may demand a national level program of "Biggest Loser" (although, not to that insanity) for financial inducements to get people to lose weight, because the loss of "caring" for the obese (FORTY PERCENT of Americans are obese and it keeps getting worse each decade).
> We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive.
There's a song about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4SzvsMFaek
Until you injure something particularly nasty, like a joint, tendon, muscle tear, etc...
A safer option is rebounding. Every time you land, every muscle in your body is exercised. It's also easy on the joints and you can do it inside if the weather is bad.
Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].
It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.
My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/fitness/forget-running-na...
I injured my knees by running more than my knees could handle. Instead of never exercising again, after a 2 month long break I started incorporating other forms of exercise in my run schedule. Now I run longer and have other parts of my body feel better.
There’s a hundred reasons to not exercise but you only need to focus on the one reason why you need to keep doing it.
Use it or lose it!
I'd rather be outside exercising / having fun and get the occasional twisted ankle or whatever, then staying home sitting on the couch and feeling like crap.
Personally the only, very minor, sports injury I have had is jamming my thumb pretty badly when my skis came off (poor bindings). Was better in a couple of weeks - no big deal. I'm 64 and started skiing 6-7 years ago, now happily going down blacks.
I did partially tear my shoulder muscle off the bone (rotator cuff tear), but that wasn't due to sports - was due to carrying my daughter around for too long (as she got bigger/heavier) with one arm and the constant bouncing. Painful at the time, but not a big deal - got better in the end just by using it and building up the joint strength again. You could also twist an ankle at home tripping over the dog - stuff happens.
Due to age/genetics I don't have the best knees, but still run, just on a rubber running track rather than on the road/sidewalk which is too jolting. You adapt.
Hmm, what else ... I have an occasional inner ear balance issue (age again?) that gets brought on by too rapid head movement or jolts, so I just avoid that. I swim outdoors in the summer all the time, and just avoid the crawl since side breathing is the kind of thing that may cause it. Again, not even caused by sports, and swimming has to be about as safe a type of exercise as you can get.
Get out there and enjoy yourself, and get some exercise!
Now tell me how many years extra you live compared to the you that just eats healthy but doesn't exercise outside of 3000 steps a day (not bedridden, not intentionally exercising)
I think it's more about quality of life rather than extending it - enjoying outdoor activities (skiing is a blast!), enjoying looking good and being in shape, able to do all my own yard work and snow shovelling etc without it being an effort.
Now, while I choose to do things that I enjoy (and the skiing is purely for enjoyment, even though it requires a lot of energy), I will say that part of the motivation for wanting to keep in good shape is seeing what happened to my Dad who had an office job (professor) and didn't exercise at all other than a bit of walking to the grocery store etc, and in his old age had all sorts of pinched nerve and mobility issues due to lack of muscle tone and strength, and realized it was too late to do anything about it.
Then we switch sports and start rehab. Aerobic exercise can be done in so many ways.
You can also walk and bike, it doesn't need to be crazy intensive.
As if no one, ever, in the history of time, was injured by walking or biking?
The vast vast majority of injuries are recoverable from and you will be able to return to what you did before. There are some bad ones, but even people with hip replacements, ACL tears and all sorts of nasty “career ending” injuries will be able to run/bike/play tennis/golf/weightlift.
It’s pretty well understood that stopping moving is incredibly bad for your body, and modern recoveries focus on pain management, pain avoidance and getting you moving again as quickly as possible.
A proper training plan makes you more injury resistant and makes it easier to bounce back from injuries if you do happen to get hurt.
For example, just look at the data for sarcopenia: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9654071
Lack of exercise is vastly more likely to cause injury to your body than exercise is.
Unless you're an elite athlete pushing your body beyond what is reasonable, but that really doesn't apply to most people.
Exercising wrong is more likely to cause you injury than either of those things. Do a bit, and do it carefully
Such platitudes are legitimately useless as nearly everyone who injured themselves while exercising immediately sees the error in their ways, but that doesn't help them undo the permanent damage they've done
Pretty much the worst thing you can do exercising is an ACL tear or an Achilles tendon rupture. Both of these are absolutely awful injuries to pick up (whoever designed the human body really phoned it in at the knee joint IMO). Both are usually solved with surgery, and will massively impact your life for 9-12 months. But the real fix to those injuries is to get back exercising again. If Tom Brady can play NFL football after an ACL tear and surgery, you can probably go back running with the right advice.
The only way to avoid injury is to not use your body at all but your muscles will atrophy and you’ll end up injured _anyway_ that way.
Most people who injure themselves exercising go to PT and then go straight back to exercising because they know how important it is and how good it feels.
You're physically lazy and unmotivated, we get it. Hiding behind "but maybe I can get hurt" is not going to make you better or improve your health. Go do something hard and stop being afraid of living life.
It will happen. But, that’s part of the game. The alternative? A mind in a useless body.
There will be mind but not a healthy one.
Love the description!
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt? This has to be as unhealthy as exercise is healthy.
Grateful, yes, appreciative, absolutely, motivated to do good, of course. Having to pay "back" (to whom?), feeling guilty? Absurd and corrosive
When you see how much suffering is allotted to those less lucky than yourself it’s natural to feel a little bad or guilty. It shows that you care about the wellbeing of others. Not helpful to beat yourself up but to shrug your shoulders and go “sucks to suck” is bad.
I've traveled to some of the poorest parts of the world. I try to donate regularly to the less fortunate. Yet, I've never felt guilt. What does guilt have to do with admitting the world is a cruel place?
The word "faith" is sufficient to describe the discordance here.
A person cannot be reasoned out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I believe you are misunderstanding empathy. Putting yourself in the shoe of the other and feeling his pain does not necessarily leads to guilt.
I don't recall suggesting that it must.
(I do recall saying suggesting that people will not be swayed from whatever they believe on this matter, though.)
Why do you donate? Do you owe them anything? No. Yet, you still donate. But how much do you donate? Why that amount and not nearly everything? Surely there are people in need!
Can donations be egoistic? Wanting to improve others lives will lead to a better world also for me, even if that's one dime a time.
You are right. I haven't thought about donations possibly not being altruistic, but there actually are such ones. Personally I would say we need separate words to distinguish egoistic charity/donations from the altruistic ones.
But how does donating to some poor people abroad benefits you?
Noblesse oblige used to be a virtue among the noble but it seems now people consider it "Absurd and corrosive"
OP said of the author:
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?
The author themselves said:
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
You mentioned "noblesse oblige" which is
> a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities
It seems that everybody is talking past one another in this exchange. The author acknowledges that guilt over this is unproductive and implicitly admonishes readers of means to help those less fortunate in the same paragraph:
> The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor.
One can simultaneously shed feelings of guilt over their fortunate socioeconomic position and give to those less fortunate. These two things are not mutually exclusive. To say that somebody should feel bad over something over which they had no control is nothing more than a secular version of original sin. I know I'd prefer to have a privileged class that pays it forward out of an intrinsic motivation to do good instead of a negative one like guilt... seems more stable and less prone to class warfare, but then again I'm no historian or anthropologist.
Good old colonial times, free of workplace regulations
The author doesn’t say they feel bad about being lucky. Quite to the contrary, they are implying that one shouldn’t feel bad about it. One might feel a certain responsibility from particularly good fortune, however.
I am confused. Just in that small excerpt you quoted it reads "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either", explicitly rejecting the larger part of idea you are critizing?
Because its not preemptive, this is them reaching the right side of the guilt bell curve
For people raised to be susceptible to guilt from a young age
Guilt? Maybe not. Feeling bad about seeing all the injustice in the world and wanting to change it is pretty natural.
The world is unjust and 99.9% of it is not our fault. It's caused by nature and other people and bad luck and history and bad systems. But nonetheless, many important institutions exist to make the world somewhat less unjust. This happens because people make it happen.
I think you might feel differently if you spent some time in sub saharan Africa. I went for the first time this year and was amazed at the warmth and generosity of the people I met. I was also shocked at how solvable most of their problems are with even just a little bit of money. Like I felt guilty, not in like a pay back way but in a "wow i can't believe how much time this lady would save if this village had can openers" kind of way.
I guess it is the same as taking a multiple-choice test, filling it out randomly and getting a perfect score.
Yes, you are lucky. But also: you should feel guilty about it.
Same with random things happening in your life and turning out well. If you don't know why they happened then who says you will be lucky the next time? Better feel a little guilty and try to understand how you can turn the odds your way (and perhaps also so others can benefit).
Why is the guilt necessary?
The guilt is a reminder of the cognitive debt.
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way?
For the same reason you have survivors guilt. When you see the similarity in others, ie empathy, and you see a divergent fate from yourself (either positive or negative), you can feel an incongruence when real world picks vastly different outcomes. This is deeply human, and likely goes further back to primates or even mammals.
Conversely, this is the sympathetic effect that can trick people into buying lottery tickets because if they see a ”nobody” winning big, ”they can too”, despite the odds. Or the American version: working at Walmart and seeing a billionaire on TV and thinking ”that’s me, soon”.
Recognizing the luck of birth conditions isn’t any different. I can relate because they are extremely strong predictors of welfare and success, but it’s also not something I go around and dwell on or causes me any pain. I think most people who get frustrated with others recognizing their own privilege is it can undermine their sense of identity, such as ”everything i have is a result of my individual hard work, and those who have less are lazy”. You can build a false identity on either premise.
What on earth are you talking about? The text you quote says literally "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" and you're asking "How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?"???
Surely I'm missing something.
Most communication isn’t a legal contract, and a lot of meaning is implicit, not just what is explicitly said.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the statements you mentioned, but "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" implies wallowing in guilt is a natural or even expected feeling. The person you’re replying to is questioning why someone would wallow in guilt in the first place.
You don't see why people might feel something (including guilt) upon realising most of their place in life comes from luck and factors beyond their control?
You said “surely I’m missing something” so I explained it.
I thought I made it pretty clear I wasn’t offering an opinion on the subject, just explaining it
I don't know about the author specifically but in many different cultures people have different understanding about what being rich means.
There are many concepts in christianity, islam etc. on it and varies a lot. In some cultures being rich is viewed as a mission given by god to do something great with it for example. In others its said that property is owned by the god and you are just given some limited time to use it for the good of humanity and preserve it, So it's not something to be proud of and you may feel sorry that others were not given such a mission.
These things not only depend on the specific religion, i.e. Christianity vs Islam but also within stuff like Protestantism and Catholicism.
Lots of stuff that the current right wing American narrative freaks out on is just a school of thought among Christians, Jews and Muslims. Many time those people are not woke or PC or whatever, just Christians that are taught by their parents to be modest and avoid bing flamboyant on their wealth. Even when people are not religious, these things run deep and defines your worldview.
Its to preempt "oh you are so lucky" distraction
My family literally died on the boat coming to the USA, leaving only a 9 year old girl orphan, another leaving a teenage girl orphan arriving alone in the USA. Luck had nothing to do with it. Some brave ass tough as nails women did though. Honor the people that put in effort/sacrifice to get your here. They were real, not some nebulous magical 'luck'.
The writer didn't actually say they feel "guilty" about it, nor that they should feel "guilty" about it.
But that term triggers libertarian sociopaths. Any idea of care for others as a priority threatens their desire to be allowed to take whatever they can.
The USA being the richest country is also somewhat debatable, especially when you consider the access to health services for the average citizen.
If we're talking about good fortune, you'd probably be better off being born in Norway or something like that.
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