Issue #5: What happened to physical mobility?
Why and how daily physical movement went from a natural expression of our bodies to a mere chore?
When was the last time you looked forward to going grocery shopping? Yeah…what an absurd question. And yet it’s as important as ever to ask. Turn out, there’s a lot going on under that not-so-concerning symptom of our rich modern lives. Rather than giving an obvious answer, let’s do this. Replace grocery shopping with any chore that requires you to take your body and put it in the outside world.
Observe what comes to your mind immediately. There’s too much heat, air pollution, etc. Or most probably, you may think that chores are such a waste of time that add almost negligible value to your life. Congrats, give yourself a back tap. The bug of productivity porn has been successful in making your mind a fruitful home.
Another more intrusive bug is the thought of energy conservation. Forget all the above reasons but you might still be thinking - “I should save energy for tomorrow’s work. As if we are racing against time except time doesn’t care. The bug enters sneakily into our subconscious minds through the culture. It is so omniscient in our culture that we don’t see it as a bug anymore.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), the famous canadian media philosopher, once said that when a new technology is wholeheartedly adopted in a society, not only do we gain a new capability of communication and action, it fundamentally changes what it means to a human being. Digital media has taken home our lives for a while now. But, can you see how over time it has capped our desire to step out of this new home?
The unwelcomed but never-ending stimulation of digital tech has made us afraid of feeling bored. Remember the childhood days when you could just spend hours with your friend laying on the grass? The meaning of boredom is itself skewed by the pop culture to sell you stuff that will heal your evil boredom. Whitespace is seen as a waste of time now. We are always ambiently optimizing our life now. And as usual, being human beings, we have easily adapted to this new reality. Physical movement used to be a natural expression of our existence. Now it has been reduced to chore-like movements in lifeless gyms. If you are not moving it to get “fit”, you are just wasting time.
What are we running towards?
We were promised flying cars, we got delivery apps. We dreamt of human-machine symbiosis but it turned out like a toxic relationship between a couple that can’t let go of each other. Our cities and the spaces within are designed for accommodating the maximum capacity of people they can. They don’t put thoughts into the design of a typical resident’s life around the city. There’s no beauty to intra-city movement but common spaces which leads to monotony. There’s a little avenue for personalization.
Since opportunists don’t leave any vacuum in society, we are literally inventing complex fucking technology to move our bodies inside our homes. Irony has never felt more seen in our world. Ahh, the dream of transhumanism improving the human condition. Technology will remove the class barrier. We’ll finally be free and equal when we’ll simultaneously sacrifice our collective agency to obtain the drug of infinite growth. It’s like we failed to tame the capitalistic reality so we thought okay, why not try the opposite. Why not become completely delusional and see where that leads us.
Close your eyes. Count to 1. That’s how forever feels. It feels like yesterday when we used to play with friends on dusty grounds, running, dancing, and fighting like the feral beings we once were. Now we need occasions to dance (parties, weddings, clubs), run (sponsored marathons, organized online communities), and fight-like activities (gyms, training centers, etc). Every human need has been programmed. Everything must have an agenda. Got no agenda. No reason to go a little crazy. This inversion of our behavior did not take shape in a single day but got accumulated one loose end of our will at a time.
How pathetic to realize that one of our fundamental expressions has been converted into an incentive-seeking activity. Rather than moving to keep our bodies healthy, now we move only if it tends to productive output. What a shame! The physical spaces and systems we inhabit have been slowly converted to sell us services rather than provide us with what we deserve. Thereby making us helplessly settle into spaces rife with loneliness-inducing emotions. It’s not that we don’t want to move. The environment itself has been reduced to only serving as a utility and not enough wonder.
The ancient nomads used to wander around places only to form fleeting relationships with a certain place. Now, the modern digital nomads wander around places failing to cultivate formidable relationships with people always in transit. Makes one think what’s worse? To sum it up, the very essence of movement which is an ongoing intimacy and a sense of belonging with nature has been stripped from the spaces that we inhabit. All we are left with are brazen spaces that feel like a chore to engage with.
Case In Point - Some cultures are modified and contrived by digital media to the extent that people are live streaming their whole day as is on social media. Because they feel like there’s is nothing stimulating enough left in the outside world. And this is just one of the thousands of ways in which people are succumbed to expressing themselves within the walls of their protective shells.
Look the other way, sometimes?
Are you running on a script?
There comes a point where you have to ask yourself the hard question - “Am I running on a script?” Does your mind remain consumed by your work after work hours? If your answer is yes for most of the days, then you are running on a script. However, you are not alone. In the hyper-connected era, the inner narrative that keeps running in our heads is ever too strong. More chaos leads to more entropy. That’s why we remember one thing and keep forgetting other things.
In this forgetfulness salad, we miss the faint signal that our bodies emit. The signal for us to move. It could be a sprained neck, a backache, burning eyes, an over-caffeinated head, etc. But the pain becomes ambient against the noise of the digital ether. In extreme cases, we schedule time for stepping outside. The microchip robots turn us into robots themselves. The circle of automation completes.
Do you look for detail in reality?
Truth is, we find reality boring against the hyper-stimulating digital media. Digital media fatigue creates a mental fog in the mind that makes us miss the beautiful details hidden in reality.
The narrative that keeps running around in everyone’s head is strong. On top of that, it’s constantly reinforced by the Internet many times a day. The brain fog is no joke. Culture also plays a big part in not developing the practice of finding detail and beauty in small things. Highly domestic cultures are prone to miss this. But even in that scope, you can find limitless things to put your attention on.
If you always try to poke into the reality of things, most of the problems will fix automatically.
Do you care for your mind?
We have a misplaced attachment to our minds. It’s a deeply rooted one. While our mind is responsible for all that we think, feel, experience, etc, it is given the least love and care. Rather, it is seen as the source of all our suffering. On the other hand, the knowledgeable and the enlightened know that the mind and the body are inseparable.
You don’t need any philosophical inquiry or a scientific analysis to believe it. Our minds and bodies flourished with nature together. They are woven too intricate for us to separate them out and create conceptual theories. Richard Feynman once said - “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”. And yet we are fooling ourselves more and more every new day. By burning more brain cells than calories.
The search for objective truths doesn’t help much to drive our day-to-day lives. To keep pushing forward. The subjective experience of our physicality is all that there is. The more the world gets complex, the closer we need our subjective experiences. Humanity must not be lost in abstraction. That might be the only antidote to technological entropy.
Isn’t movement poetry?
Finally, movement is expression, and expression performed with intent eventually tends towards poetry. There is a kind of pain that is necessary for growth and flourishing. Anyone, who has worked out for a considerable time knows that. It doesn’t come by mere suffering. It has to be earned as it is the gateway to devolving all of the unnecessary sufferings in our lives. Once they cross the initial pain barrier and remain consistent, exercising becomes addictive for a lot of people. After the bootstrap problem [link 3rd issue here] is solved, it’s only poetry all the way down.
My humble attempt to capture running into a short poem:
It’s our duty to pay out tributes to evolution and nature. Our bodies came into being hand in hand with nature’s development. It is a symbiotic relationship. So, we owe nature to not let our bodies deteriorate like this. Nature bestowed us with minds to flourish in her cradle. Not to make our lives a prisoner of our attitudes and spaces enclosing us. Did we really alter the environment just to become obese and carry back pains en-masse? The techno-optimists will always lure you into believing that it’s all for the greater good of the future. But it’s just another piece of propaganda. Truth needs no verification by any authority. It’s visible in stark daylight blinded only by our narratives.
We can walk the future
How did we lose the tradition of movement?
History is rife with proof that knowledge that is not actively and obsessively can be lost in a single generation shift. The generation of the 21st century never learned the tacit art of building communities. We were busy dreaming and plucking the fruits of the technological economy. Not to mention the inflated view of this economy on social media. Reality and fantasy merged in messy ways to the extent of blinding us. But the reality could never catch with a polished, almost perfect presentation of the urban lifestyle. And we had nowhere to turn to find refuge in our shared disappointments. Any idea of “shared anything” was slowly ripped from the old fabric.
Leisure got systematized for monetization. In the new economy, opportunists filled the vacuum with amusement spaces for people ready to spend. Fixed spaces got crowded and monotonous. Entropy was removed from day-to-day movement and hence any element of novelty, wonder, and surprise. The Internet revolution put the last nail in the coffin. Everyone discarded the physical world in favor of a more promising digital world. And rightly so because it got boring as hell and we hate to be bored. So, here we are now.
Are we lacking energy management?
When was the last time you felt unbridled energy? Weeks ago? Months ago? Why is that the case? Has it always been like that? Aren’t we concerned? These days, fewer people can cross the energy barrier and live a vital life. Feels like the current lifestyle has put a huge lid on our energy jars. In the recent past when we were living in communities, it was not a problem. When you have a community, movement happens automatically. It’s contagious. You don’t have to spend any mental energy deciding where to go and what to do. Now we are world-building in the virtual space. We don’t have any incentive to move in our physicality anymore. We can’t stop the virtual world from spreading. However, we are known for adjusting our gears. A better understanding of personal energy can help regain what keeps getting lost.
Do we even want to move in the future?
Finally, we must honestly ask ourselves - do we even want to move anymore? We obsessively debate whether AI will take our jobs while we coyly ignore the current crisis that we are in right now? Why? Maybe because there is comfort in shared negligence. Don’t forget that we are mimetic creatures. We adapt very quickly to anything sprawling in society. In the same way, genes behave. A more adaptable gene doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for the species. Its whole job is to outpace the weakly adaptable sibling gene to remain alive. But unlike genes, we have massive brains and the skill to reason. There is a silent storm brewing up in this generation and it’s our job to listen and tame it to reclaim what we lost and unleash the full potential of our bodyminds.
This was an introductory post to set the context for the state of physical movement in our current society. Coming up in the next issues are some methods to cultivate a practice of physical movement in our current lifestyles. Note that we’ll use the knowledge that we have covered to figure out some effective solutions. So, it’s highly recommended to read/skim through the past issues or read the corresponding tweets.
What thoughts arose inside you after reading this. Share with me at letsharden@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter @poetofgrindset or leave a comment here.
Don’t hold back. I assure you that I’ll get back to you. But you have to take the first step!
We are in this together and we are going to win ourselves.