What does it mean when a supple, young creature gets up in front of a group of people and shows them how to move their bodies? Does it have any significance? Does it offer any motivating power or inspiration?

I suggest that it doesn’t really tell us a great deal. Of course the youngster can move. Of course he or she can jump, stretch and lift. Of course he or she is slender and beautiful. That’s the nature of young bodies. When you’re twenty or thirty years old, you look great and you can do almost anything. And thus, your exceptional performance doesn’t really carry much weight. We may be impressed or jealous, but we’re not truly inspired.

I have long believed that health and fitness credibility lies with those who’ve figured out ways to sustain their performance over the course of decades. These are the people who have the formula.These are the people that we should be listening to.

Paul Chek once suggested – tongue in cheek, I’m sure – that doctors should practice naked or nearly so, in order that patients could see how they managed their own health. If your physician is in terrible condition after all, it really takes a bite out of his credibility.

In a similar way, I’ve come to the conclusion that there should be a minimum age for health and fitness instructors. Let’s say 40. Or better yet, 50. If you can stand up in front of a group and demonstrate your long-term results in the flesh, then you’re qualified. No exams or certifications necessary.

Over the years, many of us have been struck by the powerful imagery of “Getting Old is Not for Sissies.” This cover photo stands as an enduring icon for what’s possible. At the time this photo was taken, John Turner was 67 years old. As a practicing psychiatrist, he spoke a refreshing philosophy: “I think physicians have a responsibility to sell health at least as much as they sell pills.” (He made this statement in the early 1980′s, before the medical industry dove headlong into techno-pharmaceutical fixes for every human affliction.) Who wouldn’t want this man as a teacher, fitness instructor or physician?

In this same spirit, I’ve recently discovered a powerful new book called Fifty Athletes Over Fifty. Author Don McGrath has interviewed a series of rare individuals, athletes who are still in the game, still living a highly physical life well into what some people call “old age.” The individual stories are fascinating, but it’s the core idea that really carries the quest. For McGrath and his lifetime athletes, it’s all about developing the right relationship with the body, the process and the sport. In short, it’s about falling in love with movement.

McGrath sums up his findings in a simple paradigm: Love it – dream it – live it – powered by feelings of joy, fun, sensation and accomplishment. It’s a powerful formula, one that has been obvious to young, independent athletes for a long time. Surfers, skateboarders, rockclimbers and free runners have built entire lifestyles, sub-cultures and movement disciplines around quality life experience. For them, no extrinsic motivation is required. It’s the experience and the dream that pulls them into active, committed participation.

Sadly, this auto-telic approach has been largely eclipsed by linear thinkers who seek to reduce human health to spreadsheet-ready numbers and formulas, as if emotion and spirit had nothing to do with physical engagement. On the contrary, emotion, spirit and aesthetics exert a powerful pull that lasts a lifetime. If you fall in love with your practice, your art or your discipline, the technicalities are just a sideshow.

Listen to Don’s interview with Frank Forencich.

Question: What’s the biggest health problem in the country today?

Answer: It’s not what you think.

It’s not obesity, diabetes, heart disease, low back pain or cancer.

If you’re thinking depression, you’re getting warm, but that’s still not quite on the mark.

My claim will surprise you, because it’s not biomedical in the conventional sense. It’s almost impossible to measure or track, but it’s very real and has profound consequences across the spectrum of human performance, health and experience.

In fact, the greatest health problem in the country today is presenteeism, the lack of engagement with physicality, life and the body. Allow me to explain…

Presenteeism is a term taken from workplace studies, a variation on the word absenteeism. Presenteeism refers to the condition in which people bring their bodies to the workplace, but leave their attention at home. They’re present, but they’re not really participating in a substantive way. It’s estimated that presenteeism costs American business billions of dollars annually and is even more costly than absenteeism.

Presenteeism in the workplace is bad enough, but there’s another sense of presenteeism that people bring, not just to work, but to their bodies. That is, many of us are markedly disengaged from our physicality; we live in our bodies as passive spectators. We use our bodies as locomotor devices to get from place to place, to fulfill obligations or to sample shallow pleasures, but rarely do we participate fully in the act of being totally physically alive.

Physical presenteeism has now become a genuine epidemic with vast numbers of people who never engage their bodies in any consistent or substantive way. They have vital signs, but are only half alive. They live passively in their bodies, like ghosts.

origins

Full participation and engagement with the physical body has been the historical norm for the vast majority of human history, but modernity has weakened our engagement with ourselves. The process began with technological innovations that made physicality increasingly optional. When motors and engines do all our work for us, there’s no compelling reason to get our bodies involved and people begin to withdraw from their physicality.

Increasing medicalization of human life has also contributed to our non-participation.  The invention of antibiotics, technical and pharmaceutical medicine and a highly trained class of body experts leaves the average person out of the loop. When it comes to matters of the body, many of us are now content to leave it to others. Our bodies, it seems, are just not a part of our job description.

Finally, much of our physical presenteeism stems from our experience and relationship with TV and other passive media. The medium promotes disengagement: All you have to do is show up and press a button; no participation or risk is required. As millions of disengaged people spend billions of hours absorbing media, we create a spectator culture. We sit back and become weak, passive spectators of our own bodies.

a disease in itself

It’s almost certainly the case that physical presenteeism leads to biomedical afflictions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, low back pain, fibromyalgia and other disorders. After all, when we withdraw our attention and engagement from our physicality, we also take away a powerful source of vitality and energy; in turn, our bodies become more vulnerable to the challenges of the world. Presenteeism also leads to a loss of meaning, a vulnerability to depression and a general weakening of the organism as a whole. It seems probable that a huge percentage of our modern “lifestyle diseases” are either caused or exacerbated by our failure to engage in a meaningful physical relationship with our bodies.

But while the link between presenteeism and disease is almost certainly real, this fact misses the deeper point. That is, quite apart from the health consequences, physical presenteeism is a disease in and of itself, a state of diminished vitality and life. How else would you describe a condition that somehow leads a person to give away a substantial proportion of his or her most precious life experience? Call it an existential disease if you must, but the fact remains: physical presenteeism is not a minor side-effect of the modern human experience. It is a major, debilitating disease that wrecks millions of lives every year.

Ironically, the fitness industry itself promotes this epidemic of physical disengagement by bowing down to the prevailing cultural narrtative that “exercise is boring.” To remedy this presumption, they set up treadmills and other cardio equipment with wide-screen TVs. In this environment, customers can mount the machine, turn off their attention and go unconscious until the buzzer goes off. This is nothing less than a prescription for physical disengagement. Even worse, the whole thing turns out to be a net negative for the exerciser. Any gains made in cardiovascular fitness are offset by the deepening habit of disengagement that people build up in front of the TV. As Jim Loehr put it in his bestselling The Power of Story,

“There’s a staggering amount of waste created every day in gyms across America as seemingly dedicated patrons run on treadmills or climb StairMasters while watching CNBC or ESPN or listening to their iPods, not at all connecting with the physical activity they’re supposedly engaged in.”

Every time a big box gym installs another treadmill with a TV, the fitness industry advances a disengaged lifestyle and a dysfunctional relationship with the body. In this sense, we are definitely part of the problem.

air guitar heroes

At the outset, this distinction between presenteeism and full engagement may seem subtle, but over time it becones immense. Neuroscientist John Medina, author of Brain Rules, makes this point crystal clear when he says “the difference between just showing up and full engagement is the difference between air guitar and actually learning to play the guitar.” You can play air guitar all you want, but it will never make you a musician. For that, you have to engage, sweat, participate and take personal risk, over and over again, for thousands of hours. Merely holding the guitar in your hands will get you nowhere. The analogy is clear: By failing to engage our bodies with depth, substance and authentic participation, we are now creating vast populations of physical air guitarists. It’s no wonder our health is failing.

Woody Allen was wrong

Woody Allen once declared that “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Coaches and commentators often bring out this quote when they try to motivate people to get past the sticking point of total apathy, hoping to inspire them to get off the couch and actually do something. Obviously, showing up is better than not being there at all, but fundamentally, Woody Allen was completely off the mark. In fact, simply showing up doesn’t get us anywhere near 80% of the way to success. Just showing up for conditioning class or dance, music, job training or any other discipline doesn’t even get us close to learning or high performance. No, we have to get our bodies, our attention and our lives intimately involved in the process. Being present is obviously necessary, but it’s not even close to being sufficient. To revise Allen’s estimate, we might say “Twenty percent of success is showing up. The rest depends on full participation and engagement.”

See also “The Power of Full Engagement” by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Here’s an image for you to spread around.

Click here to get to the download page.

By now, many you will have read the intriguing piece in the May 3rd New York Times, My Left Foot: The High Costs of Fallen Arches. It’s a detailed account of one man’s battle with flat feet and the extensive corrective surgery that he endured to return his body to “normal.”

There is so much to say about this piece that it’s almost impossible to know where to begin. The questions just leap off the page: How did the author get to such a state that “required” massive surgical intervention on both feet? There is no mention of attempts at barefooting or other functional rehab approaches. So why the rush to surgery? Why the assumption that the supposed structural abnormality was the cause of the patient’s pain? Isn’t there a normal variation in foot arch? How would this person have fared in prehistory?

Depending on your perspective, this story is either a) a dramatic example of the success of modern medicine or b) a dramatic example of medicine gone completely off the rails.

I have my own opinions on this of course, but I want to hear yours.

Please comment.

“The smaller we come to feel ourselves compared to the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness.”
Arne Naess

The ground under my feet feels solid now, but they tell me it’s really an illusion and a failure to appreciate the bigger terrestrial picture. What’s actually happening is a highly dynamic process. That apparently solid earth beneath my feet is just a huge tectonic surfboard, floating on a vast sea of molten rock a thousand miles below. I’m not actually standing still, but rather surfing on a vast, slow motion planetary wave, trying my best to keep my balance, my grace and my purpose.

And it’s good to know how to surf, because you never really know what that dynamism will bring and where that tectonic wave might take you. All it takes is one small shift of direction, a subtle change in pressure or momentum, and your world can change, maybe forever.

Of course, I had no thought of any of this as I sat in my window seat at 30,000 feet, staring out at the vast expanse of the North Atlantic. According to my ticket, I was bound for London, where I was to deliver a two-day seminar at WildFitness. I was prepped and ready to share my thoughts and movements. My slide show was honed, my material ready for prime time. Aside from the usual drudgery of air travel, I was feeling good; everything seemed to be in order.

Suddenly, the captain’s voice shook me out of my daydream, but instead of the usual monotonous directive to keep my seat belt fastened, there was something new, a word I had never heard on an aircraft before: volcano. My ears perked up; this was novel, exciting and potentially very disruptive. As details began to emerge, I realized that our flight was being diverted to Paris. A massive dust cloud had blanketed the entire region and all of UK airspace was now officially closed until further notice.

I could only guess at the details, but it was surely a tectonic drama: the North Atlantic plate had just moved a few inches further into its subduction zone, slipping, driving and pressurizing the deep roots of Iceland. A trillion tons of mass collided with an immovable object of planetary dimensions and something just had to give. And so the volcano did its job, relieving the pressure by ejecting a monstrous dust cloud, oblivious to the consequences for aircraft engines, human travel schedules and the seminar plans of health educators.

This diversion would be a major inconvenience, of course. I would have to navigate more airports, more ground transport, more delay and uncertainty. But it all seemed somehow fitting, given my history of travel to the UK. Just last year, I had made a farcical journey from Seattle to London where I was rudely deported on a paperwork technicality. The similarities were clear: As a ponderous and immoveable force, UK Border “Service” falls into the same category as volcanoes and other natural forces. Both are capricious and inexplicable, following their own laws in their own time. And so, it turned out that I was paradoxically prepared for this new challenge: Having dealt with UK immigration, I was ideally suited to spar with the volcano.

In the end, I successfully navigated both UK Border Control and the volcano. The WildFitness event was a tremendous success, marred only by the fact that some participants were rebuked by the dust cloud and had their flights canceled. We played hard, studied hard and celebrated a new tribe of exuberants.

Of course, it might have gone the other way entirely. The volcano might have completely derailed our plans: It might have doubled its output and blanketed the entire continent. A shift in the jetstream might have kept the dust cloud centered directly over the UK. Administrators in charge of UK airspace might have prevailed over airline executives and kept the airports closed for weeks or months. Fine-grained dust might have brought down dozens of aircraft, sending the entire system into chaos. Things might have turned out very differently. Things might have been extremely unpleasant.

The scale and power of the volcano struck many of us as a reminder of human insignificance. It also demonstrated how incredibly vulnerable the modern world is in the face of natural forces. For all our innovation, infrastructure and power tools, we are at considerable risk. Our cities and systems are built for average conditions, not the wild swings that the biosphere can throw our way. This volcano, disruptive as it was, was really a minor planetary event. The biosphere is capable of much more powerful inconveniences.

Now that air travel has returned to “normal,” most of us have already forgotten the volcano and its potential. But there are important lessons here that we would do well to keep in mind. First, now would be a good time to revisit our studies of self-reliance: basic skills, functional knowledge, simple tools and knowledge of land and community will always be good back-ups that can serve us well in times of chaos. Second, a sense of proportion is essential; a canceled or delayed flight is nothing in comparison to genuine disaster. Finally, we’d do well to remember that we’re really just minor players in a highly dynamic world. For all our intelligence, knowledge and expertise, we’re just as vulnerable to the whims of the biosphere as any other species. The primary rule of ecology remains the same as it ever was: “Nature bats last.”

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.
Andy Rooney

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
Sydney J. Harris

You are my creator, but I am your master.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelly

You may be surprised to hear this, but I hate my Mac.
I hate everything about it.
It has all the things I loathe in a computer. It’s fast, it has a huge memory capacity and it runs all the major applications smoothly and efficiently. It hardly ever crashes and I can take it everywhere I go. The battery lasts a long time and I can plug it in and get the Internet just about anywhere. The OS is sleek and easy to operate.
“So what’s to hate?” you’re sure to ask. “Isn’t this precisely what people are looking for in a computer?”
Actually, the “success” of my computer is precisely what I dislike about it. Not only does it perform the essential functions that I need to make my way in the modern world, it also performs thousands of non-essential functions that I can just as well do without. But it’s all so easy, my laptop sucks me into projects that don’t really need to be done and lures me into tasks that don’t really need to be addressed. It keeps my vision centered on a single point in space and keeps my posture in a static position. Worst of all, it keeps me indoors and destroys my relationship with the natural world. Slowly but surely, my Mac is killing me, sapping my vitality and distorting my relationship with the real world.
The first Macintosh was introduced in January, 1984, the first commercially viable personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface. But now, as we look back, we find that the bright and shining promise of the digital age is turning out to be a delusion and the dark side is becoming more apparent with every passing day. Some of us are now beginning to realize the truth–that the only thing worse that a slow computer is a fast computer. The only thing worse than Windows is Snow Leopard. The only thing worse than Snow Leopard is Word Press. And the only thing worse than Word Press is the iPhone. And the only thing worse than the iPhone is Facebook. And the only thing worse than Facebook is Twitter. It’s all distraction, diversion and delusion.

labor generation

Back at the dawn of the digital age, “visionaries” claimed that the computer would be a highly effective labor-saving device that would free us from untold hours of drudgery. No longer would we be shackled to our desks, writing down numbers and words by hand until the middle of the night. We’d be granted a wide open vista of easy living, free to pursue our favorite leisures, hobbies and fascinations.
Boy, were they off the mark. If the computer is anything, it’s a labor-generating device, a labor multiplier. By virtue of its multi-function capability, it actually gives us more work to do than we would otherwise have. All computers have done for us is to replace one kind of drudgery with another, less physical form. Surely some of us have been freed from some types of repetitive labor, but for every case of technological liberation, we’ve created a hundred cases of technological enslavement. As computing technology has invaded every last corner of human activity, even the smallest acts of physicality have been stolen from our lives.
Techno entrepreneurs like to call this “innovation,” but its really more of “technological incarceration.” In fact, we can be sure that the felons in the big house actually go out to the exercise yard once a day, while the rest of us stay glued to our screens for weeks, months, years and decades.
Computers remove the body from almost every creative process. I could take notes by hand, but the machine is more efficient. I could make a sketch to illustrate what I’m trying to say, but the machine is faster. I could walk down the hall and have an actual conversation with a real person, but it’s easier to simply text. Little by little, our bodies are removed from every process and every profession. As physicality becomes increasingly irrelevant, we become disembodied brains. In the process, our health and vitality disappear. In the end, the “digital lifestyle” is turning out to be more of a “deathstyle.”
The disembodying effect of computers becomes ever more powerful as the technology becomes easier to use. Direct mental control of the cursor is only a few years away and then where will we be? No need to even push the mouse; just direct your concentration at the pixels in question. The “innovators” will tell us that this will make our lives “easier” but why should we accept this claim? This “innovation” will be yet one more nail in the coffin of the human body and the human spirit.

amusing ourselves to death

It would be one thing if we had the discipline to use our computers strictly as labor-saving tools. It would be one thing if we used them to streamline our lives and free us to live some authentic dream of true experience. But no, we use our digital devices, not as tools to free ourselves, but as a place to go when the outside world becomes unpleasant, onerous or confusing. Like drunks seeking comfort in the bottom of a bottle, we compulsively lunge for our keyboards, ready to escape whatever it is that ails us. Once logged in, we are free to loose ourselves in a bottomless world of visual distraction.
Ultimately, we find ourselves on a path towards addiction and denial of the world around us. As amusement machines, computers pave the way for decreased engagement with the natural world as they distract us from matters of genuine importance. This is a trend forshadowed most notably by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), but also by media pundit Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985).
Sitting at the computer has become the default position for “work,” or more correctly, the “apparent work.” For those who don’t know what to do with their time but who want to appear busy, the computer is the perfect hide-out. As long as you keep looking at your display, you’re safe. No one can call you a slacker if your eyeballs are glued to the screen and your hand is on the mouse. How many millions of people hide out in front of the keyboard each day? How many hours are wasted in digital posing? Is the computer the new ostrich hole for the overwhelmed and stressed-out modern?

opportunity costs

Computers are bad enough in what they do to us directly, but they also extract a toll by displacing vital, health-giving life experience. Like junk food that displaces genuine nutrition, computers displace essential human experience and engagement with land, animals and people. Even if computers were entirely neutral in their effect (they are not), they would still harm us by taking us away from our bodies, the natural world and face-to-face interactions with real people.
In the world of economics, opportunity cost is the value of the next best alternative that is forgone as the result of making a decision. If, for example, you spend time and money going to a movie, you cannot spend that time at home reading a book. If your next-best alternative to seeing the movie is reading the book, then the opportunity cost of seeing the movie is the money spent plus the pleasure you forgo by not reading the book. All decisions have opportunity costs, computer use included.

“smart phones” aren’t

Of course, no diatribe against computers would be complete without a shot at the so-called “smart phone” industry. Supposedly, these devices “liberate” us from our desks and the need to be “tied down” to any particular place.
But connection to place has been an integral part of human experience for the vast majority of our time on earth. Every primal culture has embedded itself in land and habitat with sensation, action, narrative, song and culture. Separating ourselves from the land is a radical act, an experiment, a shot in the dark. We simply have no idea what “freeing ourselves” from the land will do to body and spirit. Epidemics of attention problems suggest we are making a big mistake.
We can observe the dislocating effects of “smart phones” by watching the spectacular inattentiveness of pedestrians on the street. Cell phone users become nearly blind to their surroundings, oblivious to danger, sight and ambient sound. Public health officials have now documented an increasing number of cases in which pedestrians have been involved in auto accidents, their spatial and situational awareness blinded by the cell phone.
Just as the desktop computer sucks the life out of our muscles, “smart phones” suck the life out of our senses, our awareness of place and our ability to interact with other people in face-to-face settings. The actual damage may seem insignificant, but the displacement costs are immense. Every hour on the “smart phone” means one hour less in conversation or engagement with the real world. It means one hour less experience in realms that have defined human life for millions of years. And in this respect, these digital devices steal our humanity and our lives.

warning labels

The time has come to re-classify the computer industry and label it for what it really is. Some nutritional activists have advanced the notion that high-fructose corn syrup and trans-fats are “the new tobacco.” Maybe so. But it’s time to realize that computers belong in the same category. Apple, Google and Microsoft are wrecking our bodies just as efficiently as RJR Reynolds and Coke. Maybe we need to start talking about “digital tobacco.” Instead of worshipping Apple, Google and Microsoft as our saviors, maybe we should start talking about the hazards of “Big Digital.” And yes, maybe it’s time to start organizing a class action suit against corporations who peddles these products to consumers, with harsh penalties for those who promote “the digital lifestyle” to kids.
This is not hyperbole. This is not satire. It is no exaggeration to say that computers constitute a genuine public health hazard. And so, the comparison becomes inevitable: All computer products–hardware and software alike–ought to come with warning labels: “Long-term use of this product will cause sedentary behavior and will contribute to a host of lifestyle diseases including obesity, diabetes, heart disease and physical apathy. Use sparingly.” You think I’m kidding? The day will come.

computer ed reconsidered

When we take a hard look at the pathological effects of computers, we begin to realize that our educational institutions are completely missing the point. That is, most schools and colleges now operate under the unquestioned assumption that it is essential to “teach students how to use computers.” And so we see entire curriculums built around digital “how-to.” No one doubts this sort of educational offering; every institution now boasts dozens of computer classes at every level.
But given what we know about the health-negative effects of sitting for weeks, months and years in front of a keyboard, our educational objective really ought to be reversed. In other words, our goal should be to “Teach students how to not use computers.” In other words, we ought to teach students the intelligent use of digital devices. Students must learn to ask the right questions: What are computers good for? When is it appropriate to use a computer? What are the drawbacks? When is it better to use traditional materials? When is it better to simply turn away?

triage

Of course, this whole discussion poses a nasty conundrum. Computers, for all their body-sucking, health-destroying qualities, are not going away any time soon. Our culture has become so infected with digititis that escape now seems nearly impossible. If we want to get anything done in this world, we have to sit down and drive the mouse; even the most committed Luddite must spend some time at the keyboard if he is to have any chance of relevance.
And so, it’s time to make some hard decisions about what we’re going to do with all those digital tools in our lives. Shall we be the masters or the slaves?
The problem is difficult, but not unsolvable. There are things that we can and must do:
First, look to eliminate all the trivial and optional amusements that are now possible on the computer. Start by abandoning the “fake work” that is so popular in modern homes and offices. This includes all the optional tasks that really don’t need to be done: downloading cute icons, fine-tuning your screen saver and over-clocking your processor are things that can wait.
Just as obviously, the games have got to go. There’s simply no justifiable reason to be playing a computer game when there’s so many other kinds of games that we could be playing. Computer games not only wreck our bodies, they steal the very soul of human imagination.
Next, eliminate those projects that, however valuable, will become sink holes of time and effort. Sure, you could launch a new website with lots of engaging content, like videos of your cat. But that will take hundreds of hours and worse yet, the “success” of your site will only serve to suck your readers deeper into their own digital morass.
Instead, reserve your computer time for those projects and tasks that hold some prospect for genuine advancement of your essential interests. Treat your time on the computer as if it were costly. What if you had to pay $100 per hour for time on the keyboard? Wouldn’t that bring a little focus to your efforts?
When it comes to allocating computer time, it pays to be ruthless. Ask yourself:
Do I really need to be sitting here at this machine?
Am I sitting at the keyboard to advance some essential task that will enhance the quality of my life?
Or am I trying to look busy?
Am I making some kind of difference in the world or am I simply avoiding some difficult challenge?
Finally, when you’ve run out of options and are forced to push the mouse, make your screen time as short as possible. Do this by learning the programs and polishing your skills. Learn the key strokes. Find the work-arounds. Buy whatever code you need to make it go smoother, but triage that too. Don’t spend 5 hours learning a program that will save you 3 mouse clicks. It just isn’t worth it.
And one more thing: think twice about heaping digital work on your friends and colleagues. Sure, it’s easy to send out links to bottomless web pages and interminable YouTube videos, but what kind of favor is that? All you’ve done is instill a sense of obligation for your friends to remain locked onto the screen. If you really want to do your friends and colleagues a favor, let them get back to some kind of authentic human experience.

computers aren’t us

Triage, skill and discretion are essential, but these are only steps in the right direction. What we really need is to change our basic relationship with the digital realm. Most importantly, we have to stop identifying with computers, operating systems, digital devices or for that matter, any consumer product or corporation. To say, “I’m a Mac guy” is just as perverse as saying “I’m a Windows guy.”
Stand up for your humanity. You are an animal, not an OS. You are a flesh and blood creature, not a brain on a chip. You are a wild and creative spirit, not a batch of code to be run on command.
Get your identity straight.
The computer is a mere tool and a dangerous one at that.
Save yourself.
Stand up for your life.
Step away from the machine.

This is a little beyond the typical reach of this blog, but it’s simply too good to pass up. David Christian’s legendary course on Big History is on sale at The Teaching Company. In 48 brilliant lectures, Professor Christian lays out “The Big Bang, Life on Earth and the Rise of Humanity.” The clarity of his presentation is stunning and you’ll want to view or listen to it repeatedly. This is university teaching at its finest.

Exuberants,

Check out this new offering: Kigo Footwear

Please have a look and report back! Looks promising?

A very disturbing story in the New York Times reports on the widespread use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory meds during extreme exercise and the fact that these drugs actually promote injury and reduce the training effect. This story is notable not just for what it says about biochemistry, but also for what it says about our culture of extremity.  It also begs the question: “If so many participants feel the need to use painkillers before their event, then what exactly are they doing and why are they doing it?” In the course of natural animal living, pain is a signal to modify behavior; it is extremely valuable feedback. Intentional masking of pain is neither healthy nor smart.

See Phys Ed: Does Ibuprofen Help or Hurt During Exercise? By Gretchen Reynolds