alt text
First panel: [blank white space with black text] Jogging from the perspective of animals
Second panel: Wolf by a tree looking at a man jogging. "What are you running from, apex predator"
Third panel: Wolf: "Are you chasing prey?" "You need to conserve energy"
Last panel: [second wolf peeking in] "The hell is that guy doing" [first wolf] "I don't know. I don't understand"
(alt text by @cypnk@mastodon.social)
We've become so successful at getting food, we don't have to move much to do it any more. So we have to go out of our way to be active to stay healthy since evolution takes so long to catch up.
I used to refer to going to the gym as the "farm work simulator". It always amazed me that society progressed to the point where physical labor isn't necessary, but we chose to pay money, so that we can pretend to do it, in order to live longer
Ngl, if they make gym work as some kind of "heavy work" simulator games like Farming or Mining, with tracking progress, achievements, and competitive ranking, I would be at the gym way more.
VR games already make me work out way more than I thought I would.
Add a leveling system in there and make it an mmo
Honestly just tie it to some repetitie game. Think Skilling in RuneScape. All they really need is a number that goes up, and the occasional firework.
Throw in skins for your pickaxe or whatever and you're golden. People will get so buff, going for the sparkly anime-girl skin, you have no idea.
LOL What would you do with your Skill Points?
Dunno it just adds a progression system which gets me going
Leaderboards
Pretty sure this is super common on some equipment. The ellipticals at the gym I used (before it moved) had them , but I never bothered.
I had a room mate who would drive a 5 mile round trip to the gym and back to walk five miles on the treadmill. I didn't have a car at the time and was always pointing out the nonsense of it. She said she just preferred the atmosphere of the gym to the side of the road or any of the many beautiful nature trails near by. 🤷♀️
To be fair, I can close my eyes and just sort of flail on an elliptical in a way that would absolutely hurt me if I tried it on the ground. It's also a lot lower impact and when I'm done I can just stop.
CrossFit might be what you're looking for.
Because the risk of injury is similar to farm work?
It's kinda like burning dollar bills in the fireplace to make the place look cozy.
It's kind of the ultimate symbol of excess evolutionary wealth to be able to go for a run just because we want to burn off excess energy.
A step further even, a lot of us need to burn off excess energy, because we're so well off (evolutionarily speaking) that we practically can't help but take in more energy than we burn naturally
Hell, food comes to us now.
I've got my money on that not happening until after an apocalyptic event sends us back to the iron age. And the adaptations we're gonna get aren't gonna be pretty.
Unless we get fucked spectacularly we probably wont devolve back to the iron age. At worst maybe the age of sails but even then it'd be rather scattershot on what tech would survive. You might have a scenario where most tech is at 1700s level but with radio and modern firearms or atleast ww1-gulf war level.
Yeah it'll definitely be a mish mash of technology but a very large part of humanity will be left alone to their own devices having to find any way to survive
We've witnessed societal collapse before and came out of it for the better. We'll be reunited as a whole within a hundred years of such an event.
The main difference though was those were just societal not ecological.
People were able to bounce back easily because resources were still plentiful and food was everywhere. With climate change a lot of resources are going to become unavailable.
Maybe so, but humans are also clever. Just cause we're fucked doesnt mean we're out of the game.
Oh I have no doubt. Honestly it would take planet wide devastation to completely wipe us out.
But mass extinctions have happened multiple times and the species that survive are mainly just lucky.
I don't think humanity has anymore luck to spare.
With the level of technical knowledge we've achieved, there's no way we're going back to doing things exactly the way they used to. One example that jumps out at me is the method this primitive technology guy on youtube uses to stoke his furnace. He's basically made a little manual turbine out of leaves and vines to push his air rather than one of those little squeeze box things.
Obviously I'm not a blacksmith or historian so I don't actually know how common something like that might have been, but I'm guessing it's not super old. In any case, I'm sure there are other ways that we'd apply our more advanced knowledge to tackling the sorts of problems we'd be looking at with a collapse of manufacturing and shipping infrastructure.
Honestly, a technologically adept but non-industrial society of artisans sounds kind of cool.