I’m not sure about all of this. I’ve been sedentary for 34 years, and I somehow still am.
But I discovered rollerblading at 34 and now I’m part of a rollerblading course in a skatepark at a fixed time in the week, just after my biggest day of work. And going to the skatepark is boring, I need to take a bus to nowhere land and then walk in nowhere land for 10 minutes.
I’ve always been happy to go to it. And even the days I didn’t felt it, I never regretted going for it anyway.
Because it’s FUN. I don’t feel like I’m exercising, I’m just having FUN.
To me that was a revelation that felt more important than what this article says. Exercising shouldn’t be boring.
Well I’m still sedentary because rollerblading is not the most practical sport to do everyday, especially on the countryside. But even then I’m loving it.
I also like biking. Not as an exercise but just to evade. I think I will insist on going for some calm rides.
Yeah, the way we talk about exercising and fitness in general often pre-supposes that it's an unpleasant chore.
The "secret" to long-term fitness is finding activities you enjoy doing for their own sake that happen to involve moving your body and then incorporating them into your lifestyle such that you're doing them frequently and consistently.
This is like "find work you enjoy". If it works for you great, but for many it doesn't really and at some point you have to accept exercise is non-optional and just pick something you can tolerate if you don't find anything
This is definitely a good approach but I don't think it's the only one!
I absolutely agree that the idea that exercise has to be unpleasant is wrong and harmful. But there's a middle ground where the things you actively enjoy aren't sufficient to keep you fit, and so you develop a habit of doing regular exercise even when you don't feel like it and even if it's a bit boring and effortful.
Everyone's different but IME this works well provided you build up the effort level gradually, and never feel the need to push yourself to a really unpleasant degree. Eventually habit, the knowledge that it's good for you in the long run, and the fact that it usually makes you feel better in the short run make it pretty easy to stick with.
> Because it’s FUN. I don’t feel like I’m exercising, I’m just having FUN.
This is hands down the most important advice and what I tell everyone around me. Find something active that you ENJOY. Even better if the thing you enjoy requires your body to progressively improve to unlock more enjoyment from your new active hobby.
Beyond that it can be anything: dancing, martial arts, swimming, cycling, football, handstands, skateboarding
Exercise for exercise's sake is really awful and abstract for most people. Like why carry a bunch of weights if you never feel like you need that strength.
The best thing I find (where possible) is a bit of competition to necessitate progress but that's only one possible solution..
A wise grinder once told me a powerful secret, the key to perfect running form: the sides of the mouth curling up in a giant smile.
Phoebe running, rejecting social norms, gettin’ dirty, futzing with trail plans… there’s no rules, have fun. Whatever that means exactly on your own terms.
Unfortunately this sort of advice also leads to people not exercising. I don't enjoy lifting, and I don't see an easy way to make it fun, but I feel better and I'm healthier for it.
… “Smile while you train”, ie make training fun, results in not training? That is nonsensical.
You can’t figure out how to make lifting fun? Bruv, google Eric Bugenhagen. Shirtless, 70s rock, singing out loud, a tye-die hairband, strong coffee and fun exercises. Lifting is awesome, it happens in a gym, and there are 9,000 colours of fun. Homegyms rule, hip thrusts in between air-guitar with the toddler, air kicks and slam balls… and it is as easy as a patch of alley and a kettlebell or tire, if you let it be.
The entire point of my post is the opposite of your takeaway. Learn what you find fun, what makes you smile hard when lifting and by definition you will be having fun lifting.
Lifting is easy mode for fun. Speakers, smoothies, cuties, technique variants, bar variants, ego-stuff, posture-stuff, program stuff, dips, pull ups, and bouncy crap too. Ultra running, where that quote is from, involves eating a slight bit more shit for more than an hour (in AC).
Plus, you do NOT have to “lift” to “pick up something heavy, move it around, and hold something above your head”. Feeling better and healthier, hypertrophy, and targeted resistance exercise are available from a near infinite variety of activities. Some are very enjoyable, the rest can be made so with effort, creativity, and will.
That's true, there is also bodyweight and machines and just hard labor.
And of course there's cardio but that's not terribly difficult to fit into any lifestyle—lots of fun options. That's just not going to hit all your needs by itself.
Exactly. I've always loved racquet sports- how it makes me feel, the improvement of hand-eye coordination, the competition, sure, all of that- but most of all, because hitting a ball with a stick with a bouncy strings around in a court is a damn good time. So it's never felt like an effort to me.
> Because it’s FUN. I don’t feel like I’m exercising, I’m just having FUN.
First step is throwing away the idea it has to always be fun. You even said right before this:
> And even the days I didn’t felt it, I never regretted going for it anyway.
So it's not always fun and you always don't feel like it, but you connected it to other side of not regretting. That's discipline. The next step IMO, is to embrace when it sucks. Look at the upside that you're not only exercising your body, but also exercising your discipline when you don't feel like it - good for you!
A small example of embracing when it might suck is to not avoid rain. Instead of running, embrace the rain. Relax, smile, and be ok with getting wet. It's temporary. Same thing when you don't feel like doing something you know you need to do, like exercising.
It's ok if you can physically remove the battery. I'm pretty sure to have read multiple times that laptops thermals and battery engineering are optimized for daily use in open areas, not to safely run workloads 24/7 in a closet.
> I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
My previous employer was like this. A 20yo company with a nice always increasing ytoy growth. The CEO told for 20 years that he would never raise any money. It was an incredible place to work : nice compensation, product and consumer centered, we had time and means to do the right things.
Until the CEO changed his mind and raised money anyway. But we didn't have to fear anything because those investors were very different and not like the other greedy ones.
Well I'm not working there anymore for a hella lot of reasons that are just the same as everywhere else.
But at least the CEO who was already rich is now incredibly rich.
> VC by default are founder friendly in my experience.
Founders are only one stakeholder. There are employees ( I think they fall into that category ), customers, suppliers, and the wider society.
It all comes back to why does the company exist - and for which stakeholders. I think that's the point the original author is making.
I don't buy the argument that making money in the end is a perfect surrogate for overall good - it's not - it's an imperfect surrogate - and to pretend it is a perfect surrogate is just an excuse to behave like an arsehole.
To make that concrete, let's say you are a chemical company making paints - really important job, paints are needed the cheaper you can make them, the more people can have them etc, but if you knowingly pollute a local river just because you can get away with it and increase your profits - saying that increased profits justifies polluting the river based on the assumption that river pollution is correctly priced ( free ) is an obvious convenient excuse to be a selfish arsehole.
I dont this wisdom can be applied generically. Lets consider your example, if leader or founder comes across the fact that a river is getting polluted whether it makes profit or not, they will not take that decision as it would impact longer term.
What you are mixing is founder led business vs ceo led business. CEO often takes a short term view, when stakeholders are PE Firm, wall street, short term gains are prioritized. But for, a long term investor, would not incentivize you to take calls that would harm in long run.
What could be wrong is that, you wouldnt know all the consequences and causality of your decisions and thats very human thing in my opinion.
Not sure why you went the founder versus CEO route - wasn't particularly picking on founders.
The general point is that leaders are people and many CEO/founders are decent, hardworking, brave people, and some people are arseholes - and I just wanted to highlight one of the excuses arseholes make for their behaviour.
Also note I have no special insight into the specific situation the original poster talked about - I do know working out how to hand on a company you've grown and led to the next generation is one of the hardest challenges.
That's not to say there isn't a lot to say about the positive power of markets - it's just that simplifying that to 'if I'm making money therefore it must be a societal optimal outcome' kind of justification is BS.
Clearly LLMs are tools which can be used for good or ill. The supplier of raw chemicals to the paint factory isn't really responsible for the river pollution.
However you are right to point out there is a problem. Typically societies ( via governments ) try and fix by appropriately pricing the behaviours via regulation/laws ( fines or prison for the people doing it ).
However making regulation/laws is hard. What's your proposal to fix the problem you've identified?
> As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them.
That's not true at all.
There are a lot of people willing to buy smartphones with small screen or smartphones with Linux or any other OS than iOS or Android.
But those people are not enough to justify the gigantic initial investment that is necessary to provide viable products in this market. And the existing actors aren't interested in those niche.
Steam is actually not that good as an application. It’s slow, it’s full of ads, the UI is complex …
But they are the Amazon of gaming : it’s a no brainer to buy games because you know you won’t get issues being reimbursed if it’s needed. Also SteamOS/Proton/Steam Deck are nice.
And EPIC managed to do worse than that.
I do feel GOG Galaxy could become a threat to Steam someday if they added official Linux support and a full screen version but last time I tried it it was pretty buggy.
I genuinely don't want to be snarky but does the average joe needs a planet that is breathable and isn't burning or does he need even "more goods and services to go around".
Robotic helpers to do what ? More free time ?
We, as a society, can already have more free time, we just have to choose to work less. We already have it all : enough food and housing for everybody, 80+ years of life expectancy ... What will we achieve with robotic helpers or whatever new goods and services ?
This is a perfect example of something that can benefit greatly from abundant goods and services. Driving the cost of solar panel manufacturing, supply chain included, and deployment. Enabling continuous monitoring and fast response to GHG leaks or forest fire starting. Reforesting efforts. There are so many ways in which the application of intelligence and labor can help us here, and AI can vastly grow the supply of intelligence and labor.
> More free time?
Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?
> Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?
We already had a huge productivity boom these past decades, but wages flat-lined and the vast majority of the profits and surplus went to the top. Housing, education, and healthcare became less affordable, not more. History points against your simple view.
I'm not convinced that AI breaks that pattern. If anything, the concentration is worse this time. The capital required is huge, the technology is controlled by a handful of companies, and the most applications are about replacing labor. That last part further erodes the already meager worker bargaining power.
We do need a serious systemic change to get to the world you're envisioning. One where that congealed wealth needs to start flowing again.
But I discovered rollerblading at 34 and now I’m part of a rollerblading course in a skatepark at a fixed time in the week, just after my biggest day of work. And going to the skatepark is boring, I need to take a bus to nowhere land and then walk in nowhere land for 10 minutes.
I’ve always been happy to go to it. And even the days I didn’t felt it, I never regretted going for it anyway.
Because it’s FUN. I don’t feel like I’m exercising, I’m just having FUN.
To me that was a revelation that felt more important than what this article says. Exercising shouldn’t be boring.
Well I’m still sedentary because rollerblading is not the most practical sport to do everyday, especially on the countryside. But even then I’m loving it.
I also like biking. Not as an exercise but just to evade. I think I will insist on going for some calm rides.
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