Random Stuff - Chapter 311

Back in the 1950s and 60s, the world changed. Modern economies moved people out of factories and fields and into office buildings. Whereas you used to have to stand on your feet all day and carry heavy shit around to make a buck, now, the best-paying jobs simply asked that you sit at a desk for as long as possible without ever getting up.

Our bodies aren’t particularly adapted for a sedentary lifestyle. In fact, it turns out that sitting around all day munching on donuts and soda is downright awful for your physical health. As a result, we began to see epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease around the same time that everyone got cushy office jobs. People’s bodies were falling apart, becoming overly sensitive, and not functioning correctly.

To counteract this sedentary lifestyle, we all came together and developed a fitness culture to counteract the health crisis. People realized that if modern life had you sitting around all day watching a screen, that you needed to set aside time in your day to go lift something heavy or run around a little bit. That kept your body healthy and stable and strong. Jogging became a thing. Gym membersh.i.p.s were invented. And people wore spandex and jumped around on VHS tapes, looking absolutely ridiculous. The eighties were great.

Our bodies are designed in such a way that they need to be challenged and stressed to a certain degree, otherwise they become soft and weak, and the smallest endeavors—walking up a flight of stairs, picking up a bag of groceries—will begin to feel difficult or impossible. It turns out that these small, conscious efforts to stress our bodies are what keeps them healthy.

In my new book, Everything is F.u.c.k.i.e.d: A Book About Hope, I talk about how our attention spans are dwindling. Anxiety and depression are on the rise. How we’re becoming less tolerant of people with opposing views, and less patient when the world doesn’t go our way (which, due to the overload of media, feels like all the time.)

The same way removing stress and strain from our physical bodies causes them to become fragile and weak, removing mental stress and strain from our minds makes them fragile and weak.

The same way we discovered that the sedentary lifestyles of the 20th century required us to physically exert ourselves and work our bodies into healthy shape, I believe we’re on the cusp of discovering a similar necessity for our minds. We need to consciously limit our own comforts. We need to force our minds to strain themselves, to work hard for their information, to deprive our attention of the constant stimulation that it craves.

The same way the consumer economy of the 20th century called upon us to invent the nutritional diet, I believe that the attention economy of the 21st century calls upon us to invent an attention diet.

This has been a big talking point throughout my speaking tour this year, and I’d like to take a stab at codifying it in a real step-by-step program for people here.