My route includes a large amount of bike paths and this morning it got me thinking. Along the bike paths, I see many, many people exercising. Walkers, joggers, cyclists, roller bladers (or the male version, man bladers), boot camps and everything else that people do for exercise. At first I thought to myself, this is fantastic, so many people outside exercising and keeping healthy. Then I thought about why these people were here.
Is it because they enjoy these activities? How can anyone enjoy the violent act of running and no self-respecting male chooses to go man-blading! When you look around at advertising and media, we are told that we need to exercise and that there is an obesity epidemic. Is this the reason why people are exercising? Do they do it out of necessity rather than enjoyment?
Is this what our lifestyles have done to us? We consume so excessively that we are forced to exercise rather than doing it for the fun. If we didn't exercise, would we all be overweight and unhealthy? And if we weren't forced to exercise, what else would we do??? The media tells us that we NEED to exercise to lose weight, prevent heart disease and live longer. What happened to doing it out of pure enjoyment? I can't help but wonder now if most of those people I see on bike path are there out of fear and necessity.
Think about the cave man days where we all extend from. At that point in time it was about survival, we hunted to eat and ran from predators thus burning calories, then the agricultural age came with fences and paddocks, less distance to rome for food but still the physical work involved to get it and keep it all up and running. Now days a lot of people think steak and vegetables come from a super market. And as a result we supplement the physical work we used to do to survive with "exercise" or else we do get fat, ugly and unwanted. After all who wants bad genes.
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