I’m coming up on two weeks of not writing anything here, which is partly due to the weather. Not that I blog from outdoors, or anything, but we finally got a bit of snow, and as a result I’ve been doing a bunch of cross-country skiing this week— in the neighborhood of 16 miles (that’s 25 km for actual Nordics) since this past Sunday when I made a run up to Lapland Lake. Monday’s storm wasn’t the greatest, but it held up well enough for me to get out Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. (Wednesday I played basketball on my lunch break, and plan the same today; based on how things were yesterday, I don’t think the skiing today would be all that great in any case.)
This cuts into my blogging because it takes a bunch of time— Lapland is an hour away, and I spent a couple hours on the trails once there, and even going out on the local golf course takes a couple hours out of the day between travel, the actual skiing, and some recovery afterwards. It also tends to leave me pretty tired— I push pretty hard when I’m on skis— which cuts into my energy for other work.
On paper, this is perhaps not the wisest choice of how to spend my time— I have a lot on my plate at the moment, and it’s hard enough to keep on top of things without blocking out time to ski. I’ve been around enough to know, though, that that’s not true— if I don’t carve out time to exercise, and instead just stay in the office and plug away at whatever I’m supposed to be doing, I feel awful. It’s not just the lower-back stiffness that comes from too long in desk chairs, or borderline headaches from mild eyestrain after staring at spreadsheets for too long. It’s a kind of full-body lethargy that makes it significantly harder to do anything worthwhile.
Plus, it’s just nice to be out there. I grew up out in the country, and spent a lot of days stomping around in the woods near my parents’ house, so I find it very calming to be out on skis. Snow is pretty, trees are pretty, snow on trees is pretty, and, you know, birds and other wildlife are cool. Even the highly artificial environment of a golf course is relaxing when I’m out by myself and not, you know, mangling the game of golf…
In warmer months, I feel the same way about bike riding— it’s time-consuming and tiring, because I push hard, but not getting out is much worse. It feels good to get out and move fast, and a lot of the bike paths are through wooded areas that I find congenial. Basketball is more of a mixed bag— it’s my favorite sport in the world, so when it’s good, it’s really good, but the keeping-score aspect means that a frustrating set of games at lunchtime can ruin my mood for the whole afternoon. It’s still a net win, though, averaged over the long term.
In a pinch, riding the stationary bike in our basement mostly works, though it’s pretty much the methadone of exercise. It’s maybe less calming, because I tend to watch streaming television while biking-to-nowhere, but the physical activity helps.
I was thinking about this larger context while out skiing the other day because there was a tweet going around (that I won’t link, mostly because I’m too lazy to go find it) that was along the lines of “Give me one reason why you exercise that isn’t in order to lose weight or because you otherwise hate your body.” This got quote-tweeted into my timeline a weirdly large number of times, and I was mildly surprised at how much it annoyed me. I’m not entirely sure whether this was an actual exercise-is-bad tweet or a poorly phrased request for counter-arguments to use against someone else’s exercise-is-bad argument. Either way, it’s pretty clearly connected to a particular strain of argument that always gets a reflexive “Oh, go fuck yourself” from me.
The exercise version is probably sillier than the median version of this, but it shows up all over the place thanks to the relentless politicization of everything. In its most fundamental form it’s an assertion that the only reason other people choose to do something that the speaker doesn’t like (exercise, eating bad food, reading the wrong books, listening to a disfavored genre of music) is due to the nefarious influence of a Bad Thing. Capitalism, usually, but sometimes socialism, or the patriarchy, or “woke” indoctrination, or, y’know, lizard people from another dimension. It’s all more or less the same argument: “Everybody would agree with me if they weren’t in thrall to whatever societal evil I’m opposing this week.”
I really, really hate this form of argument, in no small part because it’s stunningly ineffective as anything other than intellectual masturbation. People who are already inclined to agree will nod smugly, while people on the other side will (largely correctly) see it as insulting to their intelligence and agency. It’s actively counterproductive from the standpoint of persuasion.
But mostly, my gripe is that it’s so often deployed around things that are just fundamentally insignificant matters of taste. Different people like different things, and that’s fine. Some people like beer, others wine, still others elaborate cocktails, and some stick to soft drinks. It’s all fine. Casting any of these as a huge ideological statement falls on the wrong side of the fine line between clever and toxic. It’s incredibly stressful and corrosive to general piece of mind to constantly be worrying about the secret messages hidden in matters of personal taste.
I like skiing, and bicycling, and basketball. I enjoy doing those things, and generally feel better when I carve time out of my schedule to do them. Even when that takes time away from other work. If you don’t like them, that’s fine; you probably enjoy some things that I don’t. Which is also fine. Have a lovely time doing whatever it is; I’ll be at the gym if you need me in the next hour or two.
Just stop with the implication that people don’t really enjoy the things they choose to spend their time on, just because you don’t feel the same way.
I’m going to stop promising that I’m just about to write more here, because that’s clearly not helping to free up any blogging time. I’ll write more when I write more, and if you want to see that as soon as it happens, here’s a button:
And if you want to lecture me about how I only wrote this post because (spins wheel) I inhaled too many chemtrail toxins while skiing on the golf course on Tuesday, the comments will be open:
What happened to “live and let live”?
Look, as someone trained in economics, I tend to think about externalities quite a bit. Which sometimes mean I am for strong arming people and crushing their “freedoms” (vaccines! And I would recognize that that logic can be applied to abortions… if life started at conception/a fertilized egg had a soul)
But if there no meaningful externalities - you do you. I even tend towards libertarianism when it comes to the “freedom” of destroying yourself ie im all for addiction treatment being available but pretty against limiting access to addictions
That sounds sensible to me. There are only two cases that tend to bother me. Sometimes the activity has serious negative aspects like drinking kerosene, mistreating animals or playing strangulation games. Sometimes the activity has taken over someone's life to a dangerous extent as with certain drugs, picking bar fights or obsessive exercise to the point of repeated injuries.
I'll bet the upstate NY countryside is beautiful this time of year, and the only way to really get out and enjoy it involves skis or snowshoes. There's no point in staring at that paper or spreadsheet once your brain has shut down for the day. There is nothing like moving around, ideally under one's own power, to get one's brain cells refreshed.