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By Root 1237 0

and tracking their health for over eight years.1 The strongest correlation the test found was this: the people who were in the least active fifth, the sedentary quintile, who moved into the second-lowest quintile, were the people who showed some statistically significant health and happiness gains. But as Blair explained, even with a large number of subjects, a good study would require that you take a large random sample of people and assign half of them to exercise for years on end while you assign the other half to no exercise for years on end. But since random people can obviously not be made to cooperate in these ways, there is no way of controlling for genetics and a million other factors. Still, the results we do get consistently suggest that going from no exercise to some has a significant impact on health, by many measures, but beyond that there is much less of an impact. A study at Harvard Medical School looked at seventy-two thousand female nurses, comparing exercise and heart disease for eight years. The results, published in 1999 in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that women who walked at least three hours a week had a 30 to 40 percent lower risk of heart disease compared with less active women, but that women who exercised for more time or with more vigor did not see greater risk reduction.2 What good is gym fitness, then?

Note that when we say someone is “fit,” all we are saying is that the things that happen to a body when it exercises have happened to this body. With this definition of fit, athletes are fit, no question about it. But they do not live longer than average people, they are injured more, and they seem neither smarter nor happier. It is funny that the nerds lecture everyone that exercise can increase mental acuity and that this does not conflict, somehow, with their sense of the jocks as dumb. Anecdotal evidence from our own lives and the lives of people we know seems to support both sides of the question. Exercise can make some people feel good, and it makes some people blissfully happy. Yet, on a daily basis, many of us make ourselves happy by not exercising. Many people report that they do not get the blissful endorphins that they have heard about—or certainly not enough to justify the time, money, and effort. Historically, most of humanity exercised because they had to, just getting around, cleaning clothes, and heating the house. Almost all human inventions have been about saving us from physical labor. The whole history of human technology has been fueled by our preference to not exert ourselves: the wheel, the elevator, the electric hand mixer, the TV remote control. Of course you don’t want to exercise.

Technology made this effortless living possible, but one still has to account for why we developed the technology. Through history, when people had the money, they got other people to clean their houses, cook meals, and chop wood. With a large gap in wealth between the rich and the poor, the rich can develop some ornate styles of life that require a lot of servants. But no matter how many poor foreigners you bring in to do your heavy work, the moment the culture offers any other opportunities, you are going to have a “servant shortage.” Nobody wants to wash your underwear. Doing heavy labor for your own family can be tolerable or even nice, but unless they are quite well compensated, few people want to do it for strangers. When nobody will do anyone else’s scrubbing, housekeeping standards usually fall. But in an industrial age, the situation fosters new technology, and with it a furious cycle of rising expectations. The machines raise the standards of each chore. For instance, there are tons of laundry to be done in every home today, and it must all be bright and perfect—so much so that you couldn’t decide one day to do it all by hand. It would be too much work, and it wouldn’t turn out right. Vacuum cleaners were supposed to be a labor-saving device, relieving you from the frequent, dirty, and heavy chore of beating out your rugs. But the arrival of vacuum cleaners made