The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [116]
These hidden meanings make us exercise, because we want to be the gentry, and we want to be virtuous and accrue incremental rewards. Yet even more often, the hidden meanings keep us from exercising. We cannot bring ourselves to do purposeless labor. Life may have been cleansed of hard physical labor, but most of us work as hard as ever if you judge by strain and exhaustion. Engaging in purposeless effort in addition to all that work does not always feel the way it might if we were really in charge of our lives and really at leisure. A stint on the treadmill is not really about “caring for yourself.” It is about the performance of “caring for yourself” within a particular trance of value. If you like it, great. Most healthy people want to move around a little, if nothing else is keeping them from it. But the type of activity matters, of course. If you wouldn’t mind going out back and chopping wood for a fire, but you don’t feel like riding a stationary bike in a giant hall full of mirrors, maybe that is a very sane response to a pretty insane suggestion. Maybe you should give yourself more opportunities for purposeful exercise, or maybe you actually would enjoy the stationary bike if you kept in mind some of these issues, and divorced the physical act from its oppressive meanings.
I think we would all be better off if we did unproductive exercise only for pleasure. If we want to do exercise, we should walk somewhere we have to go to anyway, do a chore you usually get someone else to do, take the stairs, carry the baby, or chop some wood. Forget the gym unless you love it, or perhaps need a change of habit. These exhortations to be a certain type of body are the nonsense jabbering of history. Anyone above the lowest quintile of activity is not going to get happy as a direct result of exercising. If you are exercising and do not enjoy it, or are not exercising and spend time feeling guilty about it, I recommend that you find something to occupy yourself that you do enjoy, whether or not it gets your heartbeat up.
Most important, remember that it is reasonable to believe that exercising keeps you young and that it gives you energy, and it is also reasonable to believe that if you want your heart to stay “like new,” you should use it gently. That goes for the rest of your body, too. As with a baseball mitt, you want to keep it supple, but you do not need to go out of your way to wear it out. Likewise, it is reasonable to imagine we have a fixed amount of energy in any given day and any given life, and we should be careful not to give too much of our energy to running around. We base our lives on the opposite assumption. Both are equally sensible. Perhaps I should say that I believe in science, but that, paradoxically, the person who believes most in scientific progress believes least in scientific knowledge, because the conviction that we will progress assures me that much of what we now know will someday soon be proved wrong, or be considered totally off the point. The fact that something makes perfect sense doesn’t mean it is true. We can learn to hear the difference between the kind of science stories that tend to be stable for centuries and those that change every decade.
The human sciences change the fastest because they are about humans, and our ideas about humans change a lot faster than our ideas about the sky. Evolution is stable. The evolutionary “just-so stories” that explain the origins of our particular modern behaviors are not stable. Often science must use “just-so stories,” to get ahead of itself and then double back and check the dependant