On exercise
A case study in rationalist self-improvement
When I was a kid, I hated exercise. I don’t mind it so much now. But I only recently made it a habit, despite long being aware of the physical and mental health benefits.1 And maintaining a baseline level of fitness doesn’t require much time, nor is it complicated. A half-hour run two or three times a week and a few bodyweight exercises like pushups and pullups—that’s all you really need. Why, then, have I not always been doing this?
The most obvious answer is that exercise is unpleasant. Sport seems to be a solution for some, but not everyone enjoys it, and disadvantages to this solution do exist. It takes longer, and the exercise may be asymmetric or not target your whole body. For a long time, I had an unhealthy relationship with exercise—I felt like it wasn’t valuable if I didn’t really push myself. Pushing yourself makes exercise an awful and painful experience, at which point you simply avoid it. But problems like this are easy to fix—you just need to notice them. Even though this mindset lingers, it has now lost its power over me.
The mindset is caused, I think, by this harmful exercise memeplex2 centred on the idea that you should ‘push past the pain’. Not only does it discourage people from making exercise a habit, it also promotes inefficient training—constantly training at full intensity isn’t optimal—and makes injury more likely. Besides, most people aren’t professional athletes—there’s no need to make things painful. Anyway, this memeplex embodies a reactionary moralising about the virtues of accepting suffering and the problems of modern decadence. While you sometimes do need to accept and push through suffering, it’s not good, and it’s not something to seek out.
Perhaps ‘exercise should be fun’ is a pushback against this reactionary exercise memeplex, but this, too, is misguided.3 There’s a useful distinction to be made here between fun and enjoyable. I’ll use fun to describe activities that are positive utility in the moment, and enjoyable, positive utility in the bigger picture. These definitions suggest we should not let fun control our lives—that it’s enough for exercise to be enjoyable, even if it’s not fun. Fun is, of course, nice and helpful, but I don’t think it’s helpful to emphasise this consideration. If we enjoy being the sort of person who exercises more than we find exercise unpleasant, why would we allow its unpleasantness to hold us back?
I’ve never been particularly coordinated or athletically talented, though the schools I attended had mandatory sport, so it could’ve been worse. But after ‘not athletically talented’ and ‘not sporty’ became parts of my identity, ‘not someone who habitually exercises’ soon followed. This is a transparently undesirable state of affairs. It’s fine to not be athletically talented, and it’s fine to not be into sport—these won’t really affect your life. The unfortunate reality, however, is that exercise is essential for your health. So don’t let an unhealthy habit, or the lack of a healthy habit, become part of your identity. Yet this loses its hold over you the moment you notice it’s happened, for you can be whoever you will.
Dissolving these emotional barriers was very useful. But I could also afford to throw some money at the problem. I bought a smartwatch to track my runs, earbuds to listen to music while running, and some nice clothes for exercise. These purchases helped me develop a habit of running by making it a little more fun,4 and they were therefore worthwhile—an excellent investment in my long-term health. In this vein, if you, like me, sit in front of a computer all day every day, you should buy the best chair you can afford. The marginal benefit to your posture is worth it.
Having done all this, you might find that starting an exercise habit isn’t particularly unpleasant. And as you continue to exercise and find it enjoyable, you may even classically condition yourself, one day realising that it’s just a little fun—how droll!
I’ve told you a story about how I came to develop an exercise habit. But I’ve also presented a case study in rationalist self-improvement. This is quite surprising—I haven’t learned any real techniques for this, and I wasn’t consciously trying to do it.
Let me now reframe the story in the language of rationalist self-improvement. I started with epistemic rationality—accurate beliefs about the world. Here, I needed only two: that exercise is good for my health, therefore I should exercise; and that I don’t exercise. A core part of instrumental rationality is dissolving the emotional barriers preventing you from taking some desired action, though you might re-evaluate your desires in the process. More precisely, in the very moment that we notice and truly understand our feelings, they cannot control us. In this case, I noticed a few things: the presence of a reactionary exercise memeplex; the idea that exercise should be fun; and the fact that not exercising had become part of my identity.
This framing elucidates that a core part of rationalist self-improvement is essentially self-therapy.5 I previously offered a warning about brain self-surgery, and it’s prudent to check for dangers here. But I suspect that these sorts of techniques are safe to the extent that they are solely introspective. That is, they are safe to the extent that they seek only to illuminate how you think and feel—to help you notice.
And the idea driving this paradigm is the most important thing I’ve picked up from the rationalists.6 Specifically, it’s that you have a brain capable of more than excelling at some random classroom test. It can fix many of the problems in your life, and all it asks is that you think about and notice them! But don’t think this is a small ask.
More precisely, many of the problems in your life can be solved if you actually attempt to solve them. This is a profound insight if you take it seriously, and not one that’s trivial to internalise. It’s so easy to autopilot your life and let all your problems simmer away. Yet if you keep working away at your list, dealing with them one by one—I believe your life can become so much better than it is right now. Even though I can’t tell you all that much about how to do this.
In truth, I take a significantly stronger statement as an axiom—I believe the world can become so much better than it is right now. I’m a blind, naive optimist in the only sense that matters—I believe technology can solve the problems we face. Often neglected are social and cognitive technologies, with which we may foster better communities and overcome the less desirable parts of human nature.7 And without such optimism, how could this world—a cornucopia of suffering—seem worthwhile?
Sorry. We were talking about exercise, weren’t we? It seems I got a little sidetracked. And yet—
Exercise is a problem like any other. It is a problem that can be solved—that has been solved, in my case.8 And it is precisely that possibility—the possibility of problems solved, of better—that drives me to solve them.
Exercise stresses the body, and this stress is hormetic—exposure to a small amount of a stressor having a positive effect on a system. People like to mention Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility in this context, but here it’s just hormesis. LindyMan suggests that exercise should be simple—this doesn’t mean stupid—and that it only needs to stress your heart and bones. Running does the former, and lifting does the latter. Perhaps pushups and pullups are enough, but barbell exercises like the deadlift, bench press, and squat are probably also a good idea.
Richard Dawkins coined the word meme—in analogy to genes—as a unit of cultural transmission, which may be an idea, behaviour or style. A memeplex is a set of memes.
Yes, I’m having fun with my terminology. Also, it would be amusing to position this as a progressive memeplex in opposition to the reactionary memeplex. Unfortunately, I don’t have the impression that there’s enough content here for that.
I know I just said that we don’t want to emphasise the consideration of fun. But it’s still important to address—we would like to ensure it doesn’t control our decisions, and this is, in fact, helpful to that end.
This is not surprising—rationalists are very interested in Focusing, a psychotherapeutic technique concerned with noticing and clarifying your feelings. Although it might be a little generous to ascribe this perspective to the rationalists when I’ve seen it expressed most clearly in post-rationalist Twitter. And none of this is to imply that regular psychotherapy or professional help aren’t useful—they are. But they tend to focus more on making people not especially dysfunctional than on making them exceptionally functional, and the latter is the goal here.
It’s obviously not unique to them.
We need a replacement for the social technology that is religion—something to provide a sense of community. But perhaps this doesn’t look like one monolithic replacement. Also, people who think human nature could pose an obstacle to realising a vastly better future simply lack ambition. I imagine psychotherapy and meditation, and things like them, could do wonders given sufficient cognitive enhancement and the sort of lifespans we ought to have. But if these didn’t suffice, we could just get our hands a little dirty.
This is not to say that I’m suddenly perfect at it—it’s just no longer a problem.