rec·re·a·tion
[rek-ree-ey-shuhn]
- refreshment by means of some pastime, agreeable exercise, or the like.
- a pastime, diversion, exercise, or other resource affording relaxation and enjoyment.
- the act of creating anew.
I hear it all the time.
“Wow Pete, you’re a crazy man! I could never do [insert thing I’m doing]!”
(And I think, but don’t often say) Of course you could. The only difference between me and you is that I tried it. I’m not actually very talented, at all. Also I’m a huge wuss.
“That looks hard, why are you doing all that?”
What is easy that is truly worth doing? What sense of accomplishment do you have after watching 10 hours of TV a week or doing the dishes?
“Running/lifting/road riding/mountain biking is scary/unnecessary/dangerous/difficult/should be outlawed.”
I’m far more scared of falling apart physically and mentally from the lack of challenge.
“I’d love to do that, but I have kids/dogs/gerbils/other obligations/excuses.”
If it’s a priority for you, you’ll find a way to make it happen.
And one of my all-time favorites,
“You’d better be careful, or you’ll end up breaking yourself/getting old/wearing yourself out.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to live forever. But I am planning on living during the time that I have.
And I hear every sort of person say these things. Fit people, fat people, young, old, male and female. Everybody thinks I’m crazy, and that I’m attempting something that is not only impossible, but foolhardy.
I’ve posted before about why I do what I do, how I get that done, and what I plan to do with it. But maybe I haven’t correctly addressed one of the root causes of the above quoted reactions to my endeavors.
Maybe the underlying question is, “what’s the point?” And I can only answer with a question. Does there have to be a point? What about fun? When I’m out on my bikes, or lifting something heavy, or running, I’m basically playing, as an adult. I’m doing things that kids do, sure, but with an adult bent.
In this Ted Talk, Dr. Stuart Brown talks about the importance of play, and of fun, on all aspects of human cognitive, social and physical development and maintenance. I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but the short of it is that play makes us smarter, happier, more capable and more well adjusted people. And as adults in Western society, we don’t do nearly enough of it. The shockwaves of the Industrial Revolution have left too many of us chained to desks under soul-sucking fluorescent light, mindless automatons that answer email and churn out product and do little else. Because we don’t offset our work with play, the parts of the brain that are stimulated specifically by it begin to atrophy, and then we wonder why we have such an epidemic of antidepressant and stimulant use.
And it gets worse. The brain’s negativity bias means that you need somewhere around 10 times the positive experience per negative experience in order to store the positive in your long term memory. So when you go to play, and you don’t have fun the first time, you have to stick with it for a somewhat lengthy time before you start to crave a duplication of the experience.
So your body may object, and your brain is a cranky bastard, but you know you need to do it anyway. So do it anyway. Create that positive feedback loop that’ll keep you coming back. Get the cerebellum firing, and the right bran tingling, and the positive endorphins flowing, and the dopamine levels spiking. It will make you happier, and smarter, and stronger, and healthier. And if the transformations I’ve seen in the people around me are any indication, it may just help keep you looking and feeling younger, too.
The word “recreation” didn’t come about by accident. Our ancestors understood that through play, through fun, through activity just for the joy of the activity, we create ourselves anew. Find yours, stick with it, and enjoy the new you.
The problem I see with your premise is that you seem to equate fun and play with physical activity. I’m not saying there’s not a correlation, yet I can’t help but note that I get as much fun and play out of building with Legos or board games as I might out of some physical activity and that there is no physical correlation between the two.
Different kinds of play yield different kinds of fun and different kinds of benefits. Much like our discussion of learning cursive, you simply can’t duplicate the set of stimuli and physiological responses provided by active, physical play without actually doing it.
That’s very true, yet the fact remains that many people have fun and play without that activity ever being physical. Calling it physical play, therefore, defines the specific kind of activity you are advocating, I’m going after this distinction because not everyone sees physical activity as fun, nor will they even after long attempts at doing it, and as a result, they will not see it as play nor as recreation. This is an incredibly important distinction for the many, many people for whom physical activity is a struggle and for whom the “just do it until you start liking it” formula fails.
I should clarify that I am not saying any of the things I am saying to be particularly contrarian nor adversarial. I actually agree with the fundamental ideal that physical recreation is an important part of who we are, and it turns out that even I have physical activities that I enjoy. That said, there are people for whom this advice still falls short and for whom your other advice (“sweat so you can enjoy the things you do like doing that much more”) is far more useful.
This is an important reality because I can tell you, as someone who has struggled with these things for years, discouragement is the number one enemy of getting fit. When someone sees an idea they know doesn’t fit them, it feeds that discouragement. To me, the idea has to be to defeat that discouragement, which is why precise definitions are so incredibly important.
Regardless, physiology and neurology continue to demonstrate the undeniable and manifold benefits of vigorous physical activity. Whatever that activity may end up being is entirely up to the individual, of course. But my point was that trying something once, or even a few times, and then quitting is not an honest approach, nor one that will ever yield results, because of that negativity bias we’re all wired with.
I maintain, and with significant backing, that physical activity is and should be fun, and that everyone should engage in it, to their own betterment. I will never insist that what I do is for everyone, but in the breath of opportunities available, I do believe that everyone can find something agreeable to them.
I’m curious to see the backing for the statement that physical activity “is and should be fun” given that fun is a subjective evaluation specific to every individual. And that kind of statement is also the point of my entire thread of comments here: when we demand that the subjectivity of some become the objectivity of all, we inevitably lose some people in the process. I maintain, and with significant backing, that we are losing people and for, in part, those very kinds of reasons.
Because fun has measurable, quantifiable biological responses. The release of endorphins, the activation of pleasure areas of the brain, etc. Whatever one’s predisposition (based on negative experience) to dislike the idea of physical activity, the body will respond physiologically in a predictable manner, given that the type, intensity and duration of said activity is planned and executed in such a way as to not push body and mind into a state of distress.
What strikes me as incongruous about your position is your apparent disregard for the concept of delayed gratification, which is something you live on a daily basis, more than most people I know. When you’re tending cattle, or baling hay, or roasting coffee, the work itself isn’t really all that enjoyable in and of itself. But because you know the payoff, your brain has created the positive feedback loop that allows the work itself to become a positive experience. It works backwards, in a way.
I also know that, like me, once you’ve made the decision to do something, the difficulties, discomforts and objections cease to matter, and you’ll put in any amount of work, however disagreeable, to get where you’re trying to go. The process by which each of us comes to that decision is as complicated as it is enigmatic, to be sure. But I think that the primary difference between your viewpoint and mine, presently, is that we are on opposite sides of that decision.
You’re missing my point. Fun does not necessarily equal physical activity. My point here is not and has not been that physical activity cannot be fun but instead that fun is not equivalent to physical activity. You seem to be making an argument, based solely on what you have written here, that there is an equivalence. I am pointing out that equivalence is false. Sure, some people may find some physical activities fun, but fun is not exclusively physical. It can also be mental. It can also be social. It can also be emotional. Lots of people have lots of fun without physical activity. There simply isn’t an equivalence.
Whatever my own preconceptions might be have nothing to do with logical inconsistency.
Therein lies one of the problems with such debates: you are arguing against other things I have said that are not what I am saying now, plus you are arguing against those things with your own set of preconceptions about what I think and what I am saying simply because you know me.
My thesis here, from the beginning has been simple and straightforward, preconceptions aside: “The problem I see with your premise is that you seem to equate fun and play with physical activity.” I have no doubt that you, and many other people, find physical activity fun, but you cannot induce from that experience that all fun is physical activity. It’s simply not true.
For example, believe it or not, I find this whole debate fun. I always have. And about the only physical activity associated with it is the fact that I’m breathing and typing on a keyboard. Fun comes in all sorts of different forms. Some of it happens to be physical. The great majority of it is not.
And, if you are making the claim that biological and chemical processes equal physical activity, that is dead wrong on a whole host of levels unless you are going to basically define all physiological activity as physical activity, which would include watching TV, sleeping, and debating on the internet.
I should also point out to everyone else who might read this who isn’t us that, contrary to how it may sound, I do not now nor have I ever argued against physical activity, physical fun, fitness, or anything of the sort. Instead, I have discovered through my own long and sometimes painful experience that what some people find as a successful method of staying fit by engaging in what most people call traditional exercise simply does not work for me. What does work is still a matter of debate.
Finally, let me put this all another way in an attempt to focus on my original point by providing a parallel example:
I enjoy drawing. In fact, I find drawing fun. Further, I think everyone should learn to draw. The benefits of learning to draw are many, including improved hand-eye coordination, a better ability to observe one’s environment, and cognitive development that helps prevent deterioration in the brain.
In fact, I think everyone should engage in production of visual art and in art appreciation for all the benefits it can provide. Yet, I know that there are going to be a whole bunch of people for whom the idea of any kind of art or art appreciation will never work, not matter what the benefits might be. Those people will never enjoy it. For those people it will never be fun.
So, both drawing (art) and physical activity (exercise) can both be fun, yet neither of them define fun. Fun is far larger than either. And that was my point.
Ah, I see the misunderstanding. I’m arguing that physical activity is fun but not meaning the reverse, and you are trying to underline that not all fun is physical. A confusion of mathematics and logic.
I didn’t mean to imply that all fun is of the physical variety. What you were reading as an equals sign, I was trying to convey as a portion of a tree diagram. Play as a general concept is necessary and beneficial, and there are specific benefits to physical play that aren’t created elsewhere in the play “tree.” I thought I was creating that distinction when I talked about different types of fun having different types of benefits. I may have also made the erroneous assumption that my readers would have watched the video, wherein the author loosely lays out that construct. That was rather a silly assumption, given that it’s over 20 minutes long…
But anyway it leads me back to one of the main ideas of the post, which is that as adults, we are socially conditioned out of physical play, a phenomenon which I think is destructive to us as human beings.