Remember when we all used to live in caves and hunt our meat and gather plant roots for dinner? Yeah, me neither. So let’s take a real quick history trip to the Paleolithic era. (Don’t worry, this is a not a pro-paleo diet / an anti-carb write up.)
Let’s teleport ourselves to the day when our fellow homo sapiens had just discovered stones. And let’s make it a Tuesday. Because it’ll make sense for the purpose of the point I am trying to carve this week.
Ok, so here we are in the heart of the Paleolithic era. And everyone is eating coconut oil. Not. Welcome. I know, the jetlag is the worst. Lay off the wine next time you’re teleporting in time.
As you might have noticed, we are sitting on the ground. Feasting on this charred animal and these delicious roots. Here’s a secret. Eat as much as you can. Because there might be a long stretch between this and the next meal.
Ah, you’re finished with your meal? Great. See that dark corner there in the cave? Yep, the one with hay and mammoth skins on the ground. Go lie down there and be as lazy as you homosapiensly can. Like I said, it might be awhile before the next meal. Try to conserve as much energy as you can.
And don’t bother getting up for the hunt. It’s not like you and I would know what to do anyways.
BAM! Welcome back to 2021. Wild ride, huh?
As you just earlier witnessed in the Paleolithic era, it made sense for us to be as lazy as a human can be. We have evolved to conserve energy. Here’s the bad news though. Paleolithic era is just two and a quarter blinks of a mammoth’s eye in evolutionary terms. Our biology hasn’t even started to catch up with our modern lifestyle.
It’s annoyingly obvious that our evolutionary laziness works against us now. Most of us (at least in the west) are lucky enough to have an abundance of food readily available. No hunting, gathering, or even cooking needed to access it. And if we’re feeling super lazy, it’s entirely possible to outsource our chewing to a blender. All we really need is the will to swallow.
Anyhoo, we have to acknowledge and accept that laziness is part of our biology. We can’t help it. But we can’t use it as an excuse. We can’t become victims of our laziness.
If we want to live a vigorous life and age gracefully, we have to fight our inbuilt laziness with all we have. It’s not always fun. It takes effort. But our biology is unlikely to catch up during our lifetime.
So we might as well get on with it.