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January - February, 2023

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January 2, 2023. The new year is a good time for self-improvement, but I don't wait for it. The main thing I've been working on lately is walking. I mentioned in a Reddit thread that my knees are in better shape at age 55 than they were at age 25, because back then I would walk around setting my feet down clumsily. Someone replied: Are you saying it takes 50 years to learn to walk?

No, but it could take hundreds of hours to learn to walk correctly, and not in a million years would my body have figured it out on its own. I'm a bad athlete, but even professional athletes put a lot of time into mechanics. The difference is, they have to focus on mechanics to perform at the highest level; I have to do it to perform with basic competence.

I've always noticed that my shoes develop a worn patch in the center of the right heel, as if I'm setting it down with a slight twist. Only last month did I bother to spend an entire minute actually watching myself walk, and catch that slight twist in action. Now, whenever I go heel-toe, I keep my head down and focus on my right leg, gradually building the habit of setting it down cleanly.

Mostly I walk on the balls of my feet, which is really hard to do without looking like a dweeb. By watching myself in windows along the street, I've discovered that the trick is to put more whip into my steps.

At the same time, I'm noticing exactly how my knees bend, and trying different ways of swinging my hips and arms. Leigh Ann says I either swing my arms too stiffly, or too loosely. She was the fastest runner in her elementary school, so she gives me unhelpful advice like "just feel it." But she can tell at a glance if I'm doing it right or wrong, and she's been helping me practice the George Jefferson walk, which is about as far as you can get from my habitual gait.


January 4. Another trick I use to walk better, is to pretend that my body is an advanced video game avatar that I'm trying out. I'm not sure why this works. My best guess is, it creates a context for observing the body, that offers more novelty and meaning than the one provided by our culture: that the body is a cumbersome meat sack that will give us pain if we don't give it enough attention.

More generally, why are games fun? Why is it that real life tasks, like prepping cilantro or flossing, are tedious chores, while game tasks can be just as fiddly and repetitive and yet we enjoy them? I think it's because games create a tighter context for tasks to feel rewarding.

This is a problem for complex society. As our actions are connected to more things, it becomes harder to grasp the value of whatever we're doing. Valuable actions like sorting trash can feel painful and degrading, while harmful actions can feel fun.

"Gamification" is a word mostly used by people playing a larger game of leveraging power into more power. Let's make it fun for the peasants to give us their data! But in a system that's not based on power over others (coming in about a thousand years) I don't see any reason to hold back from making life more game-like.