People take fitness seriously. Those ten thousand steps. Marathon over, time to tackle the ultra-marathon. Pounds upon pounds on the squat rack—just make sure to post it or it never happened. And yoga, well, people take their yoga very seriously.
Taking health seriously is wonderful, arguably better than not considering it at all. That said, one of the greatest joys of exercise is play. Your workout should be hard, otherwise you'll plateau and never grow stronger. Yet this does not imply it can't be fun.
Many sequences I create for my classes begin with me rolling around on the floor. In fact, that's what inspired me to pursue fitness in the first place, a dance class in which crawling around was mandatory. It reminded me of my youngest years rolling down hills because, well, the hill was there. Only later do we justify what once was spontaneous and pleasurable.
Though play we learn essential life skills. We tumble and push and roll and incorporate the lessons into the grander sweep of life. Play is a means of discovering boundaries. Humans and quadrupeds aren't the only animals that master skills in this manner. New research from the University of York shows that crows and parrots learn through play.
The study, led by researchers at the Universities of York and St Andrews, demonstrated that two types of bird were able to solve tasks more successfully if they had explored the object involved in the task beforehand.
By explore, the researchers mean playing with the objects: peck at it, roll it around, flip it over, figure out what it can do. The researchers chose the New Caledonia crow as it has been observed using objects in the wild, while kea parrots are a particularly destructive breed that seem to play harshly through their environment.
The team offered the birds various blocks and ropes. They then offered a tasty reward to find out if the birds could figure out how to use the objects to retrieve their food. Researchers mixed up the tools in later sessions to see if they could remember which tools did what. They did.
This means that the birds did not appear to explicitly seek information about the objects, but rather learned about their properties incidentally through exploring them.
Philosophers have championed play for eons. Alan Watts noticed Western societies treat work as a serious endeavor, far removed from any implications of play. He believed our social and sexual rigidness came from this oversensitivity to the serious—he once said that the gods of the East laugh and play while the God of the West is a stern fellow, indicative of the cultures that created their deities.
To Watts the West has it backwards: you work hard to earn enough money to acquire enough leisure time in order to play. What if we reorient our perception so that our vocation is similar to playing the guitar or dancing? We'd have much more energy at the end of the day, he argues, for we'd enjoy the process of playing at life instead of dreading our tasks in order to achieve a reward later—a rather religious sentiment.
[Watts suggests that we] do everything you have to do in this spirit. Don’t make a distinction between work and play. Regard everything that you’re doing as playing, and don’t imagine for one minute that you’ve got to be serious.
Easier said than done. But the idea is not without precedent. We all learned through playing at some point in our lives, whether stacking wood blocks into castles or by attacking invisible windmills with twig swords. The late neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp believes play is such an important component of our genetic make-up that he labelled one of the brain's seven primary processes the PLAY system.
Beyond boundaries, Panksepp speculates that this system helps us learn “nonsocial physical skills," such as foraging and hunting. Play is paramount in social skills as well, from courting and sex to developing friendships. It helps us compete for status and cooperate when necessary. Panksepp puts playing at the very foundation of what we call society:
[Play] may be an essential force for the construction of many higher functions of our social brains.
After knee surgery I was told I should stop jumping. This made no sense to me, as jumping is one of our body's four primary movements. With the repetitive stress of running, which is a short, controlled form of jumping, out of the equation, I began box jumping to increase my vertical jump as well as strengthen my posterior kinetic chain.
A high box at first seems insurmountable. And indeed, if you overthink the leap, it is. Every time I focus on the height I don't make it. A few months ago I started playing a game with my friend and workout partner, Jeff. We go jump for jump, three series of ten, back and forth. Before we knew it we were both clearing heights that once seemed impossible.
Can we translate this simple gym game to society? If all parties are willing, certainly. But humans take themselves quite seriously. More to the point, we take our points of view as if they're the last word on matters, especially when dealing with politics and spirituality. We think too highly of ourselves; any evidence to the contrary is immediately denied, or worse, mocked. While some confuse mocking with play, the only people who laugh at cynical and unwarranted bigotry under the guise of humor are those afraid of actually testing their own boundaries.
So we remain serious, which is a shame. The NY Times points out that more teenagers are suffering from anxiety than ever before. Anxiety is the most common emotional disorder in the world, yet instead of instilling a healthy relationship with mechanisms for relaxing our stress, we reinforce the problems that led to such overwhelming anxiety in the first place.
Anxiety is a multifactorial issue—I suffered from this disorder for 25 years—I'm not suggesting that rolling down a hill would solve all the world's problems. But it might help. We'll never discover the wisdom of play until we try it out. We might not be able to fly like birds, but we can certainly learn from their other skills.
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Derek is the author of Whole Motion: Training Your Brain and Body For Optimal Health. Based in Los Angeles, he is working on a new book about spiritual consumerism. Stay in touch on Facebook and Twitter.
Ash deposits of some of North America's largest volcanic eruptions.
The end of the world as we know it
Panoramic view of Yellowstone National Park
Image: Heinrich Berann for the National Park Service – public domain
Of the many freak ways to shuffle off this mortal coil – lightning strikes, shark bites, falling pianos – here's one you can safely scratch off your worry list: an outbreak of the Yellowstone supervolcano.
As the map below shows, previous eruptions at Yellowstone were so massive that the ash fall covered most of what is now the western United States. A similar event today would not only claim countless lives directly, but also create enough subsidiary disruption to kill off global civilisation as we know it. A relatively recent eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia may have come close to killing off the human species (see further below).
However, just because a scenario is grim does not mean that it is likely (insert topical political joke here). In this case, the doom mongers claiming an eruption is 'overdue' are wrong. Yellowstone is not a library book or an oil change. Just because the previous mega-eruption happened long ago doesn't mean the next one is imminent.
Ash beds of North America
Ash beds deposited by major volcanic eruptions in North America.
Image: USGS – public domain
This map shows the location of the Yellowstone plateau and the ash beds deposited by its three most recent major outbreaks, plus two other eruptions – one similarly massive, the other the most recent one in North America.
Huckleberry Ridge
The Huckleberry Ridge eruption occurred 2.1 million years ago. It ejected 2,450 km3 (588 cubic miles) of material, making it the largest known eruption in Yellowstone's history and in fact the largest eruption in North America in the past few million years.
This is the oldest of the three most recent caldera-forming eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot. It created the Island Park Caldera, which lies partially in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming and westward into Idaho. Ash from this eruption covered an area from southern California to North Dakota, and southern Idaho to northern Texas.
Mesa Falls
About 1.3 million years ago, the Mesa Falls eruption ejected 280 km3 (67 cubic miles) of material and created the Henry's Fork Caldera, located in Idaho, west of Yellowstone.
It was the smallest of the three major Yellowstone eruptions, both in terms of material ejected and area covered: 'only' most of present-day Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, and about half of South Dakota.
Lava Creek
The Lava Creek eruption was the most recent major eruption of Yellowstone: about 640,000 years ago. It was the second-largest eruption in North America in the past few million years, creating the Yellowstone Caldera.
It ejected only about 1,000 km3 (240 cubic miles) of material, i.e. less than half of the Huckleberry Ridge eruption. However, its debris is spread out over a significantly wider area: basically, Huckleberry Ridge plus larger slices of both Canada and Mexico, plus most of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.
Long Valley
This eruption occurred about 760,000 years ago. It was centered on southern California, where it created the Long Valley Caldera, and spewed out 580 km3 (139 cubic miles) of material. This makes it North America's third-largest eruption of the past few million years.
The material ejected by this eruption is known as the Bishop ash bed, and covers the central and western parts of the Lava Creek ash bed.
Mount St Helens
The eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980 was the deadliest and most destructive volcanic event in U.S. history: it created a mile-wide crater, killed 57 people and created economic damage in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
Yet by Yellowstone standards, it was tiny: Mount St Helens only ejected 0.25 km3 (0.06 cubic miles) of material, most of the ash settling in a relatively narrow band across Washington State and Idaho. By comparison, the Lava Creek eruption left a large swathe of North America in up to two metres of debris.
The difference between quakes and faults
The volume of dense rock equivalent (DRE) ejected by the Huckleberry Ridge event dwarfs all other North American eruptions. It is itself overshadowed by the DRE ejected at the most recent eruption at Toba (present-day Indonesia). This was one of the largest known eruptions ever and a relatively recent one: only 75,000 years ago. It is thought to have caused a global volcanic winter which lasted up to a decade and may be responsible for the bottleneck in human evolution: around that time, the total human population suddenly and drastically plummeted to between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs.
Image: USGS – public domain
So, what are the chances of something that massive happening anytime soon? The aforementioned mongers of doom often claim that major eruptions occur at intervals of 600,000 years and point out that the last one was 640,000 years ago. Except that (a) the first interval was about 200,000 years longer, (b) two intervals is not a lot to base a prediction on, and (c) those intervals don't really mean anything anyway. Not in the case of volcanic eruptions, at least.
Earthquakes can be 'overdue' because the stress on fault lines is built up consistently over long periods, which means quakes can be predicted with a relative degree of accuracy. But this is not how volcanoes behave. They do not accumulate magma at constant rates. And the subterranean pressure that causes the magma to erupt does not follow a schedule.
What's more, previous super-eruptions do not necessarily imply future ones. Scientists are not convinced that there ever will be another big eruption at Yellowstone. Smaller eruptions, however, are much likelier. Since the Lava Creek eruption, there have been about 30 smaller outbreaks at Yellowstone, the last lava flow being about 70,000 years ago.
As for the immediate future (give or take a century): the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone is only 5 percent to 15 percent molten. Most scientists agree that is as un-alarming as it sounds. And that its statistically more relevant to worry about death by lightning, shark, or piano.
Strange Maps #1041
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
When the pandemic forced office employees into lockdown and cut them off from spending in-person time with their colleagues, they almost immediately realized that they favor remote work over their traditional office routines and norms.
As remote workers of all ages contemplate their futures – and as some offices and schools start to reopen – many Americans are asking hard questions about whether they wish to return to their old lives, and what they're willing to sacrifice or endure in the years to come.
Even before the pandemic, there were people asking whether office life jibed with their aspirations.
We spent years studying “digital nomads" – workers who had left behind their homes, cities and most of their possessions to embark on what they call “location independent" lives. Our research taught us several important lessons about the conditions that push workers away from offices and major metropolitan areas, pulling them toward new lifestyles.
Legions of people now have the chance to reinvent their relationship to their work in much the same way.
Big-city bait and switch
Most digital nomads started out excited to work in career-track jobs for prestigious employers. Moving to cities like New York and London, they wanted to spend their free time meeting new people, going to museums and trying out new restaurants.
But then came the burnout.
Although these cities certainly host institutions that can inspire creativity and cultivate new relationships, digital nomads rarely had time to take advantage of them. Instead, high cost of living, time constraints and work demands contributed to an oppressive culture of materialism and workaholism.
Pauline, 28, who worked in advertising helping large corporate clients to develop brand identities through music, likened city life for professionals in her peer group to a “hamster wheel." (The names used in this article are pseudonyms, as required by research protocol.)
“The thing about New York is it's kind of like the battle of the busiest," she said. “It's like, 'Oh, you're so busy? No, I'm so busy.'"
Most of the digital nomads we studied had been lured into what urbanist Richard Florida termed “creative class" jobs – positions in design, tech, marketing and entertainment. They assumed this work would prove fulfilling enough to offset what they sacrificed in terms of time spent on social and creative pursuits.
Yet these digital nomads told us that their jobs were far less interesting and creative than they had been led to expect. Worse, their employers continued to demand that they be “all in" for work – and accept the controlling aspects of office life without providing the development, mentorship or meaningful work they felt they had been promised. As they looked to the future, they saw only more of the same.
Ellie, 33, a former business journalist who is now a freelance writer and entrepreneur, told us: “A lot of people don't have positive role models at work, so then it's sort of like 'Why am I climbing the ladder to try and get this job? This doesn't seem like a good way to spend the next twenty years.'"
By their late 20s to early 30s, digital nomads were actively researching ways to leave their career-track jobs in top-tier global cities.
Looking for a fresh start
Although they left some of the world's most glamorous cities, the digital nomads we studied were not homesteaders working from the wilderness; they needed access to the conveniences of contemporary life in order to be productive. Looking abroad, they quickly learned that places like Bali in Indonesia, and Chiang Mai in Thailand had the necessary infrastructure to support them at a fraction of the cost of their former lives.
With more and more companies now offering employees the choice to work remotely, there's no reason to think digital nomads have to travel to southeast Asia – or even leave the United States – to transform their work lives.
During the pandemic, some people have already migrated away from the nation's most expensive real estate markets to smaller cities and towns to be closer to nature or family. Many of these places still possess vibrant local cultures. As commutes to work disappear from daily life, such moves could leave remote workers with more available income and more free time.
The digital nomads we studied often used savings in time and money to try new things, like exploring side hustles. One recent study even found, somewhat paradoxically, that the sense of empowerment that came from embarking on a side hustle actually improved performance in workers' primary jobs.
The future of work, while not entirely remote, will undoubtedly offer more remote options to many more workers. Although some business leaders are still reluctant to accept their employees' desire to leave the office behind, local governments are embracing the trend, with several U.S. cities and states – along with countries around the world – developing plans to attract remote workers.
This migration, whether domestic or international, has the potential to enrich communities and cultivate more satisfying work lives.
Rachael A. Woldoff, Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University and Robert Litchfield, Associate Professor of Business, Washington & Jefferson College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
