I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Humans have been well and truly figured out, and we’ve built an ecosystem for ourselves that is predatory to every single one of our desires and weaknesses. For many, the reward signal received when doing a good and healthy thing is a whisper compared to the fog horn of brain chemicals just perusing through social media gives you. Humans are desensitized, and I think things like this article are people re-hacking their reward mechanisms to try and take back control.

Life is tangled. "Healthy choices" are now choices, previously they were side effects of trying to not die.

Exercise, for example, is bullshit make-work that only some subset of people are wired to enjoy for some reason (never worked out how, I'm gonna guess they're either wired to receive reward signal for this, or it's social activity; half of life's motivation is low-key sexual drive anyway). I don't. So I have to find whatever proxy that works for me.

100 years ago this wouldn't be an issue, because I'd naturally get fit, because daily life required substantial amount of physical labor that we've since automated away.

Are we in some sort of historical outlier in this regard? What do you know about this? Like were people in medieval times way more motivated than we were today or something?

Okay but like, why?

If you're actually doing the thing who cares how achieve it.

The problem isn't when people do things, it's when they spend all their time coming up with the game and then stop playing, which makes it just a form of procrastinating yet far too common.