Comment by autoexec
8 days ago
You can get the same endorphins with exercise, but you don't get to see the results of your work. It's so much more satisfying when you can clearly see your progress. Playing in sandboxes or digging holes in your yard is a game, but manual labor alone is often just work.
I haven’t been to a gym since leaving college (I rowed in a championship 8, and twice daily workouts were a thing). Instead I do manual labor and love it. I’ve built dry stack basalt walls, mowed, edged, pruned, chopped and sawn, poured and broken cement, etc and never missed the (for me) pointless repetition of “exercise”. I respect folks that can do it, but I can’t understand how.
Oh, there's a lot of exercise that's not so pointless. Climbing, soccer, racquetball, dance, etc.
For running, I put on some headphones and get lost in a meditative headspace. For weights, I usually end up reading a book on my phone. Still, neither weights or running are as much fun as the gamified exercises (sports), the puzzles (climbing), or the social-oriented exercises (dance, partnered acrobatics, some sports).
Yeah, that's part of why those gameified exercise apps are such a big hit - you can see "results" before you see the results!