FLEXing Your Brain Muscles
Well hello there! Welcome back to a new is old is new again format of the artist formerly known as Friday Flex, currently known as Physical Education, one day known as…ok I’m outta gas.
Jokes aside, I’ve been missing the written word, been missing the more meditative feeling of putting finger to keyboard, and so I’m going to alternate some video interview/podcast versions of Phys Ed with these written pieces.
This morning I read this article by Cal Newport and it threw me for a loop. My wife is a voracious consumer of non-fiction, social science, and intentionality/productivity books, and we have Deep Work on our shelves at home (My tastes skew towards knights and dragons) so I was vaguely familiar with his work, but boy did this one strike a chord with me.
I hope you read the article and take it seriously, because I its key premises scared the shit out of me and made me think deeply about what we do at Lumos. These days, we are probably more equipped than ever (from an information perspective) in the physical fitness arena, with best practices, training programs, and good gyms a click or two away. I’ve been to commercial gyms a few times in the last year or two, and have been widely impressed. Historically I’d look around, see terrible form, ridiculous exercise selection, and a general lack of knowledge and go “what the hell are all these people doing?” Now, I look around and go, “yeah, these people seem to get it.”
Returning to the “mind space” of the article, while our fitness knowledge has increased, we are at a higher than ever risk of ceding our mental health and capacity to predatory social media apps and AI “helpers” that whittle down our precious mental resources. Social media and our phones at large drag our attention from our real lives, and AI promises to make everything faster and “easier,” but almost certainly not better.
One thing that jumped out at me was when Newport talks about people using AI to help them get a project started so they don’t have to sit in the discomfort of a blank page or the space between Step Zero and that important first step.
Discomfort! I talk about that all the time! The gym is a place where we teach people how to sit with, experience, navigate, and traverse discomfort in their physical being. We get people “comfortable with being uncomfortable,” again, in a physical sense. We create safe spaces for people to fail, and then challenge them to not turn away from things that seem hard, and they always come out on the other side the better for it.
Can we do that for people’s minds? Can we evolve to help people navigate not just their physical fitness, but their mental fitness as well? Are we contributing to people’s battle with their own attention spans by existing on social media platforms? Can we help guide people towards a mental fitness practice as robust and beneficial to them as what we do for their physical capacity?
I’m going to be doing some deep thinking on this (with my phone as far away from me as possible!) and I hope you will too. I’d love for my gym to be a place that cares equally about our members’ mental fitness as it does their physical capacity, and I hope that’s the kind of gym you’d like to be a part of.
It’s nice to be writing to y’all again, and I hope it’s nice to read it.
