Whole Activities

It is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls.

- J. R. R. Tolkien

“Modernity decouples”. My friend Daffy coined this phrase a few years ago, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.

Food processing decouples sugar from vitamins. Birth control decouples sex from childbirth. Computers decouple labor from physical exercise. The welfare state decouples security from community. Scientific medicine decouples healing from relationship. Stand-up comedy decouples laughter from friendship.

This decoupling means we can’t rely on our instincts and cultural mores, because they were overfit to the old, coupled, world. We can’t trust our appetite, we can’t trust out sexual desires, we can’t trust our social intuitions. No wonder so many of us develop mental illnesses or turn to drugs. Despite being wealthier than kings of old, we find it harder to meet our basic needs than medieval peasants did. Many of us are starving in the midst of the greatest cornucopia ever assembled.

There are a few strategies people deploy to deal with the pathologies downstream of modern decoupling.

One is to RETVRN. Go back to older ways of being, avoid modernity and technology as much as possible. The Amish take this to an extreme, but you’re implementing this strategy any time you exert willpower to avoid eating candy or binging Netflix.

Another is to ACCELERATE. Use modernity’s tools to compensate for modernity’s problems. Hit the gym or do HIIT before coming into your sedentary job. Add powdered vitamins and creatine to your milkshake. Inject young blood to combat the buildup of toxins in your body.

The third, and the one I find most nourishing, is to find whole activities, activities that satisfy many needs simultaneously. Whole activities are like those beautiful multi-purpose moves in chess - the ones that defend your weakest point, threaten your opponent, and open up space for other pieces all at the same time.

I’ve never been able to sustain a gym habit for longer than a few months, but I played ultimate frisbee twice a week regularly for five years. Why? Ultimate frisbee, and outdoor team sports generally, are some of the most whole activities I know - a single activity satisfies my need to socialize, to strategize, to exercise, to feel the sun on my skin and probably ten other needs I’m not even tracking. Sadly many team sports are not fun to play when the participants vary a lot in skill, which is one reason I started hosting semi-regular capture the flag games - CTF being the only sport I know where five year olds and professional athletes can play together and still have fun.

Perhaps the most historically important whole activity in Western culture is attending church - often combining meditation, singing, dancing, spiritual instruction, community bonding, and important announcements as well a host of subtler and more sacred things in just an hour or two a week.

And the simplest whole activity of all? In Sasha’s immortal tweet:

Note how none of these activities are optimized for any one dimension. Team sports are much less time-efficient than HIIT. They don’t make you stronger as fast as weightlifting does. Church won’t give you a feeling of ecstatic union as easily as an MDMA-fueled rave. If you’re only paying attention to a narrow slice of your experience, or if you’re optimizing some metric, they basically never make sense to do…

… and yet, I repeatedly find whole activities to be the most important part of my routine. They are optimal in a deeper, more holistic sense. They make me feel fully human in a way that narrowly optimized, highly efficient activities do not.

Because our culture is obsessed with narrow optimization, it’s incredibly easy to create value by making activities just a little bit more whole. By interrupting your long meeting and asking everyone to stand up and stretch. By ending your Pilates workout with a couple of community announcements. By playing a video game with your friends instead of watching Netflix alone.

Or we could try push the bounds of just how whole an activity could be. Can an activity be as spiritually and socially nourishing as church, as exuberantly physical as a team sport or yoga class, as intellectually stimulating as a 4X strategy game, and as profoundly relaxing and meditative as a long walk? Seems hard, but we had walks and sports and church two thousand years ago. We’ve built some powerful new tools since then…

Thanks to @RogerThisdell for the diagram that inspired this essay: