Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug
derekthompson.org
derekthompson.org
My partner often comments when I’ve been a little grumpier than usual by saying, “you should go on a bike ride.”
It really works wonders on the soul (and the more physical heart and lungs) getting out for a spin in the fresh air.
Both are fine for the soul :)
(OK only some exercise, and usually I already like it while I'm doing it, I just don't want to go out to do it.)
I exercise to work up a thirst.
Earlier today, I walked across several neighborhoods and through an entire large park to get to the city center for some shopping, all in the span of 40 minutes. If you feel like walking is ineffective at getting you places, you may want to consider advocating for walkable cities.
however, both during and for two or three hours after exercising, the emotional effect is very negative. i feel much more anxious, prone to negative thoughts, self-critical, pessimistic, sometimes angry.
the benefits are definitely real but I feel like I am paying a very large cost to get them. i've tried lots of different forms of exercise and they all have this effect if i push to a reasonable level of intensity.
i'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience and managed to find a place where exercising makes them feel happy.
Have they all been in a gym environment? If so, it could be the reason. Going to the gym in the winter, I do get the benefits but it doesn't do as much for my mood as sports outdoors when the weather is nice.
I can also recommend easy, restorative yoga exercises, which is the lightest exercise there is, but it will help you with: sitting too much, improve sleep, stretch and reduce stress.
You could even try the opposite, exercising in a spinning won't have the same effect.
We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what. Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level. We have connective tissue that stores and releases energy. Our bodies can reject on the order of 1kW+ of heat steady-state through the magic of evaporative cooling.
My flat feet (and those of my mom, and those of one of her parents, ad infinitum) would beg to differ lol
Also, most of the energy our bodies burn to run just turns into heat, it's all very inefficient... even if sweating itself works pretty well, and even if our heat tolerance is high assuming we have a source of fresh water
Note also that there are numerous champion runners with flat feet.
My point is that selection pressures do not always lead to optimal outcomes...
https://chatgpt.com/share/688e4822-4e44-8004-9625-21a254fa02...
Make sure to start and transition slowly though as there are warnings about injuring your Achilles and other muscles in your calf if you start off too aggressively.
Evolution is not perfect. We are still better at running long distances for long stretches of time than any other animal.
Actually, it doesn’t seem like a horrible life, but I think we’re hoping to stick around a little longer.
Not really. We are on par with many animals, or rather they are on par with us, with some tradeoffs on both sides (e.g. humans are better in hotter weather).
Wolves, wild dogs, horses (and other fast hoofed herbivores) are all roughly on par in pure ability to run.
What made us even more successful is the ability to plan and organize (wolves have this), sweat (only humans can do full-body) and use of tools.
My knees freaking killed me when I was running. I started using the supports my wife bought for me and it instantly improved, and far beyond any placebo effect. Before: my knees ached after I ran 100% of the time. Now: they never ache anymore.
And if you are overweight and sedentary DON'T RUN TO GET INTO SHAPE.
Walking, hiking, swimming, biking, and weight training. Mix all of it so you get cross training effects and distribute stress across many domains.
Running is, by the standards of the statistical hole America is in terms of obesity, an "advanced" activity. We're talking about something that involves a stress increase of 2.5x to 4.x over walking.
Now consider that an obese person with an extra 50 lbs of fat is on their body. Running will be an extra 200 lbs of stress on your feet, and none of that fat tissue is absorbing impact or stabilizing that impact. And on top of it, the fat will disrupt the neuro-biomechanical flow of your neuromuscular system, making you less coordinated and therefore also harder to absorb the impact.
As I said elsewhere: use GLP-1 to get the fat down and simultaneously employ a gentle ROUTINE activity program that morphs into more and more exercise and exercise variety.
This. Many people aren't in good enough shape to run. And if they do run their form is often terrible.
There was a website years ago at WasWayFat.com about a guy that lost a ton of weight just stepping on an aerobic stair in his home.
Wayback machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20170710225625/http://www.wasway...
And doing it is close to the maximum calories you will burn per unit of effort and time.
BMI of 29 starting so not obese but overweight and running has me down at 27 now.
I found that there is only one type of shoe on the market that prevents me from getting injured (Asics Gel-Kayano). Everything else - low drop, high drop, HOKA, Brooks, Nike, even Asics' own GT-2000s - is a quick route to knee injury for me. And I don't need arch supports when using the Kayanos, even though I am a very clear overpronator.
Don’t ever get what someone else likes instead of what you prefer. Your feet aren’t theirs.
Matches my own experience, first season of cross country in HS I had neutral shoes and they were perfect, went back for new shoes next season and they put me in motion control shoes which gave me instant knee pain.
The point of my post was that these experiences are highly personal and specific to your physiology. Different shoe models labeled the same type can have drastically different dynamics depending on their design and the specifics of your gait and strike. If you have pain or injuries, don't trust the studies, try different shoes and cross-training/stretching techniques until you find what works for you.
About 20 years ago, I was riding my bike everywhere and hardly walking. I went on a trip to NYC and was walking 10+ miles a day. I developed severe shooting pains in my feet. Getting some supports helped dramatically and so I started wearing them whenever I wore shoes.
I did this for about 15 years and completely swore by arch supporting shoes. Then, one day I was playing basketball and landed on someone's foot going for a layup. My foot basically folded in half in the opposite direction of the arch. This was a major injury and I could not walk at all for a week and it took multiple years before I stopped feeling pain regularly in that foot.
After the injury, I completely stopped wearing arch supports. I had a theory that my feet had been weakened by using them and that this weakness was the underlying reason for the severity of my injury. For the last few years, I have averaged about eight miles of walking a day and mostly wear zero drop minimal shoes. I have developed the ability to run on concrete with them, though I do not particularly enjoy this (primarily because my running efficiency is poor).
If I were running a marathon, I would certainly wear shoes with padding, but I don't find much padding or support necessary or even desirable for brisk walking for hours at a time. And for almost 15 years, I never left the house without bulky supports.
Bracing a body part weakens that body part in the long run.
Anybody who has ever had a cast on their arm knows this firsthand.
Probably Vibram FiveFingers
Also: wearing them makes you understand that you wear gloves when everyone is stuck at mittens.
(Beleaguered parent of a toddler here struggling to find ANY workout time, or the energy for it! It's killing me, literally and figuratively)
A lot of my problem also related to back pain when growing up, and I realized also in my 20's how much going to the gym helped with the back pain. As my back got stronger via strength training, I no longer suffered from back pain. Additionally I invested more in things like a good office chair at home and ensured I had a good one at work.
Overall I no longer have back problems and no longer require any inserts in my shoes.
Some years later when I started running with typical arch supporting running shoes, picked out for me at a specialty running store where they record your stride etc, I developed pretty bad plantar fasciitis as soon as I started hitting 8k on my runs. Swapped them out for zero drop Altras and I haven’t had issues since.
All that is to say our feet are pretty well designed as long as you give it the strengthening it needs. You should take care of your feet, but not coddle them, is how I’ve come to view it.
And if you think our moving->sweating is bad, check out horses and dogs.
Trail runners often run with poles on up or down hills. Not sure about top speed, but from experience the poles definitely help with endurance.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27446911/#&gid=article-figur...
That record progressed
2008 18.58
2015 15.71
If we check in on more recent progress since then, we find the current record is 15.66 set in 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20241222175947/https://www.guinn...
Another 7 years, for an improvement of 0.05 seconds, or about 850 years of linear improvement to reach Bolt's 9.58 seconds.
Anyone wanting to bet on beating Bolt by 2048?
Humans are evolved to run, but not to have heavy frames and not carrying material for fighting wars.
After surviving early years, people still used to get old. Infant mortality was just way higher bringing the average down. (And that those metrics often compare to poor peasants and our paleo ancestors were not peasants)
> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.
US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.
And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."
I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)
I'm not sure from where you got this because any documentary/book/article and simply real life experiences related to this subject states the opposite (take a common animal such as a dog as an example)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
A key hunan advantage was persistence hunting - track and run after a deer (or similar) prey. Tgey can burst outrun the human, burt hemshe keeps on running, eventually, often after double-digit kilometers, the human can just trot up to the exhausted nimal and kill it. That's what the tendons and evaporative cooling do.
There's a famous Uktramarathon race, iirc, the Western States 100, 100 miles in the Sierra mountains that was a horse race, until some people started running without the horse, and winning.
This appears to be the case and this idea is explained, in-depth, in the excellent book:
_Born to Run_
... by Christopher McDougall.
I highly recommend it.
A meta-analysis of RCTs with ~50,000 participants concluded that exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality or incident CVD in older adults or people with chronic conditions [1].
However, for specific high-risk groups, the causal evidence from RCTs is strong. A separate meta-analysis found that for cancer patients and survivors, exercise led to [2]:
- A 24% reduction in mortality risk
- A 48% reduction in recurrence risk
The commonly cited large benefits (e.g., 40% lower mortality) come from observational studies [3]. These are very susceptible to the "healthy user bias" or reverse causation—people who are healthy enough to exercise are already at a lower risk of dying. This makes it difficult to prove the exercise caused the benefit.
So, while exercise is strongly associated with lower mortality, the direct causal evidence for the general population isn't as definitive as it is for specific subgroups like cancer survivors.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189...
Consistency over sporadic herculean efforts always wins out.
Which is the best of both worlds: You don’t index yourself against an herculean performance, and yet you still do exercise. And walking 8hrs in the mountains actually does wonders to weight, MUCH better than my herculean 1000m-in-70-minutes climb.
Also if after passing your 20s, ego still defines your behaviour on such a personal and private aspect of your life, I'd suggest to look into doing meditation/mindfulness, as it's a bit strange (or at least it should be).
I am also saying that for those new to the gym, starting with say 10-20 minutes every day is better in the long run than 1-1.5 hours three times a week before the body is acclimated or before proper form is developed. This lowers the risk of injury that could set back the health improvement endeavor.
The danger of hyper-optimization is people just giving up altogether. That's why a lot of those intense diets don't work.
Does Keto work? Yes. But does it actually? No. Because being on Keto is very, very hard and people just give up. The vast majority of people who start Keto will not stick to it.
But switching out soda for diet soda is easy. So, if I'm inclined to give suggestions, I'd rather suggest that.
I'm talking about the basics. For anyone who wants to get benefit from exercise. If you think you're getting those benefits in some other way, you're lying to yourself or you don't understand what we're talking about.
But, for most Americans, they need to be walking. The rest can come later. Sorry superman.
Used to run but was always getting sore knees. Now I walk and it’s very consistent.
Tai chi actually is another amazing tool - it is a dynamic calisthenics exercise that builds core strength, balance, and stretches connective tissue.
> To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our metabolism, improve mitochondrial function, fortify our immune system, reduce inflammation, improve tissue-specific adaptations, and protect against disease.
Yoga is neither aerobic fitness nor weight training
note: I do yoga probably about twice a month (should do more) so I'm not dissing yoga. I'm only noting that the picture of yoga seems to have nothing to do with the article.
If the proposition is "exercise is a miracle drug," my experience at least is that yoga 100% qualifies.
At a minimum, I don't feel the HN post title properly reflects the full contents of the article.
I was only able to gain an exercise habit by addressing my mood and anxiety first. First, with my mental improvements I became actively motivated to exercise and didn't hate it anymore. I kept at it for several weeks, only stopping every so often due to fatigue. Eventually I did earn the habit of exercise. This wasn't intuitive to me, but the typical causality was backwards. Exercise was not what directly made me healthier, but being healthier (mentally) from the start allowed me to initiate and keep exercising, from which I earned even more health benefits.
A mental deficit in being able to form habits is arguably even worse than a lack of exercise, since you would try to apply the "exercise cure" advice and just burn out after a while like I did. It's not like you didn't exercise, but you could not internalize what all those people typically say must be the case if you just exercise a lot.
Even as my mood fluctuates I am now able to still go for a jog once in a while. These days I understand that if I had started off exercising in a state of low mood, I would have no chance of making it stick. The habit carried over from when I persisted at it in my limited window of improved mood.
What exactly is moral investment and why should government be in the business of making moral investments, especially for foreign countries?
On a tangent, I think that's part of why volunteering can be so rewarding.
So becoming a software developer?
I’ve met a lot of my gym partners, biking friends, and climbing friends through software work.
At my first job (where I kinda 'weaseled' my way into doing software vs my job title) it was an incredibly collaborative experience. It started with finding ways to make tools that helped my colleagues do monotonous tasks faster. Which then evolved into fun dialogue. "Hey can you make a button to do X" and we'd get to talk about it, I'd hack the feature together, hit publish and wait for the team to give feedback. "Oh I got this error" I'd get up and walk over. It wasn't perfect but I was never lonely and only as still as I wanted to be.
At my second gig, It started a little lonely but thankfully the culture was just laid back enough I got to socialize (thankfully it was a shop full of fun and interesting people!).
Third gig, Uggh it was very 'heads down' for most of my time there, nobody liked small talk except the conspiracy theory guy. I learned a lot about what I did and didn't like in company culture there. It did get a little better before I left...
Fourth gig was a dream. It was the second place where I didn't just get to collaborate with my team, but the first place where it was a lot of software engineers. We even had a teams room for nothing but sharing music and it was always heartwarming to see a reply to some obscure tune and someone would reply with something that yes you would absolutely appreciate given what you originally posted. And it was hectic enough that I did get a reputation for being a 'floor runner'.
Fifth Gig... well it was 100% remote. And in fact one day I was so focused on a problem I sat in the wrong position too long and permanently fucked up my left ulnar nerve... But that was such a good group, and Ironically I was able to -take- the lessons from #4 and #2 and turned them into traditions that stuck around even after I left (hell even after they fired everyone, we kept doing the 'game night' for a while...)
Won't say anything about my current place, that's all still a work in progress <_<
That's pretty much what was done during the pandemic unfortunately.
Point being: dressing appropriately can extend your running season dramatically.
If you have been sedentary for a long time and are overweight, you obviously have too much weight for your muscular strength and connective tissues, which have concurrently atrophied with inactivity, in addition to reduced neuro-biomechanic maps in your brain since you haven't used the circuitry.
This all adds up to a high initial injury risk in starting exercise even if you have the mentally focus.
But GLP-1, if it is the miracle it purports, should be able to drop overweight people, even if it is temporarily, to the point where you can being exercise much more safely, and/or with more intensity and duration to get more benefits sooner.
On a macro level a universal health care system that is cheap and effective is really a generation or two away with heavily incentivized exercise, and not without precedent, if I am to understand what Iceland did.
We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive. These aren't 1-2% improvements at macro levels. 10% improvements, which in pharma land are considered exceptionally effective drugs, and a minimum, and 30-50% miracle drug levels of outcomes are on the table.
But our medical establishment is either drugs or surgery. The extent of insurance company inducements are "silver sneakers".
The perverse accounting involved in extreme obesity may demand a national level program of "Biggest Loser" (although, not to that insanity) for financial inducements to get people to lose weight, because the loss of "caring" for the obese (FORTY PERCENT of Americans are obese and it keeps getting worse each decade).
There's a song about that:
I’m in my 40s and have exercised my whole life. But still did intermittent fasting (skipped breakfast). I’m a standard deviation below average bone density and have lost some cartilage in my knee from underfueled long runs (I was diagnosed with RED-S). Now I work with a sports nutritionist, and do a mix of strength, running, cycling with good rest days.
I’ve learned I’d rather have a bit of a belly now but very strong than underfueled and lost muscle/bone mass
This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
Not exercising is a miracle NOT drug! Exercise is what your body is engineered for by nature and thousands of years of evolution. So exercising is the more normal thing, not sitting around :)
Get out there and have fun with it! Even walking you’ll get to see the sky, sunset, sunrise, and all the big houses in your neighborhood.
Even lactate, formerly regarded as simply a waste product, is one.
But sure, a cocktail may be possible at some point, beyond getting a blood transfusion from someone fitter and maybe younger.
If the idea is to avoid the effort of exercise, perhaps it would be worth considering the possibility that the effort itself is essential.
Exercise for him is (a) expensive and (b) really really really painful.
If he could take a pill that simulated this it would be amazing for his life.
After a few experiments that felt more like drowning than swimming I finally got the hang of it. But it left me seriously worried about exercise in my future. After all, joint problems are likely going to happen again in my future. And I started to wonder: how do disabled folks do this? It must be incredibly difficult (and expensive!). I really am incredibly lucky across multiple fronts to have the life that I have.
It is really all about working with what capabilities you still have, and maximizing those. Even that may provide enough healing & fitness to get back to a bit of previously constrained activities.
> When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible.
https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/72/Supplement_...
My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.
On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.
That's part of why steroids were and sometimes still are used medically for people with cancer and other wasting diseases. It makes them eat more (they're usually strongly appetite inducing) but they also just help develop muscles even if sedentary.
(Of course it would be far more effective to also engage in high intensity resistance training.)
Cortico steroids usually result in muscle mass loss.
...The men in the testosterone groups had significant increases in the cross-sectional areas of the triceps and the quadriceps (Table 4); the group assigned to testosterone without exercise had a significantly greater increase in the cross-sectional area of the quadriceps than the placebo-alone group
- Impact and stress strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons / ligaments
- energy use that leads to better sleep
- increased blood flow, development of new capillaries, stretching of blood vessels
- if you exercise outside, exposure to sunlight
- the release of all the associated neurochemicals
I have a suspicion that anything designed to mimic exercise would hurt as much as the actual thing given that so many of the benefits of exercise involve damaging bone and tissue then repairing it
OTOH we have billions or more mechanisms (basically all of them) that assume that we exercise regularly, at least when we are healthy.
There's no need to go hard, even steady walking for 20 minutes a day is healthy. And recent studies show that you don't need to jog or run, walking is almost as efficient and less stressful for your joints.
One of the best ways to exercise as long as you aren't a brain in a jar is to use an indoor rowing machine. Rowing will engage about 80% of your muscles.
I was rowing on real boats during my school and university days, but sadly never found the time afterwards to get join a club and row in teams.
Rowing machines with a water container are en vogue, but they are heavier (if filled with water) need regular water maintenance and the training effect isn't better.
Edit: here's a good intro to using such a machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHHy0KpFKvE
Humans evolved to run but rowing is much better in many ways.
I'm up to 1.3 million meters this year so far (C2 Model D / PM4). I've missed zero days since the first of the year. The only way this is possible is because the impact is whatever you want it to be. You can scale all the way to ~zero if you are having a really shit day and just need the mental checkmark. You can throw the MacBook on a chair next to the rower and watch some dopamine slop to keep you distracted for the 30 minutes. Whatever it takes. Achieving 500 calories/hr is not difficult even if you've never looked at one of the machines before.
Going outside in any capacity has a lot higher physical/mental barrier. Other erg machines like treadmills and stationary bikes are something that my particular monkey brain doesn't like as much for whatever reason.
Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].
It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.
My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.
Older rebounders used metal springs and were harder on the joints. Newer rebounders use bungees for a softer, gentler and silent landing. Some people rebound while their partner sleeps a few feet away.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/fitness/forget-running-na...
Unless you're an elite athlete pushing your body beyond what is reasonable, but that really doesn't apply to most people.
You're physically lazy and unmotivated, we get it. Hiding behind "but maybe I can get hurt" is not going to make you better or improve your health. Go do something hard and stop being afraid of living life.
The only way to avoid injury is to not use your body at all but your muscles will atrophy and you’ll end up injured _anyway_ that way.
There’s a hundred reasons to not exercise but you only need to focus on the one reason why you need to keep doing it.
It’s pretty well understood that stopping moving is incredibly bad for your body, and modern recoveries focus on pain management, pain avoidance and getting you moving again as quickly as possible.
For example, just look at the data for sarcopenia: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9654071
Personally the only, very minor, sports injury I have had is jamming my thumb pretty badly when my skis came off (poor bindings). Was better in a couple of weeks - no big deal. I'm 64 and started skiing 6-7 years ago, now happily going down blacks.
I did partially tear my shoulder muscle off the bone (rotator cuff tear), but that wasn't due to sports - was due to carrying my daughter around for too long (as she got bigger/heavier) with one arm and the constant bouncing. Painful at the time, but not a big deal - got better in the end just by using it and building up the joint strength again. You could also twist an ankle at home tripping over the dog - stuff happens.
Due to age/genetics I don't have the best knees, but still run, just on a rubber running track rather than on the road/sidewalk which is too jolting. You adapt.
Hmm, what else ... I have an occasional inner ear balance issue (age again?) that gets brought on by too rapid head movement or jolts, so I just avoid that. I swim outdoors in the summer all the time, and just avoid the crawl since side breathing is the kind of thing that may cause it. Again, not even caused by sports, and swimming has to be about as safe a type of exercise as you can get.
Get out there and enjoy yourself, and get some exercise!
Now, while I choose to do things that I enjoy (and the skiing is purely for enjoyment, even though it requires a lot of energy), I will say that part of the motivation for wanting to keep in good shape is seeing what happened to my Dad who had an office job (professor) and didn't exercise at all other than a bit of walking to the grocery store etc, and in his old age had all sorts of pinched nerve and mobility issues due to lack of muscle tone and strength, and realized it was too late to do anything about it.
Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].
It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.
My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/fitness/forget-running-na...
Myokines aka exerkines
Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt? This has to be as unhealthy as exercise is healthy.
Grateful, yes, appreciative, absolutely, motivated to do good, of course. Having to pay "back" (to whom?), feeling guilty? Absurd and corrosive
But how does donating to some poor people abroad benefits you?
A person cannot be reasoned out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
(I do recall saying suggesting that people will not be swayed from whatever they believe on this matter, though.)
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?
The author themselves said:
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
You mentioned "noblesse oblige" which is
> a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities
It seems that everybody is talking past one another in this exchange. The author acknowledges that guilt over this is unproductive and implicitly admonishes readers of means to help those less fortunate in the same paragraph:
> The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor.
One can simultaneously shed feelings of guilt over their fortunate socioeconomic position and give to those less fortunate. These two things are not mutually exclusive. To say that somebody should feel bad over something over which they had no control is nothing more than a secular version of original sin. I know I'd prefer to have a privileged class that pays it forward out of an intrinsic motivation to do good instead of a negative one like guilt... seems more stable and less prone to class warfare, but then again I'm no historian or anthropologist.
There are many concepts in christianity, islam etc. on it and varies a lot. In some cultures being rich is viewed as a mission given by god to do something great with it for example. In others its said that property is owned by the god and you are just given some limited time to use it for the good of humanity and preserve it, So it's not something to be proud of and you may feel sorry that others were not given such a mission.
These things not only depend on the specific religion, i.e. Christianity vs Islam but also within stuff like Protestantism and Catholicism.
Lots of stuff that the current right wing American narrative freaks out on is just a school of thought among Christians, Jews and Muslims. Many time those people are not woke or PC or whatever, just Christians that are taught by their parents to be modest and avoid bing flamboyant on their wealth. Even when people are not religious, these things run deep and defines your worldview.
Yes, you are lucky. But also: you should feel guilty about it.
Same with random things happening in your life and turning out well. If you don't know why they happened then who says you will be lucky the next time? Better feel a little guilty and try to understand how you can turn the odds your way (and perhaps also so others can benefit).
I don't feel guilty about being born in a prosperous country. I don't feel guilty about being born a human, nor of being born in a time of relative peace.
I feel grateful for these things, but no - I don't feel guilt, and I don't think I "should".
Surely I'm missing something.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the statements you mentioned, but "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" implies wallowing in guilt is a natural or even expected feeling. The person you’re replying to is questioning why someone would wallow in guilt in the first place.
I thought I made it pretty clear I wasn’t offering an opinion on the subject, just explaining it
For people raised to be susceptible to guilt from a young age
For the same reason you have survivors guilt. When you see the similarity in others, ie empathy, and you see a divergent fate from yourself (either positive or negative), you can feel an incongruence when real world picks vastly different outcomes. This is deeply human, and likely goes further back to primates or even mammals.
Conversely, this is the sympathetic effect that can trick people into buying lottery tickets because if they see a ”nobody” winning big, ”they can too”, despite the odds. Or the American version: working at Walmart and seeing a billionaire on TV and thinking ”that’s me, soon”.
Recognizing the luck of birth conditions isn’t any different. I can relate because they are extremely strong predictors of welfare and success, but it’s also not something I go around and dwell on or causes me any pain. I think most people who get frustrated with others recognizing their own privilege is it can undermine their sense of identity, such as ”everything i have is a result of my individual hard work, and those who have less are lazy”. You can build a false identity on either premise.
The world is unjust and 99.9% of it is not our fault. It's caused by nature and other people and bad luck and history and bad systems. But nonetheless, many important institutions exist to make the world somewhat less unjust. This happens because people make it happen.
If we're talking about good fortune, you'd probably be better off being born in Norway or something like that.
But that term triggers libertarian sociopaths. Any idea of care for others as a priority threatens their desire to be allowed to take whatever they can.