It's sad that we sacrifice health for more money only to spend it on health-related issues we accumulate from our career choice.
I always thought that maybe having to carry a medicine ball up a hill in order to deploy a service would be fun.
I've worked manual labor jobs. They suck, and they damage your body. If you think sitting all day long is bad for your health, imagine what even just pushing a broom thousands of times a day is doing to say, your rotator cuff.
Pack a healthy lunch, keep your hours reasonable, get up from your desk and walk around every couple hours, exercise in your free time, and your office job won't kill you.
As to which type of job is more "fun" - a construction foreman once told me that he always sees these guys who try working construction to get away from their office job, who try to find meaning/enlightenment through manual labor - a sentiment you hear here a lot - and they always go back to their office job. Always.
But the guys who manage to escape the jobsite for the office - they never, ever come back.
The job was to help with building a hotel during a sweltering hot summer in Georgia. I'd be soaked in sweat before noon. We spent all day carrying heavy pieces of drywall up and down rickety staircases that somehow never collapsed, injuring our fingers, stepping on rusty nails, walking through rooms full of brightly colored dust and gas with no masks on, etc. I felt like I'd cut into my lifespan after just a few days. My whole body hurt by the time I got home, and I was so exhausted I couldn't do anything else.
Construction work can be simple, sure. But it's not easy.
But enough IT types talk about RSI problems, wrists and such, that it ought to be on the radar screen if you are considering a physical job.
An uncle of mine had a physical job in a hospital most of his life and suffered from spinal stenosis, which I believe caused incredible pain in his retirement.
My mother was a computer programmer, but the whole reason she got a college degree was because she studied like mad in high school, because she was driven by escaping manual labor on the family farm. None of her siblings became farmers.
Believe you. I've been wet an got electrical shocks from wet equipment more than once on a particular site.
But part of it is probably also that office jobs typically pays better and people find it hard to return to a lower salary.
What I liked best was when I had my own office but lots of trips to install, maintain, upgrade and verify the systems I programmed ;-)
When I was a removal man, one guy had to come back to work earlier than recommended after open heart surgery as they only got the UK statutory sick pay which was fuck all. We were taking a sofa out of a building over a first floor balcony when the sofa slipped and banged him right in the sternum. I can still remember the scream of pain he made :-(
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/construction-workers-topped-r...
Personally, I really couldn't agree more with what you're saying. The prospect of doing manual labor for a living just sounds awful. Getting dirty and smelly, blowing out my knees and ruining my back, having my brain stuck in idle for 8 hours all day every day, massively increasing my probability of suffering a crippling or fatal work-related accident. And an office job has the possibility of leading to a work-from-home situation, which would allow you to get whatever level of exercise of whatever type you want every single day of the week.
Doing a few exercises every 30 minutes is far better than doing nothing and you could argue that doing any more than that has decreasing marginal returns in terms of your fitness indicators. But it's still not the same as having a physical purpose that you can hone and push yourself in.
Fittingly Sisyphean.
When waiting for the computer forces us to idle, most of us try to fill the void with attempted multitasking. Be it half-assing something productive or trying to grab some instant gratification from our favorite distractions, it doesn't matter, it throws us or our the flow. This is why faster compilers raise productivity by much more than the directly saved man-minutes.
Now what if we could actively speed up the build? (or whatever else we are waiting for?)
Imagine a system that throttled down a bit during "unattended" builds (developer staring at hacker news would count as "unattended"), and only opened up fully when the user does "the compile thing", similar to your idea of carrying a medicine ball for deployments. It could be something hardly physical as repeatedly (impatiently!) tapping a button, but it would feel much better with a more physical activity.
What I envision is a big, satisfying crank. The Compiler Crank. With a subtle sound (or haptic) effect that stops when the build is done, bonus points for force feedback via modulating the resistance according to occupied cores.
It's not intended as a fitness device, just something to keep you occupied with something that does not cause the dreaded context switch, and does not promise occasional gratification (never ever try filling those gaps with Solitaire!).
Whatever productivity it would waste during hn-induced "unattended" builds, I think it could make up tenfold by maintaining high engagement whenever engagement is sufficiently high to actually use the device.
Ahh, well - you gotta put something on the old tombstone someday right?
Just drink a lot of coffee so that you're forced to get up and go to the bathroom every 20 - 30 minutes. (Or mint tea, if you want the same effect without the caffeine.) As a bonus it will also prevent Parkinson's.
It would probably be pretty bad for me if I had milk or sugar, but luckily I like just plain black tea.
The only problem is that I now have to wear shorts to work or I get excessively sweaty during the day, so it may not be feasible in less permissive work cultures.
But as I said, it's only sometimes.
You can’t really quantify fitness, there are too many subtypes (running? swimming? weightlifting?) This study used blood pressure and weight (among others) but those can vary wildly based on genetics and diet, I’m not sure they’re reliable indicators.
The point of the article (as I understand it) is that positive thinking can influence your health. Fine. But let’s not get carried away: you’re not going to roll out of bed and complete an Ironman without training just because you think you can.
EDIT: Mods have updated the title to better reflect the first underlying study (which focuses on mortality, not fitness).
But 1) even with the focus on mortality, it's still hard to correlate PMA and mortality and not control for diet, exercise, history, genetics, etc. and 2) if PMA doesn't correlate w/fitness, it's hard to see how it can make you live longer (i.e., can you be morbidly obese and positive and live longer than an athlete with a bad mental attitude?)
PMA is good. But I'm having a hard time believing you're going to live longer -- seems like there are 50 other factors that are more important.
In the beginning I have grand plans of finishing near the peak of the Gaussian distribution of my age group. After 10km I am cursing myself for not training more. After 20km I am just focusing on finishing, and after 30km on not dying.
My point is, there is no one universal definition of fitness.
The most reliable measure I've heard of is belly fat, which you can measure with a calipers. But you can't wish away belly fat with positive thinking, so I think the writers of this article are taking this study a little too far, IMO.
At the high level I think of fitness as the combination of: Speed, Strength, Power, Endurance, Flexibility, and Balance.
Then athleticism would include all of the fitness indicators plus some sport-specific technique and skill (or proprioception).
Should be reliable enough
You can't claim to be exactly fit if your pressure is 180/120 or if your BMI is high (unless you're obviously an exception - and most of those that complain about BMI aren't)
10 years ago I was playing competitive rugby, basketball and training for the former 3 times a week and was genuinely very fit. Now, I've got a decent amount of fat on me and am no-where near as healthy as I ought to be. Yet my weight and height haven't changed, so neither has my BMI. Nonetheless, I've lost a reasonable amount of muscle and instead put on a lot of fat.
On the other hand, my blood pressure definitely has got worse.
For starters, it can't distinguish between muscle and fat. So anyone muscular is obese per BMI.
More: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bmi-is-a-terrible-measu...
The point that the mental state of mind has some impact on fitness is important though. First, it makes sense if you think about it because we know mental stress definitely causes unhealthy physical states.
Second, a healthy mental state leads to working out which leads to more fitness and healthier mental state, etc... It's a healthy cycle that is all connected, and for many people that first healthy mental state is the hardest part to change.
But I think the authors of this article, who cite a previous study got a little carried away. They cite a paper where researchers measured cleaning ladies after 4 weeks? You're not going from zero to hero in 4 weeks.
How they ate over that period probably had a far larger effect on their overall health than mental positivity.
I don't think the study actually supports this; more likely mental state impacts stress hormone levels which change blood pressure, heart rate, and immune system activity. That is not the same as physical fitness.
But even for that study, I'm a little skeptical of their results. There are so many factors that figure into mortality, it's hard to believe a positive attitude can really be singled out as significant.
Diet? Age? Exercise level? Family history? Weight? Where does positive thinking sit on this list?
Whether you're using it as a proxy for fitness or mortality I think it's a questionable correlation, IMHO.
The second study is more convincing, since it relies on randomly assigned groups. However, I don't think they measured the participants' actual level of activity during the course of the experiment? It's possible that the different interventions led to differences in activity level, during the experiment period, which led to the physiological improvements later seen.
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical in not accepting the study's conclusion. It just seems too fantastic, that someone can lose weight and reduce their mortality, merely by deluding themselves on how active they really are.
Feeling in better shape (and not actually being so) is a byproduct of optimism.
someone mostly happy may avoid a lot of stupid complications
I agree completely. The base human emotions are all prone to delusion, but have substantial effects on the human body. "Unjustified" confidence and optimism can still have a great impact on physiological health. However, "perceived physical activity" is such a hyper-specific and abstract thought, that it doesn't engage our reptilian brain the same way something like "confidence" would. Hence why I find the study's conclusion pretty surprising.
Not to belittle the researchers, but trying to outperform a brain that gets data about the individual situation 24 h a day is a quite hard task.
That is to say, there are so many cases of thoughts seeming to affect reality that are difficult or impossible to explain with existing science. Those who do not accept such possibilities naturally do not see proof of them, and those who do accept those possibilities may see them or even perhaps imagine that they see them when there may be a simpler explanation.
I find it ironic that some rabidly religious people cannot accept any explanation for events other than what their book(s) tells them, while at the same time strictly "scientific" people likewise behave the same, but using different books. Neither group sees their mirror image in the other...
Rather, science has explained many of these cases already.
Humans are prone to confirmation biases, are really bad at probability, and have quite faulty memories.
Those facts combined result in phenomenon that exist outside science because any time science sheds light upon them, it turns out that it is a construct of the human brain unrelated to reality.
> strictly "scientific" people likewise behave the same, but using different books
Scientific people do not hold on to books with no evidence and accept challenge. Science is more about the methodology and reasoning than about the current conclusions. If a scientist is ignoring something counter to their books, it's because the books have provided more scientific evidence than the challenging opinion.
There's a massive difference here, and simplifying science down to "it's like religion, but the bible is other scientist's books" is neither helpful nor accurate.
But regarding science and possibilities, how often in history had science said somethingwas not possible or real, and by rules of science at that time they were correct, but later with more understanding science began to allow the observed thing to be "real".
Science, its definitions and rules, are ever changing and advancing. Thus it is fair to say that at any given time we are dumber than we will be in the future.
I have to ask, by whose standard?
Our current population is only 347 million and the birthrate is about 1.25%. Running a total for the last 20 years or so I can't get more than 300 million adults or so.
Any math folks that want to analyze the number of unique adults entering/leaving the US from 1990 to 2011?
Researchers had a different measure of fitness.
If the researcher's measurements are less predictive than people's estimates, one possible reason is that there's some powerful mental effect going on.
However, a more parsimonious interpretation might be that self-perceived fitness was a better measurement than the one the researchers came up with. This isn't completely unreasonable because the subjects have access to more information about their own health than do the researchers.
Thems some odd numbers
“No matter how they ran the numbers, if people thought they were “a lot less active” than their peers, this was associated with a statistically significant higher risk of death: at least 18% when compared to the general population (those whose data were not included), and up to 71% higher when compared to people who thought they were “more active.” Again, this is regardless of actual physical activity or other health risk factors (smoking, being overweight, etc.).”
This was -after- controlling for actual fitness (eg. BMI). That doesn’t mean “perception matters more than BMI,” it means “perception matters a lot in explaining the variance that remains after removing all the variability explained by actual fitness.”
The second study wasn’t just about “activity perception.” It came with a positive message from authority figures, and offered an additional validation of an otherwise low-prestige job. Both of these things might contribute to a motivation-driven short term effect that has nothing at all to do with long term self-perception not long term mortality.
Knee-jerk, hobby-horse-compliant hypothesis: reduced levels of perceived activity are a symptom of below-average/impaired interoception [1], and effects of that deficit (less efficient homeostatic feedback, inability to recognize progressive injury and illness in its early stages) are responsible for the increased mortality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoception
> Interoception is contemporarily defined as the sense of the internal state of the body. It encompasses the brain’s process of integrating signals relayed from the body into specific subregions—like the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex—allowing for a nuanced representation of the physiological state of the body. This is important for maintaining homeostatic conditions in the body and, potentially, aiding in self-awareness.
It effects more than motivation. Take stress for example. Under stress - e.g., "am I fit enough?" perhaps? - the body releases cortisol. To the best of my knowledge, cortisol has been linked to weight gain. Stress effect sleep, which has system-wide implications. Etc.
The mind is the body and the body is the mind. The Western separation of the two is a myth that should be considered irrelevant at this point.
There's a tribe in Africa that comes to mind. They studied them, because they don't eat that much and they do a ton of activity. It turns out, when they run, they just burn fewer calories than most people. So, intake, calories burned, overall health, it all seems to not follow a hard and fast rule, apart from the intention of the mind.
Ignore politics for a second, the amount of time he spent on his feet and the amount of energy it must have required during the campaign, and how Trump's doctors say he's really healthy(assuming you believe them), but his diet looks pretty bad, but you know in his head, he's saying, "I'm the healthiest, I'm so healthy, my health is great, it's the best".
Take-away from article? "I'm so healthy, I'm the healthiest, my health is huge, it's the best."
