Earlier generations moved so much more than we do, and I don’t think that was accidental — it was a decision, or rather, the result of decisions about how to live. My grandparents’ generation had to produce food, maintain a home, work the land. That was just daily life. Listening to Ep 132: How Movement Fits into Intentional Aging made me think about how much physical work used to be baked into ordinary existence — not exercise, just living.
I’ve been trying to be a homesteader, and that’s given me a glimpse of what that kind of daily physical work actually feels like. It’s a lot of movement. And it connects to something bigger for me — Movement and health is about freedom as you age. Movement and freedom feel linked. The more I can move through my own life doing real things, the more agency I seem to have over it. Katy Bowman gets into this in ways I find genuinely useful, and her conversation over at Living in Your Ancestral Human Body - Katy Bowman — Mythic Medicine pushes that thread even further.
The hard part is that we’ve lost some of this, and accepting that isn’t easy. Technology removes movement by default — that’s just what it does. It solves problems that used to require your body. And because it’s the default, most people don’t notice the loss. The stress of modern life is affecting how we move in ways that compound this. We’re not just moving less because we chose comfort; we’re moving less because the entire built environment has arranged itself to make movement optional.
My frame now is: don’t use technology sometimes, specifically to get that movement back. It’s a small reframe but it matters. Not every shortcut needs to be taken. Embracing Activity: A Legacy Beyond Genetics points at this too — there’s something to recover here that isn’t about performance or optimization, it’s about what a human day actually feels like when your body is part of it. This episode on Spotify is worth a full listen if you want to sit with that question longer.