The Digital Deathtrap

From a custom bicycle wheel website, of all places:

It was never in our blueprint that we would spend our days driving to and from a job, the grocery store, and sit like a stone the rest of the time, or that we would eat high glycemic refined carbohydrates and high fat foods almost exclusively. This age of distraction from our natural diet and exercise has created a deathtrap situation that we're largely unaware of due to its gradual onset.

Today's common "plagues" such as cancer, osteoporosis arterialsclerosis, adult onset diabetes, hypertension, depression and obesity were all but unheard of just one hundred years ago. Like a modern age Bugs Bunny cartooon spun horribly out of control with "labor saving" devices, we've taken the concepts way beyond our ability to judge their true efficacy and understand the unintended results of our tinkering. For every great man who invents something, like the lightbulb, there needs to be an equally great man to tell us to turn off the light and get to sleep so as not to ruin our circadian rhythms. Since profit motive reigns supreme, this simply will not happen. The greatest insult, in my opinion is the genetic manipulation of fruits and vegetables (our "manna" from heaven) so that even they lack nature's blueprint, just to make
them look better. Have you eaten a trans-genic red "Delicious" apple lately... they taste terrible! Talk about eating from the forbidden tree, such defective intelligence doesn't even have to be labeled in this country... buyer beware!

Defective intelligence often stems from the broad acceptance of narrow minded "reductionist" science that claims to be the truth. Do you think it's the ultimate idea to say "all other things aside, this truth exists" when nothing remains by itself without outside influences. Every other week the "scientists" come up with a new expensive patented drug, (tested in a reduced to neutral environment claimed to relieve some obtuse condition (usually a digital age condition)) while ignoring the whole intelligence of the human system. The result is rather like the little Dutch boy whose finger in the leaky dike only causes some other leak to spring up once your run out of fingers, you're done for. Life can be just as accurately viewed as a system, a cooperative synergy with all parts interdependant. But remove or change too much and the synergy collapses into a competition for survival. Thankfully it's not too late and you don't have to be a part of the headlong rush to extinction, (the age of the 21
year old heart attack victim is almost upon us).

The most important thing to break the digitial distraction is physical play, as opposed to simply entertainment. Skating, skiing, biking, racketball, volleyball, and hockey are examples of play. Movies, video games, restaurants, gadgetryand new cars are
examples of entertainnment. Play is usually cheap, healthy, and recharges your batteries. Entertainment usually earns you more fat, debt, and digital disease. This may sound like anticommercialism, but isn't it up to you to decide what is or is isn't in your best interest, not some advertising hype. No one can really protect your best interests but you - most are really just after your money or power. There is a great societal pressure to convince you that you can't do more with less. No one is spending millions of dollars to tell you that a simple diet and lifestyle will further your health, wealth and wisdom far beyond the empty promises of the latest pill, gadget, or automobile.

The efforts to separate you from your money also separate you from your "game". Life is both work and play in balance, both sides bleeding into each other. When you
settle for entertainment instead of play, you give up your natural relationship with your body and environment. Fatter poorer and distracted, you have to work twice as hard on that digital treadmill just to keep up. Natural health and motivation can become a distant memory.

Astonishingly, our generation, on many levels is becoming the poorest to ever walk this planet. We have eliminated many of the "labors" that contribute to our well being and in doing so have placed an awesome responsibility on each of our shoulders. Human beings are not just a formless mind floating around.

There is no boundary between mind, body and environment - use or lose is the only option. Once you stop living the digital treadmill all factors bleed together again; body, mind and environment work as a system again as you get fitter, faster and happier... Welcome to planet Earth!

Get out and play.