Might Live Forever or It Might Just Seem Like It

As Steve and I gasped our way up yet another hill on our tandem bike, I thought about our reasons for getting fit. I've never been one for getting fit for fitness sake, I find exercising boring and will come up with thousands of other things to do rather spend time on a treadmill or other instrument of exercise torture (it must be time to clean out my closets!). However I do like to travel and explore the world, I think that's why I'm enjoying the tandeming so much - we're going places and seeing things that we miss in a car or on the motorbike.

I'm also enjoying the by-product of all that pedaling to get to those places, getting stronger and fitter. And I'm really, really pleased to have found some things that I enjoy that will keep me fit because 750,000 Hours can be a really, really long time without a body that can support everything I want to do.

There's so much written about how people today are overweight and becoming ill, but there's less written on how much smaller one's life becomes when you get out of shape. If you hurt, you can't walk for long distances and you get out of breath easily, there's a limitation on the activities you'll choose to do. You don't do certain things, you don't go to certain places, you don't try new things, and ultimately your life becomes smaller and smaller as you do less and less.

As we, as a species, live longer and longer, there are a lot of years to fill. 100 years old used to be a big deal, now it's not that surprising. Those years could be fascinating, exciting and filled with all sorts of activities, or they could seem like forever...