Is it natural to be lazy?
Once again, evolution has a surprising answer for us
Hello learners,
Last week, we discussed an interesting topic: have we really evolved to exercise? As we saw, evolutionary anthropology suggests that we haven’t. I’d recommend you go through it quickly in case you missed it.
Exercise is a healthy albeit unnatural ritual that we had to invent to counter the problems created by our sedentary lives in today’s hyper-automated, modern world.
But we ended that piece with a cliffhanger, and I’m sure you’d want an answer to the question we left with: is our tendency to be a couch-potato and shirk our workouts so unnatural?
Well, it is quite natural to be lazy and to not want to exercise!
I can almost hear the sounds of booing in the background as the gym rats and marathoners unsubscribe from this newsletter forever. Hear me out, though. There’s a simple yet fascinating logic behind this.
To understand that, all you have to do is go back to the mother of all mental models: the theory of evolution.
You see, thinking about all cases pertaining to human bodies, actions and behaviours from the point of view of natural selection can be tremendously enlightening.
To do so, you need to ask (while evaluating a trait or behaviour): what is it that natural selection must have favoured back in the day? How is it that this observed trait/behaviour must have provided a survival advantage to its owner and hence got selected?
Thinking this way and taking an evolution-centred view can allow you to take an educated guess about why certain things have turned out to be the way they are today. For instance, why is obesity such a big problem? Why is it that we just can’t stop gorging on those deadly chocolate cakes?
A simplistic guess, keeping natural selection in mind, would be to say that in conditions of scarcity, ancestors who could find and consume sources of sugar in the jungle had a better chance of survival. It had adaptive value, and therefore humans grew fond of any source of sugar and calories because it became a source of energy and a crucial object that’d aid survival.
But within the span of only a few thousand years (which, in light of billions of years of evolution, is literally equivalent to the blink of an eye), we have gone from being hungry foragers in the jungle to living in an era of widespread abundance.
We no longer have to hunt and forage and expend effort for food- thousands upon thousands of deadly, sugary calories are always tucked away in our drawers, available in a market downstairs or available to order from an app 24/7.
Or at wedding reception dinners- a theme I explored in a funny piece.
So this created a mismatch between what our genes are selected for and the environment they find themselves in!
As we saw, the environment has undergone a drastic transformation, and thus a trait that was very helpful for survival 2000 years ago has suddenly become problematic as it leads us on the road to ill health and obesity.
Having understood this evolution-centric way of thinking, can you now hazard a guess as to why it is natural to not want to expend energy on futile things like running or weight lifting?
There are two points to consider here.
At the ultimate level, natural selection only '“cares” about one thing: reproduction. The traits it selects are based purely on whether they allow us to survive and reproduce. I think we can all agree that this is pretty intuitive.
And here’s the kicker: the entire process of reproduction requires a hell lot of energy! An average hunter-gatherer mother requires over 2400 kcals to nurse an infant, which is a HUGE amount of energy! And this is not the only expenditure. The entire process of conception itself imposes an energy tax on the body and requires access to reserves so that the process of giving birth can happen without a hitch.
Our genes are, therefore, programmed to prioritise and divert resources to the processes involving reproduction. So you can see why spending them on futile workouts is not optimal from an evolutionary POV- and hence not something we would naturally feel the urge to do.
But there’s another reason that explains our aversion to working out. And it’s the simple fact that even doing nothing itself requires an immense amount of energy for basic maintenance and functioning.
The resting metabolism rate (RMR) of a dude weighing 80 kgs is around 1800 kcals. If you weigh that much, it means you need to consume those many calories just to sit around and do nothing all day. But it’s quite likely that if you’re reading this newsletter, you are not someone who stays in bed all day long doing nothing.
We all have to move around, work, walk, play, pick our noses and do numerous other things, which take even more energy. Our brains, livers and muscles take 20% each of our total energy stores- which is damn expensive. Who would have thought thinking was so costly?
Moreover, we have evolved after our genetic lineage separated from our closest cousins, the chimps. They are even more notorious for being extremely lazy and spending most of the day lolling around and moving about to digest food. If we share most of our genes with them, you can imagine why we might have a special aversion to exercise!
The conclusion is clear: even sitting on your butt all day is energy-intensive. And if that is the case, the body clearly has priorities: to use its energy stores for reproduction or maintenance (or even other crucial processes like growth and storage).
We all know what it feels like to spend way beyond what our pay-grade can afford when we’re already living paycheck to paycheck right?
That out-of-budget spending is exactly what it feels like to your body, which is why it doesn’t feel natural at all to want to go to your society garden and run 5000 metres just for the heck of it.
So exercise may be unnatural and feeling lazy might be perfectly natural, but that still doesn’t give you the license to chill the eff out and abandon all ideas of exercising.
Precisely because of the gene-environment mismatch we spoke about, it has become all the more important for us to continue to indulge in that unnatural routine of physical activity so we can remain active and derive the numerous health benefits it offers.
We are all ultimately possessors of genes that can’t offer good health and maintenance without being constantly put through regular physical activity.
So listen to what our evolutionary past has to tell us and do the right thing: throw that tub of Cheetos away and start working out!
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, I’d highly recommend the book ‘Exercised’ by Daniel Lieberman.