Have you ever had fun doing something that you may publicly ridicule? Perhaps in high school you surreptitiously liked math or doing Sudoku. I have in the past and presently find myself in such a position. Although I have gotten over many of my insecurities of yore, some part of me is still shocked when I find myself enjoying doing mathematical logic or something similar. An activity such as this certainly seems to possess little to amuse, and yet I find my self more and more drawn to it.

Finally, the answer inexplicably came to me. These activities are necessary to balance out all the time a person spends observing and thinking critically about the world around us. Speaking as someone who spends many waking hours doing just that, I can tell you that it is both mentally and emotionally taxing. There is only so much time you can spend in a day wondering “why?” and “how?” things work. Eventually, without some kind of respite, your sanity will inevitably slip.

We must occasionally subsume our souls and consciousness into moments of pure action or activity. It is rather ironic, but when you think about it this is also the reason that people love exercise. It allows us to temporarily live in a simplistic set of surroundings: it allows us to subsume ourselves into one moment. And yet there exists a strange social divide between those who prefer physical or mental stimulation of this nature. I have been fortunate to be able to enjoy both, but as a result I must look on with a curiosity tinged with horror at the idiotic schism that exists between these two kinds of people. They both seem to resent each other immensely, and for both of them the source of that resentment seems to be their own insecurities about the strengths of the others. It is profoundly vexing. Here we have people who enjoy their activities for the same reasons and yet manage to despise their counterparts.

Perhaps the true source of their mutual discontent is the fact that they both spend so much of their time occupied with this one kind of activity. Living only in these moments of mental and physical purity can make a person lose perspective. If all we do is exercise or problem solve we will begin to think of the world in only those terms. This is the reason why both the socially maladjusted computer scientist and the blustering football player are both so uninteresting. Having viewed the world as simple they have become simple. To spend your entire existence living in such pure activity, is an animal trait, in order to be human we must learn to appreciate these moments and acknowledge our animal natures but not allow them to dominate our lives.

I admit that it is possible for this rationale to have come from the fact that I view things in somewhat cynical terms. If my higher brain functions thought of things in terms of how wonderful the world was then I might not view these thoughts as overly taxing. Which could conceivably remove the need to occasionally distance myself from reality. However whatever is the cause of our desire to submerge into these other realities it seems pretty clear that the desire is indeed there, and I feel its important to be conscious of how we allow it to manifest itself in our lives.