We’ve lost focus… Even now I am struggling to remember what I sat down to write. But I left myself a clue; “We’ve lost focus”.

We suffer from a cognitive disease that is not observed because it is simply too widespread to consider it a malady. Watching people now days is a tragic series of attention drugs, endlessly fulfilling with greater efficiency the need for instant gratification. We have no patience. We have no tact. We don’t know “quiet” anymore, what it sounds like or how to do it. We’ve lost our ability to hunt.

With the safety of modern society firmly in place, we’ve spared ourselves the need of involuntary danger. We just do it for fun now…

Consider how disconnected we all seem. Lost in that instant gratification machine that should be in our pocket, but it’s in our hand again. Now think about how people suffer as a result of an inability think very well. They have the machinery, they just never really learned to exercise it. It’s hard to solve problems well when you’re so easily distracted, and distractibility, nature teaches us, is an extreme disability.

When you need to listen, you need to be able to listen. When you need to identify both predator and prey with every sound in your world, you need to be able to discern. When you make a mistake, you need to accept it and change your plan immediately. There’s never any time to argue.

The nature of nature is clear then. Nature has crafted her laws to keep you tested and at the peak of your condition. If you fail one of her tests, you don’t get a second chance. This natural condition will undoubtedly hone and shape a mind that is clear, calm, creative, interrogative, quick, precise and focused entirely on the sequence at hand; whether that is eating the best shoots, identifying a predator, inventing tools.

If we accept a general definition of “health” as our body and minds existing in a functional representation of their intentionally designed states, then it becomes clear quite quickly how unhealthy we are. Our bodies are meant to move, yet we move as little as possible and call it “rest” after a long hard day, sitting at our desk. Our minds are made to live in an arena of high stakes problem solving, yet we just allow them to wander aimlessly and infinitely. Anything that takes too much focus is scoffed at for being too much work.

But health is work isn’t it? If we want to take care of our bodies and minds. If we want to be healthy, we have to work. So why is physical exercise so obvious and acceptable while mental work is so taboo? I can’t answer that, but it needs to change, and I hope you change it for yourself. I hope you can understand how imperative it is to exercise your mind and get to work.