Moms, have a little compassion on your teenager who just won't get off the couch and do those household chores you keep nagging him to finish. Turns out, you didn't get stuck with a lemon of a kid. They're all that way.
And so is everyone else. It called laziness, and a Harvard professor says we're all predisposed to it.
I thought I was the only one who, fully intending to workout at the gym -- even going so far as donning my exercise clothes, found myself instead becoming uncharacteristically intriqued in whatever was on television--to the point that I never got around to working out.
I found out I'm not alone. Lots of people do it.
According to Daniel Lieberman, an expert in human evolutionary biology, that type of behavior is normal.
In his 2015 paper, "Is Exercise Really Medicine? An Evolutionary Perspective," Lieberman theorizes that exercising for health reasons alone is unnatural.
I could have told him that. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last 20 years that I've actually wanted to go to the gym. (However, I can say with certainty that when I did go, afterwards, I was glad I did...100 percent of the time).
Lieberman thinks the reason we're all couch potatoes to the core dates back to our hunter/gatherer ancestors. They exerted so much energy just trying to survive, that they rested whenever they got the chance to do so. In other words, they burned so many calories finding and preparing food, they had to remain sedentary or they'd be hungry sooner than later and have to do all that work again.
Therefore, Lieberman theorizes, we are genetically programmed to want to conserve energy and rest whenever possible, just as our forefathers and foremothers did.
"It is natural and normal to be physically lazy," he writes. "I predict that hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari or the Amazon are just as likely as 21st Century Americans to instinctually avoid unnecessary exertion. Although a small percentage of people today exercise as a form of medicine, doing their prescribed dose, the vast majority of people today behave just as their ancestors by exercising only when it is fun (as a form of play) or when necessary."
Lieberman elaborates by saying throughout history humans got a lot of physical activity... but not because they wanted to, because they had to. When given the choice, as we have now, people always choose the no-exercise route.
"Our instincts are always to save energy. For most of human evolution that didn't matter because if you wanted to put dinner on the table, you had to work really hard," Lieberman said in an interview. "It's only recently, we have machines and technology to make our lives easier... We've inherited these ancient instincts, but we've created this dream world and the result is inactivity."
Although, it's interesting to contemplate whether, as humans, we gravitate towards being still, we must remember we have the power to overcome our base self-destructive tendencies.
We know we should exercise and we have the ability to overcome giving into what we want, and instead do what we should, even if it's not pleasant. If not all the time, some of the time, hopefully increasingly more.