This is just the article I needed to get my new year goals back in view!

The unfortunate truth is that we are lazy by nature, where we will consistently take the easiest path forward, the road perceived as requiring the smallest amount of effort.

I've operated from this mindset for so long, trying to minimize my responsibilities to the point where I have very little to be accountable for each day. But it also means I have little reason to live for also, and I do not like being so disassociated from everything.

even when we know we should be doing something else. And the "nothing" most of us are mostly doing, feels like we are doing something, like scrolling a feed, or watching something on a streaming service. This makes it hard to compete with.

The nothing I have to compete eith every day is Splinterlands. Devoting my time to this game is my present version of doom scrolling. Sure I'm making some rewards and I show more accumulation every Season, but the time I spent with Splinterlands is keeping me back from advancing my life in other areas. Well, that and all the cannabis I'm smoking.

we aren't walking more, nor are we using them to improve our physical wellbeing.

Well, at least here I can give some thanks to @actifit here on Hive and the FitBit I've been using over the past 18 months. I do enjoy the gamifications of tracking my steps. I still don't remember to do it every day to ppst through actifit, but I do try and hit that 10K steps goal daily. It is much easier when I'm at work as a teacher, since I typically hit that mark with all the work I do bopping around my classroom and taking the students up and down 4 flights of stairs a few times a day. I made it right into the actifit Top100 for 2025 with over 2M steps logged!

The "build it and they will come" mentality is no longer enough to just create the space, because it also requires the incentives for the space to be used.

I had a partner, the beloved Dr. Jane Hurley, who studied exactly this problem for her doctorate. She was looking into which incentives provided the best "bang for the buck" to get people at low activity levels to medium activity levels. She hated cars, but love riding bikes and taking public transportation. Cruelly she was killed as a pedestrian in a car crash back in June 2019 just a month after defending her dissertation and only 3 days after signing her first job contract to work for a Top3 think tank in urban planning. Humanity would be better off if she was still around. I'm sure wherever she is now, she is smiling that you are writing an article about her field of study and passion!