Elemental behaviors with Katy Bowman

Was life really better back then?

This Q&A is part of a series of conversations with people who are forging meaningful lives in a time of chaos and unpredictability. They take time and skill to produce, but I keep them available to all subscribers rather than paywalling them. If you value the themes explored in these conversations, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. For a couple more weeks, annual subscriptions are 50% off, which means you can support me for a year for just $15 (or £12).

I first interviewed biomechanist and author Katy Bowman many years ago, for a piece in Outside magazine. I remember being really impressed by the interview, and disappointed when, months later when the print magazine came out, it had been cut down to a small fraction of our refreshingly deep conversation

I’ve followed her work ever since, and watched her profile grow in tandem with her message. Biomechanics is the study of movement in living things, and what Katy espouses in her writing and her company Nutritious Movement is elegantly simple: we don’t just need to exercise more, we need to move in more varied, novel, playful, and nourishing ways. It’s not just that we sit or drive too much for optimal cardiovascular or musculoskeletal health, but also that the quality and depth of our lives — as well as our communities — suffer when we lose touch with all the ways our bodies were designed to move.

I easily could have have focused this interview on all the cool lifestyle tweaks, hacks, and optimizations that Katy regularly shares in her writing and online. From how you carry your kids and arrange your workspace to the merits of occasionally forgoing furniture and your shoes — there are so many ways to integrate nutritious movement in your life that have little to do with formal exercise. (You should follow Katy online or read her books if you’re interested in that.)

But I wanted to take this conversation in a more expansive direction because, as Katy’s work has helped me see, moving more isn’t just about being fitter, living longer, or anything like that. The way we move shapes how we think, what we value, and ultimately, who we are. In fact, I think moving our bodies in the ways they were designed to move is an underrated form of political and social resistance. It’s a nourishing way to stand up to a modern world that wants us out of our bodies, living in our heads, chasing the next dopamine high via our screens. It leads to more human versions of ourselves, and as this interview shows, a broader awareness of the people and living things around us.

This conversation was meta and went in unexpected directions: the meaning of labor, the naturalistic fallacy, the existential ennui of privileged people like me. In other words, my favorite kind of chat. I hope you enjoy it.

Photo by Frederick Shaw on Unsplash

Rosie: I often think about how there are all these moments in modern life where, if you pull the thread of something that seems off, you start to unravel a whole set of assumptions and conditioning that you didn’t even know you were living under. You’ve kind of done that with the idea of movement for many people — you’ve started to unravel our modern understanding of it. 

Katy: I think of the way our reality was displayed in the movie The Matrix, except instead of 0s and 1s, it’s fabric. There’s a swath over your eyes and something gets pulled back, and then all of a sudden you see movement everywhere. I do think that one of the things I’ve done for many people is pull back the cloak. The emphasis of exercise is right here in front of your eyeballs, and that keeps you from seeing all the movement beyond it. And then you remove the exercise-glasses and you see movement (or lack thereof) everywhere — in our individual lives, our family dynamics, our political dynamic. 

R: There’s something you said in a podcast recently that really struck me: “If you had any idea how much labor goes into the production of flour, you’d have an entirely different relationship with grain.” This is just one example of the way that our ignorance of movement affects our relationship with something so quotidian: a loaf of bread. If there were any work involved in us acquiring it, perhaps we’d enjoy it more, or not eat so much of it, nor demonize it as “bad for us.” 

K: Movement or effort or labor — however you want to think about it — is a natural moderator of many things. We have a relationship with everything we put in our mouths that is almost entirely labor-free (and therefore, movement free) and we don’t really even know it. 

Professionally, I am not particularly interested in conversations about food, the end unit. But I am interested in conversations that look at how we come to value and more importantly depend on the final end product of something while being completely ignorant of the movement or labor that brought it into being. 

R: Sometimes people talk about adding friction between ourselves and these modern things we want more moderation on — sugar, technology etc. In other words, to force ourselves to work harder to get our dopamine fixes. I wonder if that resonates in a movement sense. 

K: I’ve done a lot of teasing out exercise from movement, and that was radical in its own right. And it’s great that in the last decade or so, that conversation has spread all the way to the public health level. But where I am now is teasing out exercise and physical movement from labor. Because yes, I think that much of our eons-old relationship with dopamine was moderated via taking physical action — specifically movements necessary to achieve some essential task. The dopamine reward is why we got up to take care of ourselves physically. Now you can get your dopamine and your essentials right off your phone and we are just starting to see the effects of this phenomenon.  

Labor is a tricky topic because labor and oppression have become deeply entangled, but we all have an amount of movement it takes to get the things we need to stay alive. We’ve gotten to the point where many of us live in a situation where every single thing consumed in our lives is a result of physical action done by someone else, somewhere else — and not always in great circumstances. And yet the only problem we tend to see in that kind of lifestyle is the lack of movement and the impact that has on the individual, not the broader harm that movement-outsourcing has caused along the way.

I’d like to see more of us “pick up our own shovel” so to speak, not only because it’s good for our bodies and brains when we do, but also as a way to reduce the cost/tax/burden that’s been placed on other people and the environment. 

R: That’s such a fascinating connection — the way exercise is a stand-in for labor — and one I’ve never heard explored before. 

K: It’s not only: make sure our kids get exercise every day. Kids need to know that their body can stand in for a car. They should also know the roots of these modern things, and not only what they add, but what they can take away. There are benefits to being able to go farther in a car, but a big negative is no longer being able to walk shorter distances because the car is used for those too.

There’s this resistance to doing the labor, which is natural. In fact that’s the paradox: Our bodies have this tremendous need for movement but also are evolutionary hard-wired to conserve energy and take the easier path whenever it’s available. This conflict needs to be unpacked and interrogated.

There’s a saying I think of often: “There are two types of fools: one that believes that just because it’s old, it’s good. The other believes that just because it’s new, it’s good.” But I would add a piece to that: “Just because something is good in a small amount, it’s good all the time.” It’s not, and all this convenience and outsourcing of our own labor isn’t necessarily best for us. 

nutritiousmovement

A post shared by @nutritiousmovement

R: Another thing I’ve heard you say recently is that “we’re not only logging on with our eyeballs, we’re logging on with our bodies.” That feels so true. And yet I think one of the things I like about your work is that it doesn’t feel like you’re saying “put down your phone, it’s terrible for you.” In fact, a lot of what you offer is via technology. And how we log on is one of those things we can mitigate quite a bit. You can change the physical infrastructure of how you work, and the boundaries you set — you can make it not so terrible.

K: I think of the Amish. They’re not totally anti-tech, but as I understand it, they only bring in technology when it solves a problem and everyone agrees to bring it in. I can create a similar process for myself and ask: What problem am I solving here, if any? To decide to consciously take things on, or not. 

But most of us aren’t even choosing, we’re boundary-less. We often pass adult problem-solving technologies onto children without a thought. It’s a symptom of the fact that there’s so much going on, there’s no time to make thoughtful choices about anything anymore — movement, parenting, food, technology. 

R: So the work is to give yourself that pause and moment to think about how you want to use screens or whatever. To put structures and boundaries around it. 

K: There’s our biology: our basic needs of water, food, air, movement. And then there’s our individual value system. Different people are going to value different things, but if you’re not sure of what your body’s needs or what your value system is, then it’s very hard to orient yourself when you’re in a storm of things vying for your money, attention, and time. 

For the first time in human history, our society is not helping people meet their needs, it’s only helping them meet their wants. Our entertainment, or ability to take in whatever information we want, has never been higher. If I let my nine year old pick out what they want to do for the day it would be the unicorn frosting sprinkle cupcake version of the world. 

We don’t have elders or tradition to guide us back to this baseline. So we have to create it for ourselves, with conversations like this. 

R: Okay now for a self-interested question: I had a baby a year ago, and once I got past the birth and acute postpartum period, I was really surprised by how physically debilitating the physical work of caregiving was — and continues to be. Breastfeeding, constant walking, swaying, bending over, wiping/cleaning, carrying him on the hip. The back, hip, shoulder, neck pain surprised me because what I was doing is ostensibly so “natural.” Why was I so wrecked by this supposedly natural movement experience?

K: My book Grow Wild is about that. If we’re talking about biologically why you were struggling, you’re doing all this caretaking (laboring!) movement in a new environment and context. If you go back a few generations you’re going to find that other people would be in your house doing many of the things you’re having to do yourself: making food, taking other kids out, rocking the baby. There were a lot of alloparents — and that would include other children helping, other childless adults who are still allo-parenting. That’s a big piece that’s missing right now. While child-rearing might still be a completely natural process, the context we do it in is quite unnatural.

R: And you think that goes all the way down to impacting the physical experience in my body of parenting? 

K: I do, yes. Another thing going on is that this might be the first experience of physical labor that you couldn’t get away from or outsource. It was way more labor than what you were used to, but if you’d been washing the laundry by hand or walking everywhere or carrying large loads every day, it wouldn’t have been this sudden onset of constant labor. The difference between your life before and after the baby wouldn’t have been so stark in terms of labor. 

R: Yeah that feels true. Because it is constant, constant, constant labor. There is no escape.

K: Yes. And labor is continuous by definition. You have to show up to physically meet your needs day after day after day. Many of us are not used to constant labor. We’re conditioned for comfort. 

R: I wanted to bring this conversation back to the naturalistic fallacy at some point, the mistaken idea that “if something is natural it must be good for us.” I’m sure you’ve had critics say your work is romanticizing very harsh lives in the past. That, for example, it is a total fantasy to assume new mothers seven generations ago wouldn’t have had back pain and hip pain. What’s your response to that?

K: I don’t think just because it's natural, it’s better. That’s one of the types of fools I mentioned earlier. 

People have always had pain, and they’ve dealt with it with traditional medicines and healing. Then we’ve had the invention of powerful pharmaceuticals that can really remove feeling from almost everything. And yet, we’ve seen the number of people in pain grow, and the pain people experiencing grow bigger than just the physical or mechanical type. 

We seem to be struggling with purpose. I’m not sure if that’s a new struggle, but it’s made worse when part of “what am I here to do” no longer includes “take care of yourself physically.” We’re now in this situation where the tools we have aren’t able to fully deal with the emerging pain problem, and we should be open to meaningful discussion about how lifestyles completely liberated from the daily labor of completing physical tasks might not be actually working out for us physically.

We’ve got more leisure time now which is why those of us who are relatively comfortable can have these discussions: Could it have been better back then? I don’t know how to evaluate better or worse. I think a more accurate question is: Comfortable or not, would more of your actual needs have been met by a slower, more physically active lifestyle?

R: I know I fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy a lot in my thinking, probably often in this newsletter. But at the same time, I can’t help but notice that we keep trying to out-innovate our problems, when it seems we have many of the answers we need. Like a simple one: move more, outsource less. 

K: From what I understand of what you’re exploring here, you’re asking how do I make a life that’s neither nihilistic or delusional — we need a space in between. And how do we set up something that’s thriving in that space? 

I just got done living in Central America for four months. And I saw that what I would have called modern problems are not modern problems at all. They come from a particular region and society. I met people there who live very labor-intensive lives. And sure, they don’t have access to every single treatment and “worried well” protocol that we do, but if there’s something that is wrong medically, they can get it taken care of. They eat simple diets, they move a lot to get where they need to go. And they have a very interesting relationship with their religion and spirituality — it’s just about dealing with today. Our biology is set up to live like that, I think. It’s not set up for long bouts of forward thinking. And that kind of constant forward thinking causes a lot of mental stress — the kind of mental stress we’re trying to solve. 

So part of it is recognizing that we each need to figure out what your values are then align yourself to them. Beyond that, there’s only so much you can do. There’s work in accepting that.

R: I would also add that there’s a sense of place to that life you just described. There’s not this constant need to go on to the next best bigger thing or place. There’s that investment in place, people, community.

K: Place in terms of location but also place in life. My role in society. The American story seems to go “your place” is just the next step on the ladder you can get to. There’s lots of climbing. It’s our cultural inheritance but maybe it doesn’t make for contentment. 

R: The theme that runs through these conversations is that examining our own lives — in this case how we move — is not just about navel-gazing. If done with a certain sensibility, it can have ripple effects with the wider world. And maybe not solve these meta-crises, but maybe touch the sides of them, and engage with them meaningfully. So I want to hear you make the case for how paying attention to how you move could help do that. 

K: There are plenty of people who need support with their body. I just think about how taxed our medical system is, and how much work would be alleviated if we took up some of that work ourselves. How we’d free up an emergency system a bit. If everyone needs medicine for every single ailment all the time, that system then becomes so big. And the big challenge that we have is we are a small system that depends on not everyone passing through our doors at the same time — as we saw in Covid how that doesn’t work. There’s no more infrastructure left because we’re not even making the most simple basic movement choices for ourselves. 

That’s ground zero: just feeling better in my daily life, feeling more productive, more aware, more present for other people. 

R: The thing that I’m really taking away from this conversation is that new framing you offered. It’s not: “was it better back then?” but rather “were more of our basic human needs met?”

Because with that framing, we don’t have to choose between modern life versus a homesteading fantasy life. We can have both. We can be like the Amish where we consciously adopt the new, innovative thing because we’ve thought about it and decided it’s worth it. And yet we can still maintain the things like movement and forms of labor that are more fundamental to who we are. 

K: Anytime you start talking about baking your own bread, or carrying your kids instead of putting them in a pram, or other examples like that, people say “I don’t want to go back to pre-modern times!” So we need a new word or a language that is talking about moving forward, welcoming progress, but doing so without losing these behaviors that are essential to meeting our needs. 

R: Right, like the behaviors that are elemental to who we are as human beings with bodies. 

K: Elemental behaviors. 

You can follow Katy on Instagram and Facebook. Her most recent book is Rethink Your Position: Reshape Your Exercise, Yoga, and Everyday Movement One Part at a Time

Thanks for reading. If you enjoy this newsletter, it helps a surprising amount if you forward it to a friend or two, or leave a like or comment below. If you’d like to support me further, you can update your subscription to paid here (and get 50% off an annual subscription for another two weeks.) And if you’re already a paying subscriber, my deepest thanks for giving me the time and space to explore these themes. It means a lot.