11 ms·

The slow death of purposeless walking (2014)

229 points by darrhiggs 10y ago

elcapitan 10y ago
Judging from the reactions here, doing something for no apparent reason has become quite a taboo. But why? In German, there is a special verb for this, "flanieren". When I look it up, I get "to dander", which seems to be the root for "dandy".
jflatow 10y ago
I tend to bite my nails, especially when I'm programming or deep in thought. Last year I decided to start walking whenever I reach that point where I am fidgeting and can't sit still. It's totally changed the way I work for the better. I walk between 10-20 miles per day, and can get a lot of work done on those walks. Highly recommended, especially for people living in places with good weather and beautiful scenery.
- elcapitan 10y ago
  Even if not for distance and just a few hours, getting out of the city setting and flooding your perception with nature, trees, natural sounds, quiet, fresh air, etc, can feel like a week of vacation. I think people travel around half the world to get away from their daily routine and see other stuff, but often a walk in the woods can already lift you up quite a bit.
- vagabondvector 10y ago
  I have the same problem. If I'm learning something or programming or anything mentally straining I start biting nails. I have no feeling some problem is out of my reach but still the nail biting happens. Ever since I've started standing instead of sitting, walking around has decreased my nail biting.
- brador 10y ago
  I can see walking 10-20 miles a day being detrimental to your health long term. Knees, feet, hips, somethings gonna give. Good cushioned footwear and insoles is a must to limit the damage at that range.
  - nils-m-holm 10y ago
    I've been walking about 10kms per day for decades now without wearing any shoes at all. No detrimental effects so far. But then I'm a featherweight, which might help. Anyway: walking is absolutely essential to me. I do most of my work outside, walking and thinking.
  - samdoidge 10y ago
    It will be beneficial to many others parts of your health. I'm thinking it would be a net positive, vs not walking / exercising very much. I agree on cushioned shoes if walking on something like concrete.
  - austinjp 10y ago
    While cumulative effects no doubt contribute to tissue changes, those changes aren't necessarily going to be for the worse. Leg bones and cartilage adapt positively to the light impact and weight-bearing of walking (for most people, most of the time, in most circumstances). In fact a lack of upright weight bearing in 20s and 30s may contribute to the development of osteoporosis and cartilage thinning. Your mileage may vary (apologies for the pun) but if you can, walk.
  - partisan 10y ago
    There are ways in which walking for long distances can affect you negatively. Consider bursitis for instance. I was walking 5 miles a day, on average according to my iPhone, last year. I suddenly noticed this dull aching pain in my hip/buttock sometime in December. Over the course of several weeks, it got increasingly worse until the point where I was bedridden for 4 days. I've started my routine up again, but I walk about 3 miles a day now, and not every day, until I can be confident that the pain will not return.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
    Running maybe (and I say that as a runner myself) but even then the jury's pretty much out. I'd imagine that spending the few hours it takes to walk 10-20 miles sitting instead would be far worse to long term health.
- srdeveng 10y ago
  I keep nail clippers in my desk exactly for this reason. I hate the feeling of rough bitten nails which became an unproductive distraction in itself. Now, I clip instead. My nail grooming has become on point.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Clipping in a cube farm is a capital offense. If it's your home office or you have a door its okay :)
cooper12 10y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506.
static_noise 10y ago
We now call it meditation.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  I do both. They are very, very different.
- vidarh 10y ago
  You can certainly meditate while walking and it can work very well, but most of what people describe doing while walking in this thread is not meditation (some might be). E.g. "letting your mind wander" which is one of the things people frequently like to do while walking is pretty much the opposite of most meditation practice (that's not a criticism of doing that; letting your mind wander is wonderfully relaxing too, but in a very different way to meditation).
raverbashing 10y ago
I like walking, biking is not for me, so I walk And yes, you have a different perspective of the city when you do it. Because it's easier to realize how places connect Yes, it won't take you as far as a bike, but it's doable You can walk to work if possible, get on an earlier stop if going by public transport, or, I dunno, just walk around the block if you have to park at your work.
- _kyran 10y ago
  I do both, biking I can cover more distance, but if I'm riding fast, I'm usually not thinking much. Same goes for running. Walking or riding slowly is what gives me time to ponder.
lmm 10y ago
So is there any evidence for any of these supposed advantages of aimless walking? Or is this just a "people should do things the way I did them"?
- GrinningFool 10y ago
  The cool thing about it is that it's an easy thing to try for yourself [assuming you're not physically unable] and gather your own evidence. I can't believe these words are about to come off of my fingers, but -- if it works for you, then does it matter what a body of scientific research has to say about it? Because the benefits are at least in part subjective, this is a case where a sample size of one is sufficient.
  - lmm 10y ago
    I asked precisely because it doesn't work for me. As far as I can tell the article is nonsense. But I wouldn't necessarily know whether I was being more or less creative, so actual evidence would trump my personal experience there.
    - chippy 10y ago
      What are the conditions of your experiment? What are you wanting to measure? Just a measure of creativity? How about incorporating other factors as mentioned in these comments, some do seem more measurable than others. Ironically, I think that walking to increase creativity, calmness, clarity of mind, reduce stress, increase fitness, etc is actually purposeful walking. Walking to not get any advantages is more of an interesting phenomena. Why do people do that?
mseebach 10y ago
> But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk? BBC Magazine strikes again. No, they're not losing it, it's not "slowly dying". Did "people" at large ever have that? Having the time and energy to go aimlessly wandering was a luxurious privilege until very recently. If anything, the existence of "[a] number of recent books [that] have lauded the connection between walking - just for its own sake - and thinking" would suggest that walking is enjoying a renaissance - this time for the masses. > Many now walk and text at the same time. There's been an increase in injuries to pedestrians in the US attributed to this. One study suggested texting even changed the manner in which people walked. > It's not just texting. This is the era of the "smartphone map zombie" - people who only take occasional glances away from an electronic routefinder to avoid stepping in anything or being hit by a car. This is pure Marie Antoinette. 200 years ago, peasants would only glance up from their plows to avoid hitting a rock in the field, or whatever, and surely the savants of the time deplored that as well. Here's a thought: Most people walking around in the city aren't out on an Dickensque intellectually stimulating aimless wander, they're not out to tread a deep mental path in the words of Thoreau, they are in transit between two places, we could vulgarly call them "work" and "home", and the transit bit is an undesired period of downtime. You'll have to be an intellectual to problematise their choice of filling that period with something else than romantic observation of the very same surroundings they look at twice daily for years.
- 1782635782 10y ago
  > Having the time and energy to go aimlessly wandering was a luxurious privilege until very recently You just made this up.... Firstly, you have never been around since the beginning of humans, and secondly, you haven't even read any history books if you think humans have always been extremely busy and that somehow they are not now. The opposite is actually true. Humans have had a lot more free time in the past. It is easy to find this information out on the internet. Humans were estimated to only work about 3 hours per day in some time periods. In others they had months at a time off.
  - christophilus 10y ago
    Yeah. A political scientist I know told me that at some points in Catholic history people had almost 1/3rd of the year off. I couldn't find a reference for that, but this site indicates about 1/4 of the year off as leisure time: "Altogether there were about 80 days of complete rest with over 70 partial holidays, that is, about three months of rest spread over the year." http://www.traditioninaction.org/History/A_021_Festivals.htm http://www.traditioninaction.org/History/A_021_Festivals.htm Not sure about the veracity of that site, but that kind of leisure time is in keeping with much western history that I've read. Looking at a timeline, the Protestant work ethic seems to have played a pretty big role in shifting the work/leisure balance more towards work.
mouzogu 10y ago
I personally find it much easier to think deeply whilst doing some tedious repetitive task like ironing or cleaning the house as opposed to while walking. Living in a big city I find walking can be quite stressful and distracting - even in a park.
kleiba 10y ago
There were times in my life (thesis writing) where I'd go and sit in the library all day to work and come home in the early evening. The psychological stress on me during that time was tremendous. Every evening, after coming home, I'd have a small dinner and then go for a one-hour walk, always the same route. At that time, I lived in a small town, and my route would take me down a dead-end street, across another one, and then on to the fields where there weren't any cars and hardly any people. Just a wide space with a bit of a view. This was usually just before sunset. Continuing on, I would eventually get back to a different part of the town I lived, I had to climb up some stairs and walk through a quiet neighborhood before getting back to my own street. All in all, it took around one hour to walk that way. I believe that this process really helped me save my sanity during that time of extended mental stress. I could literally air our my brain, and also get some mild physical activity after sitting in the library all day. I tried really hard not to think about my thesis, but just to take in the scenery, the light, the wind. Sometimes it rained. It was really healthy. In contrast, I remember a former co-worker telling me about a road trip they once did. I think it was in Arizona, but I might be wrong. Anyway, after driving for many hours, they decided to take a break and just to walk down the road for a few minutes before hitting the road again. So they pulled over and started walking. Sure enough, in no time, they get stopped by the cops who inquire what the heck the are doing! They weren't walking on the road or in any otherwise dangerous fashion -- but apparently in that area, just being out and about on foot was enough of a reason to be considered suspicious. :-)
- aninhumer 10y ago
  If someone gets out of their car in the middle of nowhere and starts walking, it's fairly possible that they've broken down or run out of fuel, in which case the police could help them out. I don't know how the interaction in question went, but it's possible they were just interpreting an earnestly concerned police officer as suspicious because of a (justifiable) distrust of police.
  - fuzzywalrus 10y ago
    Maybe this is my Northwestern showing but as a (nearly)lifer of the Pacific Northwest, I can honestly say that if I see someone walking, I assume they're out for a walk even when I lived in a town of 2500. I imagine this is the privilege of living somewhere known for natural beauty because I think "Why wouldn't you want to be outside?" It's fascinating to read about inherent fear of being questioned. I don't think its ever crossed my mind, and its not uncommon to see cars parked along side random roads all through Oregon and Washington. I guess I'm lucky in this regard.
tluyben2 10y ago
I walk insane lengths as it clears the mind and fosters creativity. I talk into my phone during that; either to colleagues or to a recorder and then type it in at home (no, speech to text does not work; if someone wants to work with me to get that working, that would be great but for now, it does not even work a bit; only gibberish comes out; it seems to have something to do with my way of talking which I am trying to fix but I type faster than I talk anyway). Because I walk so much (through the mountains here) and my brain works better while walking, I really work on programming on the go. I want to be able to program while walking and besides discussing code with a colleague while there is internet (which is not everywhere in the mountains) I cannot code while walking which annoys me. I get ideas and want to try them right away. Now I have to sit down, get out my pandora and try it. I want to try it while walking. I believe I will find a way of doing that eventually but everything I tried (from primitive AR to Scratch like programming languages) doesn't really work well. The thing is ; I can text chat fine while walking so why not coding... I know why but I try to somehow resolve it anyway. The purposelessness here is the time between I want/need to write code or talk; that's most of the walk. Edit: one of the findings is that you basically should not need any scrolling/dragging within small distances; like scrolling to a part of code and dragging your cursor to make changes for instance. This includes dragging/dropping the Scratch visual code; it doesn't work while walking.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  > I want to be able to program while walking... That's why Google glasses got me excited, as it's a step towards that direction. I don't see this being too viable until I can control the computer with my thoughts, though, so we need the microchip in the brain (or something similar) still too. But then I could work outside, walk while working, not be tethered to a desk or table all day. Can't wait for that time, hopefully it's not much more than a decade away.
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    > I want to be able to program while walking... Won't help the "bus factor"...
srdeveng 10y ago
I pace. I do laps around the lab, between buildings and to the nearby beach when my mind gets jammed. Used to think watching the waves would settle my mind. Being at the beach just makes me want to go surf. Ive have had quite a few software design problems solve themselves during my 15min commute to work in the morning as well. I never listen to talk radio (NPR) as a result.
amelius 10y ago
The problem with walking is that it does little to the body. Your heart rate stays normal, and thus it is not a cardiovascular exercise.
- austinjp 10y ago
  It does plenty. See my other comment here. Additionally, it maintains proprioception, it fosters a sense of well-being (for some), it helps lower blood glucose, it slightly elevates fat metabolism, it contributes hugely to veinous return from the legs, it may help gut motility... and probably much more besides.
- Xylakant 10y ago
  Why does it need to do something to your body? Wouldn't it be good enough if it does something beneficial to your mind? Apart from that, go for a stiff 2 hour walk and then come back and tell me that it didn't do anything to your body. It's certainly not extreme sports, but it's still exercise, at least for your legs and your whole motion apparatus.
  - amelius 10y ago
    > Why does it need to do something to your body? Wouldn't it be good enough if it does something beneficial to your mind? Well, why not ride a bicycle, and let both your mind AND your body benefit? > Apart from that, go for a stiff 2 hour walk and then come back and tell me that it didn't do anything to your body. I've tried this. I walked 1.5 hours a day, 5 times a week for about a year. Didn't lose a gram of body weight, while having a normal diet with limited refined sugars (I don't like sweet tastes). Switched to cycling (30 minutes a day), and feel much more in control now.
    - dingaling 10y ago
      > Well, why not ride a bicycle, and let both your mind AND your body benefit? If your mind is not on the road when you're cycling in a city then you're doing it wrong, unfortunatley. Doors of parked cars opening, buses pulling out without indicating, drivers egressing from side-roads without checking, truck drivers underestimating their position when passing... Taking your mind off reading the road ahead even for a minute is an invitation to an accident. Whereas on an early morning run or walk on the pavement / sidewalk / trail one's mind can wander and explore.
jokoon 10y ago
Wasn't this already posted on hackernews? I've already read it, and I was a little curious because that's a little what I started to do last year (my apartment and school started to feel like a prison cell). I just walk in my city to explore, preferably greener, quiet areas without car traffic, but I always plan a zone I'll go to. I use offline openstreetmap (OSMAND) on my smartphone. I try to go to different places when I can, but it's difficult as green places are too remote. Public transport can boost me, but I usually take off from home and try to make a looped route. To me it helps "loosening" my focus, so I can think a little more creatively. I just talk with myself. I don't have a time where I know I have to go home, I don't plan. Walking is a physical exercise (at least for me, I sleep better), which make the blood flow, so you're not as much anxious when you sit for too long. I don't want to sound like a crazy hobo, but cubicles, houses, apartments and dense urban areas can feel like prisons. It's not just about the physical exercise, it's about being in the large outdoors and not controlling your behavior because there are civilized people around you. If all you do is work and gym, it won't feel very good. Maybe all of this is in my head, and my unconscious just pretends it's good. But I know that I can't be creative at home. Also try to watch that speech about creativity by the monty python head guy. He gave really good insights about how to put oneself in a position where you can be creative. You need large spaces, relative silence, freedom from behaving like you want, etc.
- viraptor 10y ago
  Yes it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506
  - dang 10y ago
    HN mostly doesn't treat reposts as dupes once well over a year has passed, which is the case with this one.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Once of the reasons I want massively more dense residential areas in cities is because I want city living but shorter distances to large parkland. I live in a relatively green area, but still my street alone (~660 houses)"wastes" around 40,000 m^2 of space compared to new high rises on the way near our local station. I'd love to see far more of the residential areas compressed like that, if only it meant a reasonable portion of additional land was turned into parks (and here's the problem - in practice this is of course additional housing, not replacing equivalent amount of less dense units). We do have a "country park" just 20 minutes walk away, so we're not in a bad spot, but it could be so much better. If I was given Sim City like powers over London, I'd raze large parts of it outside of the centre, and replace it with super-dense hubs around the main rail hubs outside of the centre, connect them with a high speed orbital railway plus spokes out to the smaller cities further out, and free up ~half the current area of London for park lands. You could fit 30m+ people in London and still make it feel spacious and green compared to the scattered, busy suburban nightmares that covers large part of the outer reaches of London today.
tezza 10y ago
It is good to see purposeless news articles are still going strong
hellofunk 10y ago
One more to add to the list: J.S. Bach who walked some 200 miles to hear an organist play once. One of many legendary anecdotes about the man.
albertojacini 10y ago
Walking helps me in solving programming issues. When I find myself stuck and my mind starts to loop around, I need to force myself to take a purposeless walk, around my office's block or little more. During the walk I stop thinking about the problem for a while and then resume from a new angle. It normally works very well.
hyperpallium 10y ago
also, purposeless bicycling. need to be away from traffic, so you don't have to concentrate. a bike path - even better, a national/state park. but to clarify, it helps to have a destination, even though it's not the "purpose".
- davidw 10y ago
  Yeah, easy-pace bike rides are definitely great for thinking.
messel 10y ago
My super power. During the week I walk a loop in the morning (9.5miles) and when I have to commute to NY, it's a few miles downtown,a brief lunchtime wander around, and a swift walk back up in the evening to Penn. Part of my walking is for health reasons, part is due to a need to move about, part is meditation. My mind wanders while out for a good walk, it's the most liberating feeling I experience. My wife and I go for longer walks on the weekend, sometimes we chat, but often time we walk together in silence. It's a guilty pleasure.
- allemagne 10y ago
  Guilty? That sounds lovely
DrNuke 10y ago
Wanderers were our ancestors and wanderers we are, gentrification and hipsterification in large cities are a notable exception.
staticelf 10y ago
I walk a lot, but often with Podcasts and I find that to be very relaxing. Of course, I walk a lot without podcasts as well and I honestly don't feel anything different. I have to say though, I don't listen to entertainment podcasts but rather thoughtful ones like msdevshow, startalk radio, fullstack radio and the changelog among others. I also have a dog, so walking at least 3 times a day is a must and I guess that changes things. But I used to walk everyday for at least 1 hour before my dog was born, now I just have company. Sometimes I find a place to be very beautiful then I usually absorb the moment.
Hoasi 10y ago
See also the concept of "Dérive"[1] or purposeless walking as defined by Guy Debord[2] and used by the Letterist and Situationist movements. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive [2]: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
marmaduke 10y ago
I'd hazard a neurological mechanism for this: walking feeds information to path integration mechanism which helps us form a spatial map of what's around us. This same map is also considered a cognitive map which we can explore to find different solutions to the same intellectual problems, which we represent spatially.
VladimirGolovin 10y ago
I just can't function without a daily walk (~5-6km or 3-4 miles). If I don't take my walk, I can't wind down after a day of work and can't sleep properly. No purpose, no soundtrack, no smartphone - except when I want to write down some ideas that came to me during the walk.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hownottowrite 10y ago
A few good reads on walking, purposeless or otherwise: "A Philosophy of Walking" by Frédéric Gros "Wanderlust" by Rebecca Soinit "The Old Ways" by Robert Macfarlane (or really anything by him) "Walking Home" by Simon Armitage
kristofferR 10y ago
There's regularly articles in Norwegian newspapers about how weird the Norwegian culture of purposeless walking is to foreigners and tourists, so it's probably not dead in Norway at least.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > Norwegian culture of purposeless walking Is this Hiking?
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    Well, we don't really separate walking and hiking in the Norwegian language (I actually had to google the difference). According to Statistics Norway[1], 85% of the Norwegian population has taken a walk of 3 hours or less in the last 12 months (of 2014) and around half a walk of more than 3 hours. I didn't find updated stats about frequency, but in 1998 46% of Norwegians went on walks for longer than 30 minutes at least 2 times a week [2]. I don't have a reason to believe it has changed significantly. [1] https://www.ssb.no/kultur-og-fritid/statistikker/fritid/hvert-3-aar/2014-12-18 https://www.ssb.no/kultur-og-fritid/statistikker/fritid/hver... [2]http://www.vg.no/forbruker/typisk-norsk-aa-gaa-paa-tur/a/30362/ http://www.vg.no/forbruker/typisk-norsk-aa-gaa-paa-tur/a/303...
timwaagh 10y ago
these bloggers can make everything look like spirituality these days to promote the latest book of Hipster. I walked yesterday. aimlessly. not because of my desire to be mindful or some kind of creativity boost or because i had aloe vera growing on top of my head. i did it because it was a national holiday and i was bored. of course, i came back enlightened like the buddha. i saw an elephant on somebody's home decoration. and i had this funny idea for an association to promote the raping of elephants (sorry if you find this offensive). so yeah i guess it does make you more creative for some definition of 'creative'. but please dear bloggers, dont go promote walking as some kind of mindfulness. please. or i might just translate my hard-gained 'creativity' into action. Elephants across the world will thank you.
jcadam 10y ago
Two years ago, I moved from Northern VA to the Florida coast. My house is about 4 blocks from the beach. The wife and I have taken to going on longish walks along the beach after dinner (or even just around the neighborhood on occasion). I'm usually lost in thought, so not much conversation happens, but I enjoy the walks. In NOVA, we lived in a fairly dense townhouse development with significant vehicle traffic and going for walks was just not very pleasant (and the weather certainly wasn't as nice - especially in the winter). We've both lost a decent amount of weight since we moved here :) I absolutely loathe big cities, which I know is a severe handicap for a software developer, especially since I've found remote work isn't actually a real thing. I do have a rather mundane job here (fairly low stress, 40 hrs/week CRUD stuff), but I'm not moving (besides, I have my side projects to keep me challenged) :)
- johnchristopher 10y ago
  How long is your commute (if you have any) ?
  - jcadam 10y ago
    15-20 minutes :)
neurobuddha 10y ago
I go on longs walks a lot, and a few months ago I bought a poker stick to pick up the plastic bottles I see littered everywhere. My walks are no longer purposeless, but I feel better when I come back with a garbage bag of plastic that will be recycled rather then end up in our soil and water supply. Here's the poker stick I bought: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B0042SNCGA/ref=yo_ii_img?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B0042SNCGA/ref=yo_ii_img?ie=UT...
- neurobuddha 10y ago
  That product page is the mobile version. Here is a better shot: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0042SNCGA/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0042SNCGA/ref=oh_aui_detai...
tinbucket 10y ago
Walking is, I think, a combination of habit and culture. Both sets of my grandparents, from opposite ends of the country, used to walk quite a lot without any real purpose for doing so. They did this well into their 80s, and so did their friends. It seemed just to be something they did, and always had done. My parents, by contrast, almost never walk when they can drive, and will often drive to a park to let their dog off rather than walk her there and back. Many of my friends are the same. One goes so far as to drive five minutes, then deals with parking and paying for it, to get his lunch every day rather than simply walking for the same length of time -- he spends more time in traffic in his car than actually moving. One colleague of mine at my last job was amazed that I walked from the train station to the office -- a walk of less than 10 minutes at a brisk pace; it didn't even occur to her to ask about how I'd covered the mile-and-a-half from my home to the train station at the other end. My total commute was about the same distance as hers, but it took me less time, cost me slightly less, and got me some exercise into the bargain. Some evenings, my fiancée and I would go for a walk of a couple of miles just to get out of the house, or to enjoy warm weather, or just because. Since leaving that job, I walk less overall. I also have a dog, now, the walking of whom replaced most of the purposeless walking I used to do in the evenings. Most of my walking, now, has 'purpose' because it's exercising the dog, or taking her out for toilet breaks.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I think location is also a big factor here. I've lived in multiple parts of the US, and most of it is simply designed against walking. I enjoy taking casual walks, but when I lived in the midwest, I had to drive to a park to walk. There were no sidewalks, and the streets were dangerous for pedestrians (lots of blind curves, speeding cars, etc). It always frustrated me that I had to take a vehicle to go for a walk.
  - panglott 10y ago
    Much of this is also perception. Lots of places are fine for walking or cycling, but people are so accustomed to driving everywhere that they drive even when it's somewhat ridiculous, like driving from one parking spot to another in the same a parking lot instead of just walking to a store elsewhere in the strip mall. Or driving to a store a block away and trying to find a parking space instead of just walking. Some places are actively hostile to walkers: building only arterial roads and refusing to build sidewalks to exclude walkers and the wrong sort of people (black or poor). Relatively few places are so hostile to drivers. So people grow a bias toward driving everywhere. Load your bicycle on the car and drive it there to ride around in circles.
jshelly 10y ago
I'm surprised they did not mention Einstein. From what I've read he loved to take walks.
lettergram 10y ago
Every day, I walk from the ferry building in SF to 4th Street and back for work. I look at it as the time I can enjoy the city and never (or try to never) think of issues I am having. It relieves a lot of stress, as I look at the faces of pasaers by, and the buildings. Prior to college, during college, and even now, my wife/wife-to-be and I took an hour walk in the evening (and sometimes morning). It's something I always use(d) to relieve stress. The thing is, most people thought we were kind of weird. Back where we are from we literally used to walk next or through corn fields and the town was definitely not design for walking. We made it work, but I can see why walking is dying a slow death.
overgard 10y ago
I love purposeless walks, but I think one of the quotes had a point about the self conscious nature of it. Even if you're inconspicuous about it people treat it like you're doing something weird. I blame suburbanization a bit. There are some neighborhoods where people just seem to assume you're there to rob the joint if you don't have a dog on a leash.
akeck 10y ago
The article reminds me of a cute saying about getting "exercise" in a corporate environment, "People think a person walking with purpose has a purpose for walking."
burmer 10y ago
I love walking, but this article really bothers me, so I'm going to get a little sarcastic. Am I the only one who finds this entire article incredibly ironic? The author is trying to defend "purposeless" walking, but which is actually very purposeful! The loss of 'purposeless' walking is seen by the author as a loss of Creative Thinking. We're so busy with other smaller tasks, we're not setting aside enough time (like we used too, in the good ol' days) to think up all our really valuable thoughts! It would be one thing if they highlighted the relaxation, health benefits, de-stressing, etc., of walking, but that is clearly not the point: rattling off a list of Great Minds, and their Great Achievements whom we would benefit from emulating. The point of the article clearly is not to get people to take more breaks or curb their their obsession with work. Really it's a sneaky backdoor lifehack sermon: you're not good enough or creative enough, and you should pencil in some mindful unstructured time into their schedule to boost your Really Important thinking output by 10-15%.
pivo 10y ago
I have a 35 minute walking commute in Boston, through the public gardens, which can be very beautiful. While it's not aimless, it does seem to have offer of the benefits that I get from aimless walking, which I also do fairly often. A walking commute I see as my biggest job perk. I'm always saddened to see so many people talking on their cell phones on my commute, especially in the public garden. It seems they either have no appreciation for walking or, worse, they're afraid to be alone with themselves.
MicroBerto 10y ago
My version of "taking a walk" is swimming laps. My finest work is accomplished in the pool, going back and forth. Been a swimmer all my life, and if I don't get at least a swim or two in each week, things start to turn to shit. It's my meditation, and despite being the most boring thing on earth for some people, it's one of my favorite things to do. Many introverted mathematical minds would love it, but you gotta learn proper technique to be able to really get into a good careless rhythm. I highly recommend it. It's a thinking man's sport.
- swah 10y ago
  I agree. I'd love to swim in the ocean, if I lived near it. (Of course, devising a way to safely swim alone)
  - MicroBerto 10y ago
    I'm an accomplished ocean swimmer too, but now live in Texas. I will say that ocean swimming is a completely different ballgame, and you need to be far more on your toes. For me, it's not a "thinking man's" sport out there. It's a "get out of this fast and alive" and keep an eye on my line of sight sport. But if you're a swimmer, I do encourage open water swimming if you want a good rush. Exhilarating. Wear a bright colored cap and if you get the "willies", just get the F outta there. Live to swim another day.
    - swah 10y ago
      Are you talking about sharks? I was thinking about tying myself to a rescue buoy. A bright colored cap is a great idea. (Actually, swimming in ponds is probably much easier)
nurettin 10y ago
Previous discussion (2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506
canjobear 10y ago
Can any of the walking enthusiasts posting here say whether using a treadmill desk conveys the same advantages?
tomkat0789 10y ago
Back during my PhD quals, I used to just walk in a circle around my smallish apartment complex to blow off stress. Once I even met my roommate doing them same thing on one of my laps! More often I'd walk around some trees around the university campus. When out for a stroll, I can take a different perspective on things and let my mind wander without being tempted to open a new tab and browse HackerNews or something. I think I've planned a lot of research just by walking around. Sitting in front of my computer, my mind is stuck in the mode of "Do something. Do something."
phantom_package 10y ago
One of the things I always look for in a new house/apartment is a good PaceTrack.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
I love walking. I would say roughly 50% of my hours programming are spent on foot.

229 points by darrhiggs 10y ago

Judging from the reactions here, doing something for no apparent reason has become quite a taboo. But why? In German, there is a special verb for this, "flanieren". When I look it up, I get "to dander", which seems to be the root for "dandy".

jflatow 10y ago

I tend to bite my nails, especially when I'm programming or deep in thought. Last year I decided to start walking whenever I reach that point where I am fidgeting and can't sit still. It's totally changed the way I work for the better. I walk between 10-20 miles per day, and can get a lot of work done on those walks. Highly recommended, especially for people living in places with good weather and beautiful scenery.

elcapitan 10y ago
Even if not for distance and just a few hours, getting out of the city setting and flooding your perception with nature, trees, natural sounds, quiet, fresh air, etc, can feel like a week of vacation. I think people travel around half the world to get away from their daily routine and see other stuff, but often a walk in the woods can already lift you up quite a bit.
vagabondvector 10y ago
I have the same problem. If I'm learning something or programming or anything mentally straining I start biting nails. I have no feeling some problem is out of my reach but still the nail biting happens. Ever since I've started standing instead of sitting, walking around has decreased my nail biting.
brador 10y ago
I can see walking 10-20 miles a day being detrimental to your health long term. Knees, feet, hips, somethings gonna give. Good cushioned footwear and insoles is a must to limit the damage at that range.
- nils-m-holm 10y ago
  I've been walking about 10kms per day for decades now without wearing any shoes at all. No detrimental effects so far. But then I'm a featherweight, which might help. Anyway: walking is absolutely essential to me. I do most of my work outside, walking and thinking.
- samdoidge 10y ago
  It will be beneficial to many others parts of your health. I'm thinking it would be a net positive, vs not walking / exercising very much. I agree on cushioned shoes if walking on something like concrete.
- austinjp 10y ago
  While cumulative effects no doubt contribute to tissue changes, those changes aren't necessarily going to be for the worse. Leg bones and cartilage adapt positively to the light impact and weight-bearing of walking (for most people, most of the time, in most circumstances). In fact a lack of upright weight bearing in 20s and 30s may contribute to the development of osteoporosis and cartilage thinning. Your mileage may vary (apologies for the pun) but if you can, walk.
- partisan 10y ago
  There are ways in which walking for long distances can affect you negatively. Consider bursitis for instance. I was walking 5 miles a day, on average according to my iPhone, last year. I suddenly noticed this dull aching pain in my hip/buttock sometime in December. Over the course of several weeks, it got increasingly worse until the point where I was bedridden for 4 days. I've started my routine up again, but I walk about 3 miles a day now, and not every day, until I can be confident that the pain will not return.
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
  Running maybe (and I say that as a runner myself) but even then the jury's pretty much out. I'd imagine that spending the few hours it takes to walk 10-20 miles sitting instead would be far worse to long term health.
srdeveng 10y ago
I keep nail clippers in my desk exactly for this reason. I hate the feeling of rough bitten nails which became an unproductive distraction in itself. Now, I clip instead. My nail grooming has become on point.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Clipping in a cube farm is a capital offense. If it's your home office or you have a door its okay :)

cooper12 10y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506.

static_noise 10y ago

We now call it meditation.

nommm-nommm 10y ago
I do both. They are very, very different.
vidarh 10y ago
You can certainly meditate while walking and it can work very well, but most of what people describe doing while walking in this thread is not meditation (some might be). E.g. "letting your mind wander" which is one of the things people frequently like to do while walking is pretty much the opposite of most meditation practice (that's not a criticism of doing that; letting your mind wander is wonderfully relaxing too, but in a very different way to meditation).

raverbashing 10y ago

I like walking, biking is not for me, so I walk And yes, you have a different perspective of the city when you do it. Because it's easier to realize how places connect Yes, it won't take you as far as a bike, but it's doable You can walk to work if possible, get on an earlier stop if going by public transport, or, I dunno, just walk around the block if you have to park at your work.

_kyran 10y ago
I do both, biking I can cover more distance, but if I'm riding fast, I'm usually not thinking much. Same goes for running. Walking or riding slowly is what gives me time to ponder.

lmm 10y ago

So is there any evidence for any of these supposed advantages of aimless walking? Or is this just a "people should do things the way I did them"?

GrinningFool 10y ago
The cool thing about it is that it's an easy thing to try for yourself [assuming you're not physically unable] and gather your own evidence. I can't believe these words are about to come off of my fingers, but -- if it works for you, then does it matter what a body of scientific research has to say about it? Because the benefits are at least in part subjective, this is a case where a sample size of one is sufficient.
- lmm 10y ago
  I asked precisely because it doesn't work for me. As far as I can tell the article is nonsense. But I wouldn't necessarily know whether I was being more or less creative, so actual evidence would trump my personal experience there.
  - chippy 10y ago
    What are the conditions of your experiment? What are you wanting to measure? Just a measure of creativity? How about incorporating other factors as mentioned in these comments, some do seem more measurable than others. Ironically, I think that walking to increase creativity, calmness, clarity of mind, reduce stress, increase fitness, etc is actually purposeful walking. Walking to not get any advantages is more of an interesting phenomena. Why do people do that?

mseebach 10y ago

> But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk? BBC Magazine strikes again. No, they're not losing it, it's not "slowly dying". Did "people" at large ever have that? Having the time and energy to go aimlessly wandering was a luxurious privilege until very recently. If anything, the existence of "[a] number of recent books [that] have lauded the connection between walking - just for its own sake - and thinking" would suggest that walking is enjoying a renaissance - this time for the masses. > Many now walk and text at the same time. There's been an increase in injuries to pedestrians in the US attributed to this. One study suggested texting even changed the manner in which people walked. > It's not just texting. This is the era of the "smartphone map zombie" - people who only take occasional glances away from an electronic routefinder to avoid stepping in anything or being hit by a car. This is pure Marie Antoinette. 200 years ago, peasants would only glance up from their plows to avoid hitting a rock in the field, or whatever, and surely the savants of the time deplored that as well. Here's a thought: Most people walking around in the city aren't out on an Dickensque intellectually stimulating aimless wander, they're not out to tread a deep mental path in the words of Thoreau, they are in transit between two places, we could vulgarly call them "work" and "home", and the transit bit is an undesired period of downtime. You'll have to be an intellectual to problematise their choice of filling that period with something else than romantic observation of the very same surroundings they look at twice daily for years.

1782635782 10y ago
> Having the time and energy to go aimlessly wandering was a luxurious privilege until very recently You just made this up.... Firstly, you have never been around since the beginning of humans, and secondly, you haven't even read any history books if you think humans have always been extremely busy and that somehow they are not now. The opposite is actually true. Humans have had a lot more free time in the past. It is easy to find this information out on the internet. Humans were estimated to only work about 3 hours per day in some time periods. In others they had months at a time off.
- christophilus 10y ago
  Yeah. A political scientist I know told me that at some points in Catholic history people had almost 1/3rd of the year off. I couldn't find a reference for that, but this site indicates about 1/4 of the year off as leisure time: "Altogether there were about 80 days of complete rest with over 70 partial holidays, that is, about three months of rest spread over the year." http://www.traditioninaction.org/History/A_021_Festivals.htm http://www.traditioninaction.org/History/A_021_Festivals.htm Not sure about the veracity of that site, but that kind of leisure time is in keeping with much western history that I've read. Looking at a timeline, the Protestant work ethic seems to have played a pretty big role in shifting the work/leisure balance more towards work.

mouzogu 10y ago

I personally find it much easier to think deeply whilst doing some tedious repetitive task like ironing or cleaning the house as opposed to while walking. Living in a big city I find walking can be quite stressful and distracting - even in a park.

kleiba 10y ago

There were times in my life (thesis writing) where I'd go and sit in the library all day to work and come home in the early evening. The psychological stress on me during that time was tremendous. Every evening, after coming home, I'd have a small dinner and then go for a one-hour walk, always the same route. At that time, I lived in a small town, and my route would take me down a dead-end street, across another one, and then on to the fields where there weren't any cars and hardly any people. Just a wide space with a bit of a view. This was usually just before sunset. Continuing on, I would eventually get back to a different part of the town I lived, I had to climb up some stairs and walk through a quiet neighborhood before getting back to my own street. All in all, it took around one hour to walk that way. I believe that this process really helped me save my sanity during that time of extended mental stress. I could literally air our my brain, and also get some mild physical activity after sitting in the library all day. I tried really hard not to think about my thesis, but just to take in the scenery, the light, the wind. Sometimes it rained. It was really healthy. In contrast, I remember a former co-worker telling me about a road trip they once did. I think it was in Arizona, but I might be wrong. Anyway, after driving for many hours, they decided to take a break and just to walk down the road for a few minutes before hitting the road again. So they pulled over and started walking. Sure enough, in no time, they get stopped by the cops who inquire what the heck the are doing! They weren't walking on the road or in any otherwise dangerous fashion -- but apparently in that area, just being out and about on foot was enough of a reason to be considered suspicious. :-)

aninhumer 10y ago
If someone gets out of their car in the middle of nowhere and starts walking, it's fairly possible that they've broken down or run out of fuel, in which case the police could help them out. I don't know how the interaction in question went, but it's possible they were just interpreting an earnestly concerned police officer as suspicious because of a (justifiable) distrust of police.
- fuzzywalrus 10y ago
  Maybe this is my Northwestern showing but as a (nearly)lifer of the Pacific Northwest, I can honestly say that if I see someone walking, I assume they're out for a walk even when I lived in a town of 2500. I imagine this is the privilege of living somewhere known for natural beauty because I think "Why wouldn't you want to be outside?" It's fascinating to read about inherent fear of being questioned. I don't think its ever crossed my mind, and its not uncommon to see cars parked along side random roads all through Oregon and Washington. I guess I'm lucky in this regard.

tluyben2 10y ago

I walk insane lengths as it clears the mind and fosters creativity. I talk into my phone during that; either to colleagues or to a recorder and then type it in at home (no, speech to text does not work; if someone wants to work with me to get that working, that would be great but for now, it does not even work a bit; only gibberish comes out; it seems to have something to do with my way of talking which I am trying to fix but I type faster than I talk anyway). Because I walk so much (through the mountains here) and my brain works better while walking, I really work on programming on the go. I want to be able to program while walking and besides discussing code with a colleague while there is internet (which is not everywhere in the mountains) I cannot code while walking which annoys me. I get ideas and want to try them right away. Now I have to sit down, get out my pandora and try it. I want to try it while walking. I believe I will find a way of doing that eventually but everything I tried (from primitive AR to Scratch like programming languages) doesn't really work well. The thing is ; I can text chat fine while walking so why not coding... I know why but I try to somehow resolve it anyway. The purposelessness here is the time between I want/need to write code or talk; that's most of the walk. Edit: one of the findings is that you basically should not need any scrolling/dragging within small distances; like scrolling to a part of code and dragging your cursor to make changes for instance. This includes dragging/dropping the Scratch visual code; it doesn't work while walking.

cableshaft 10y ago
> I want to be able to program while walking... That's why Google glasses got me excited, as it's a step towards that direction. I don't see this being too viable until I can control the computer with my thoughts, though, so we need the microchip in the brain (or something similar) still too. But then I could work outside, walk while working, not be tethered to a desk or table all day. Can't wait for that time, hopefully it's not much more than a decade away.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > I want to be able to program while walking... Won't help the "bus factor"...

srdeveng 10y ago

I pace. I do laps around the lab, between buildings and to the nearby beach when my mind gets jammed. Used to think watching the waves would settle my mind. Being at the beach just makes me want to go surf. Ive have had quite a few software design problems solve themselves during my 15min commute to work in the morning as well. I never listen to talk radio (NPR) as a result.

amelius 10y ago

The problem with walking is that it does little to the body. Your heart rate stays normal, and thus it is not a cardiovascular exercise.

austinjp 10y ago
It does plenty. See my other comment here. Additionally, it maintains proprioception, it fosters a sense of well-being (for some), it helps lower blood glucose, it slightly elevates fat metabolism, it contributes hugely to veinous return from the legs, it may help gut motility... and probably much more besides.
Xylakant 10y ago
Why does it need to do something to your body? Wouldn't it be good enough if it does something beneficial to your mind? Apart from that, go for a stiff 2 hour walk and then come back and tell me that it didn't do anything to your body. It's certainly not extreme sports, but it's still exercise, at least for your legs and your whole motion apparatus.
- amelius 10y ago
  > Why does it need to do something to your body? Wouldn't it be good enough if it does something beneficial to your mind? Well, why not ride a bicycle, and let both your mind AND your body benefit? > Apart from that, go for a stiff 2 hour walk and then come back and tell me that it didn't do anything to your body. I've tried this. I walked 1.5 hours a day, 5 times a week for about a year. Didn't lose a gram of body weight, while having a normal diet with limited refined sugars (I don't like sweet tastes). Switched to cycling (30 minutes a day), and feel much more in control now.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    > Well, why not ride a bicycle, and let both your mind AND your body benefit? If your mind is not on the road when you're cycling in a city then you're doing it wrong, unfortunatley. Doors of parked cars opening, buses pulling out without indicating, drivers egressing from side-roads without checking, truck drivers underestimating their position when passing... Taking your mind off reading the road ahead even for a minute is an invitation to an accident. Whereas on an early morning run or walk on the pavement / sidewalk / trail one's mind can wander and explore.

jokoon 10y ago

Wasn't this already posted on hackernews? I've already read it, and I was a little curious because that's a little what I started to do last year (my apartment and school started to feel like a prison cell). I just walk in my city to explore, preferably greener, quiet areas without car traffic, but I always plan a zone I'll go to. I use offline openstreetmap (OSMAND) on my smartphone. I try to go to different places when I can, but it's difficult as green places are too remote. Public transport can boost me, but I usually take off from home and try to make a looped route. To me it helps "loosening" my focus, so I can think a little more creatively. I just talk with myself. I don't have a time where I know I have to go home, I don't plan. Walking is a physical exercise (at least for me, I sleep better), which make the blood flow, so you're not as much anxious when you sit for too long. I don't want to sound like a crazy hobo, but cubicles, houses, apartments and dense urban areas can feel like prisons. It's not just about the physical exercise, it's about being in the large outdoors and not controlling your behavior because there are civilized people around you. If all you do is work and gym, it won't feel very good. Maybe all of this is in my head, and my unconscious just pretends it's good. But I know that I can't be creative at home. Also try to watch that speech about creativity by the monty python head guy. He gave really good insights about how to put oneself in a position where you can be creative. You need large spaces, relative silence, freedom from behaving like you want, etc.

viraptor 10y ago
Yes it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506
- dang 10y ago
  HN mostly doesn't treat reposts as dupes once well over a year has passed, which is the case with this one.
vidarh 10y ago
Once of the reasons I want massively more dense residential areas in cities is because I want city living but shorter distances to large parkland. I live in a relatively green area, but still my street alone (~660 houses)"wastes" around 40,000 m^2 of space compared to new high rises on the way near our local station. I'd love to see far more of the residential areas compressed like that, if only it meant a reasonable portion of additional land was turned into parks (and here's the problem - in practice this is of course additional housing, not replacing equivalent amount of less dense units). We do have a "country park" just 20 minutes walk away, so we're not in a bad spot, but it could be so much better. If I was given Sim City like powers over London, I'd raze large parts of it outside of the centre, and replace it with super-dense hubs around the main rail hubs outside of the centre, connect them with a high speed orbital railway plus spokes out to the smaller cities further out, and free up ~half the current area of London for park lands. You could fit 30m+ people in London and still make it feel spacious and green compared to the scattered, busy suburban nightmares that covers large part of the outer reaches of London today.

tezza 10y ago

It is good to see purposeless news articles are still going strong

hellofunk 10y ago

One more to add to the list: J.S. Bach who walked some 200 miles to hear an organist play once. One of many legendary anecdotes about the man.

albertojacini 10y ago

Walking helps me in solving programming issues. When I find myself stuck and my mind starts to loop around, I need to force myself to take a purposeless walk, around my office's block or little more. During the walk I stop thinking about the problem for a while and then resume from a new angle. It normally works very well.

hyperpallium 10y ago

also, purposeless bicycling. need to be away from traffic, so you don't have to concentrate. a bike path - even better, a national/state park. but to clarify, it helps to have a destination, even though it's not the "purpose".

davidw 10y ago
Yeah, easy-pace bike rides are definitely great for thinking.

messel 10y ago

My super power. During the week I walk a loop in the morning (9.5miles) and when I have to commute to NY, it's a few miles downtown,a brief lunchtime wander around, and a swift walk back up in the evening to Penn. Part of my walking is for health reasons, part is due to a need to move about, part is meditation. My mind wanders while out for a good walk, it's the most liberating feeling I experience. My wife and I go for longer walks on the weekend, sometimes we chat, but often time we walk together in silence. It's a guilty pleasure.

allemagne 10y ago
Guilty? That sounds lovely

DrNuke 10y ago

Wanderers were our ancestors and wanderers we are, gentrification and hipsterification in large cities are a notable exception.

staticelf 10y ago

I walk a lot, but often with Podcasts and I find that to be very relaxing. Of course, I walk a lot without podcasts as well and I honestly don't feel anything different. I have to say though, I don't listen to entertainment podcasts but rather thoughtful ones like msdevshow, startalk radio, fullstack radio and the changelog among others. I also have a dog, so walking at least 3 times a day is a must and I guess that changes things. But I used to walk everyday for at least 1 hour before my dog was born, now I just have company. Sometimes I find a place to be very beautiful then I usually absorb the moment.

Hoasi 10y ago

See also the concept of "Dérive"[1] or purposeless walking as defined by Guy Debord[2] and used by the Letterist and Situationist movements. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive [2]: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html

marmaduke 10y ago

I'd hazard a neurological mechanism for this: walking feeds information to path integration mechanism which helps us form a spatial map of what's around us. This same map is also considered a cognitive map which we can explore to find different solutions to the same intellectual problems, which we represent spatially.

VladimirGolovin 10y ago

I just can't function without a daily walk (~5-6km or 3-4 miles). If I don't take my walk, I can't wind down after a day of work and can't sleep properly. No purpose, no soundtrack, no smartphone - except when I want to write down some ideas that came to me during the walk.

deleted 10y ago
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hownottowrite 10y ago

A few good reads on walking, purposeless or otherwise: "A Philosophy of Walking" by Frédéric Gros "Wanderlust" by Rebecca Soinit "The Old Ways" by Robert Macfarlane (or really anything by him) "Walking Home" by Simon Armitage

kristofferR 10y ago

There's regularly articles in Norwegian newspapers about how weird the Norwegian culture of purposeless walking is to foreigners and tourists, so it's probably not dead in Norway at least.

Chris2048 10y ago
> Norwegian culture of purposeless walking Is this Hiking?
- kristofferR 10y ago
  Well, we don't really separate walking and hiking in the Norwegian language (I actually had to google the difference). According to Statistics Norway[1], 85% of the Norwegian population has taken a walk of 3 hours or less in the last 12 months (of 2014) and around half a walk of more than 3 hours. I didn't find updated stats about frequency, but in 1998 46% of Norwegians went on walks for longer than 30 minutes at least 2 times a week [2]. I don't have a reason to believe it has changed significantly. [1] https://www.ssb.no/kultur-og-fritid/statistikker/fritid/hvert-3-aar/2014-12-18 https://www.ssb.no/kultur-og-fritid/statistikker/fritid/hver... [2]http://www.vg.no/forbruker/typisk-norsk-aa-gaa-paa-tur/a/30362/ http://www.vg.no/forbruker/typisk-norsk-aa-gaa-paa-tur/a/303...

timwaagh 10y ago

these bloggers can make everything look like spirituality these days to promote the latest book of Hipster. I walked yesterday. aimlessly. not because of my desire to be mindful or some kind of creativity boost or because i had aloe vera growing on top of my head. i did it because it was a national holiday and i was bored. of course, i came back enlightened like the buddha. i saw an elephant on somebody's home decoration. and i had this funny idea for an association to promote the raping of elephants (sorry if you find this offensive). so yeah i guess it does make you more creative for some definition of 'creative'. but please dear bloggers, dont go promote walking as some kind of mindfulness. please. or i might just translate my hard-gained 'creativity' into action. Elephants across the world will thank you.

jcadam 10y ago

Two years ago, I moved from Northern VA to the Florida coast. My house is about 4 blocks from the beach. The wife and I have taken to going on longish walks along the beach after dinner (or even just around the neighborhood on occasion). I'm usually lost in thought, so not much conversation happens, but I enjoy the walks. In NOVA, we lived in a fairly dense townhouse development with significant vehicle traffic and going for walks was just not very pleasant (and the weather certainly wasn't as nice - especially in the winter). We've both lost a decent amount of weight since we moved here :) I absolutely loathe big cities, which I know is a severe handicap for a software developer, especially since I've found remote work isn't actually a real thing. I do have a rather mundane job here (fairly low stress, 40 hrs/week CRUD stuff), but I'm not moving (besides, I have my side projects to keep me challenged) :)

johnchristopher 10y ago
How long is your commute (if you have any) ?
- jcadam 10y ago
  15-20 minutes :)

neurobuddha 10y ago

I go on longs walks a lot, and a few months ago I bought a poker stick to pick up the plastic bottles I see littered everywhere. My walks are no longer purposeless, but I feel better when I come back with a garbage bag of plastic that will be recycled rather then end up in our soil and water supply. Here's the poker stick I bought: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B0042SNCGA/ref=yo_ii_img?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B0042SNCGA/ref=yo_ii_img?ie=UT...

neurobuddha 10y ago
That product page is the mobile version. Here is a better shot: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0042SNCGA/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0042SNCGA/ref=oh_aui_detai...

tinbucket 10y ago

Walking is, I think, a combination of habit and culture. Both sets of my grandparents, from opposite ends of the country, used to walk quite a lot without any real purpose for doing so. They did this well into their 80s, and so did their friends. It seemed just to be something they did, and always had done. My parents, by contrast, almost never walk when they can drive, and will often drive to a park to let their dog off rather than walk her there and back. Many of my friends are the same. One goes so far as to drive five minutes, then deals with parking and paying for it, to get his lunch every day rather than simply walking for the same length of time -- he spends more time in traffic in his car than actually moving. One colleague of mine at my last job was amazed that I walked from the train station to the office -- a walk of less than 10 minutes at a brisk pace; it didn't even occur to her to ask about how I'd covered the mile-and-a-half from my home to the train station at the other end. My total commute was about the same distance as hers, but it took me less time, cost me slightly less, and got me some exercise into the bargain. Some evenings, my fiancée and I would go for a walk of a couple of miles just to get out of the house, or to enjoy warm weather, or just because. Since leaving that job, I walk less overall. I also have a dog, now, the walking of whom replaced most of the purposeless walking I used to do in the evenings. Most of my walking, now, has 'purpose' because it's exercising the dog, or taking her out for toilet breaks.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I think location is also a big factor here. I've lived in multiple parts of the US, and most of it is simply designed against walking. I enjoy taking casual walks, but when I lived in the midwest, I had to drive to a park to walk. There were no sidewalks, and the streets were dangerous for pedestrians (lots of blind curves, speeding cars, etc). It always frustrated me that I had to take a vehicle to go for a walk.
- panglott 10y ago
  Much of this is also perception. Lots of places are fine for walking or cycling, but people are so accustomed to driving everywhere that they drive even when it's somewhat ridiculous, like driving from one parking spot to another in the same a parking lot instead of just walking to a store elsewhere in the strip mall. Or driving to a store a block away and trying to find a parking space instead of just walking. Some places are actively hostile to walkers: building only arterial roads and refusing to build sidewalks to exclude walkers and the wrong sort of people (black or poor). Relatively few places are so hostile to drivers. So people grow a bias toward driving everywhere. Load your bicycle on the car and drive it there to ride around in circles.

jshelly 10y ago

I'm surprised they did not mention Einstein. From what I've read he loved to take walks.

lettergram 10y ago

Every day, I walk from the ferry building in SF to 4th Street and back for work. I look at it as the time I can enjoy the city and never (or try to never) think of issues I am having. It relieves a lot of stress, as I look at the faces of pasaers by, and the buildings. Prior to college, during college, and even now, my wife/wife-to-be and I took an hour walk in the evening (and sometimes morning). It's something I always use(d) to relieve stress. The thing is, most people thought we were kind of weird. Back where we are from we literally used to walk next or through corn fields and the town was definitely not design for walking. We made it work, but I can see why walking is dying a slow death.

overgard 10y ago

I love purposeless walks, but I think one of the quotes had a point about the self conscious nature of it. Even if you're inconspicuous about it people treat it like you're doing something weird. I blame suburbanization a bit. There are some neighborhoods where people just seem to assume you're there to rob the joint if you don't have a dog on a leash.

akeck 10y ago

The article reminds me of a cute saying about getting "exercise" in a corporate environment, "People think a person walking with purpose has a purpose for walking."

burmer 10y ago

I love walking, but this article really bothers me, so I'm going to get a little sarcastic. Am I the only one who finds this entire article incredibly ironic? The author is trying to defend "purposeless" walking, but which is actually very purposeful! The loss of 'purposeless' walking is seen by the author as a loss of Creative Thinking. We're so busy with other smaller tasks, we're not setting aside enough time (like we used too, in the good ol' days) to think up all our really valuable thoughts! It would be one thing if they highlighted the relaxation, health benefits, de-stressing, etc., of walking, but that is clearly not the point: rattling off a list of Great Minds, and their Great Achievements whom we would benefit from emulating. The point of the article clearly is not to get people to take more breaks or curb their their obsession with work. Really it's a sneaky backdoor lifehack sermon: you're not good enough or creative enough, and you should pencil in some mindful unstructured time into their schedule to boost your Really Important thinking output by 10-15%.

pivo 10y ago

I have a 35 minute walking commute in Boston, through the public gardens, which can be very beautiful. While it's not aimless, it does seem to have offer of the benefits that I get from aimless walking, which I also do fairly often. A walking commute I see as my biggest job perk. I'm always saddened to see so many people talking on their cell phones on my commute, especially in the public garden. It seems they either have no appreciation for walking or, worse, they're afraid to be alone with themselves.

MicroBerto 10y ago

My version of "taking a walk" is swimming laps. My finest work is accomplished in the pool, going back and forth. Been a swimmer all my life, and if I don't get at least a swim or two in each week, things start to turn to shit. It's my meditation, and despite being the most boring thing on earth for some people, it's one of my favorite things to do. Many introverted mathematical minds would love it, but you gotta learn proper technique to be able to really get into a good careless rhythm. I highly recommend it. It's a thinking man's sport.

swah 10y ago
I agree. I'd love to swim in the ocean, if I lived near it. (Of course, devising a way to safely swim alone)
- MicroBerto 10y ago
  I'm an accomplished ocean swimmer too, but now live in Texas. I will say that ocean swimming is a completely different ballgame, and you need to be far more on your toes. For me, it's not a "thinking man's" sport out there. It's a "get out of this fast and alive" and keep an eye on my line of sight sport. But if you're a swimmer, I do encourage open water swimming if you want a good rush. Exhilarating. Wear a bright colored cap and if you get the "willies", just get the F outta there. Live to swim another day.
  - swah 10y ago
    Are you talking about sharks? I was thinking about tying myself to a rescue buoy. A bright colored cap is a great idea. (Actually, swimming in ponds is probably much easier)

nurettin 10y ago

Previous discussion (2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679506

canjobear 10y ago

Can any of the walking enthusiasts posting here say whether using a treadmill desk conveys the same advantages?

tomkat0789 10y ago

Back during my PhD quals, I used to just walk in a circle around my smallish apartment complex to blow off stress. Once I even met my roommate doing them same thing on one of my laps! More often I'd walk around some trees around the university campus. When out for a stroll, I can take a different perspective on things and let my mind wander without being tempted to open a new tab and browse HackerNews or something. I think I've planned a lot of research just by walking around. Sitting in front of my computer, my mind is stuck in the mode of "Do something. Do something."

phantom_package 10y ago

One of the things I always look for in a new house/apartment is a good PaceTrack.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

I love walking. I would say roughly 50% of my hours programming are spent on foot.