Outside for Sports, Living Room for Lazy

I was talking with a friend about a party she went to recently.  At some point, late in the evening after much alcohol had been consumed the nintendo wii was broken out and exercise and sport attempted.  My friend was pleased that she was sober enough to recognise this as a bad idea and doubly pleased that the party wasn't at her house and thus she was not responsible for cleaning up the inevitable messy consequences.

On a broader scale I have to wonder about things like wii sports.  Here's an idea!  If you want to play sport then go outside and play some fucking sport.  We seem to spend half our time thinking of ways to reduce the amount of physical exercise we do and the other half coming up with ever more sophisticated ways of replacing that exercise.  We could have saved ourselves a lot of time by not doing either and we would be at least as fit and healthy as we are now.

Not that I am in any way an advocate of physical exercise.  I'm doing a bit myself now and I've got to say it absolutely sucks.  However I do find it amusing that in the poorer parts of the world where eating is frugal and physical exertion is a way of life the inhabitants have no higher goal than to one day live a life which involves being fat and lazy while in the parts of the world where this has been achieved two of the biggest money making endeavours are the diet and exercise industries.  As a species we seem to be rather difficult to please.  Actually that's not strictly true; we're very easy to please its just that its difficult to please us for very long.

Rather than being a flaw in our collective personality this dissatisfaction with the status quo is a good thing.  The principal driving force behind achievement is not so much to get to a destination as it is to get away from here.  Would fire have been invented if everybody had decided that raw meat and chilly caves were good enough for them?  I doubt it.  Thousands of years of human achievement can be traced back to somebody looking around at the way things are and saying; "I'm sick to death of this".  Hopefully one day soon we'll be sick to death of wii.