I was a doubter until COVID. Then I built a habit of 30 to 60+ minutes of walking a day, ~1.5 to 5mi depending on length and pace.
Geez, the amount of stuff I got done, problems I solved, and general boost to well-being I achieved was lost on me until a job pushed those walks out of the workday. My productivity wasn’t the same.
Definitely going to block off a walk around the harbor during most workdays going forward so I can refresh the slate so to speak.
It reminds me about this video where John Cleese talks about creativity. One of his points is that his work was better than some of his more talented peers simply because he set aside more time to let ideas mature:
"If you have the option to work on something you like on your computer or just even glance outside into the sun for a moment, always choose the latter."
This golden rule has given me more benefits - including finishing the task way faster I would have taken longer if I just sat in front of the computer.
Not OP, but it has to be a walk with no headphones for me. As I walk, thoughts seem to bubble up from my subconscious and present themselves for consideration. This doesn’t happen as often if I’m listening to music.
I wish more people knew you can turn iPhones and Androids into dumbphones through MDM and other methods. It would save people money , you wouldn't have to sacrifice security, and they wouldn't complain about losing Google maps or Signal.
Result is no ability to install apps and no web browsing. It's really a smart, smartphone because you get the benefits of it being smart without becoming dumb through the distractions.
Cider9986 answered for Android, so I'll throw out a suggestion for iPhone.
Assistive Access on iPhone might be an option for people looking for something drastic. Turning it on is simple, but it's pretty brutal and a bit crude in some ways even compared to a feature phone. Your mileage will vary! It's something I often suggest, and never quite recommend.
You pick the apps you want access to, and the permissions each should have, set a password, and then when you turn Assistive Access on, the phone reboots into a very limited mode. You can have every app you want, but when I've played with it, I've still found it felt too limited for daily use. Maybe I wouldn't find that if I was at the point of buying a feature phone. I can't remember what frustrated me, except that I remember being pleasantly surprised by how much worked, and frustrated by some basic things.
As an example, I was impressed that I could turn on and off a VPN through an app, even though I couldn't see the status of it outside the app. On the other hand, the location permissions felt buggy, and the locations permission changes in Assisted Access mode seemed to mess with the settings in the normal mode too.
Live in user profile, keep owner profile with appstores. Push apps that are distractions free into user profile.
Use ADB to remove the built in browser because you can't just delete it or not install it because it's a system app. On GOS it's the only system app that is distracting, but I can imagine other phones might have others. Same principle, just remove it with ADB from the user profile.
Never install an app store in the user profile.
Owner profile password mitigation. You have a few options. Make it way too long to easily type and memorize it, write it down on paper and put it away in basement/attic/friends house, give it to a friend, give part of it to a friend(so they can't unlock the owner profile, only you can, but only if you ask them so huge friction).
Personally, I just have a super long passphrase memorized and that's enough too make the friction large enough. And it's really peaceful on the user profile.
Result. Without the owner password, I am in the user profile and I can't browse the web(HN) or install a distracting app like TikTok or install a new browser. If I want to update an app or manage the device or when the device restarts
Back when I was on iOS I used Apple Configurator which is Apple's MDM solution. You need a Mac it borrow one.
You remove Safari and disable installing apps. This is the guide I followed. Pretty sure your have to factory reset your phone first.
So, to install new apps you have to connect the iPhone to the Mac and optionally add a password.
MDM is supported by Apple, uninstalling the browser is not recommended by GOS developers, but I haven't had any issues. Soon, GOS will support MDM, so hopefully that will be an even better solution.
I don’t walk but I run 60-120 min 4-5x a week and could not imagine doing so with headphones. Firmly believe we need time away from the constant stimulation of modern life.
Mostly boring, but in upper zone 2 and sometimes zone 3 does not help. Yeah, I find it helpful to run outdoor. It’s particularly enjoyable to run in a trip because the routes will be unfamiliar
Yeah I started walking a lot since 2021 (before I walked but just a few km to/from work, and sometimes I'd take a bus), since 2020 I worked remotely and I realized how much I need these walks, started walking around 7km daily on average, with 20-30km walks on weekends.
It fixed my back pains. It made me lose weight. It gave me time to reflect on my long-avoided problems. Productivity is like the least important benefit.
Walking, showering, sleeping, and riding a bike are great ways to debug code.
It's very cool to go to sleep and wake up knowing what the solution to the problem is.
The key for incubation for me is to make sure my brain can churn without distractions (that means no listening to podcasts, music, etc while performing said action).
It's the daydreaming/mind-wandering state that occurs when you're not focused on an external task. With all the stimuli of the modern world, I feel like we're being starved of crucial DMN time if we don't engineer conditions like the ones you describe.
I remember during covid, cyclists were the ones in my town in a poll answering they missed their commute. It's such a nice way of thinking things through and then clearing your mind, then arriving home not thinking more about work.
but sometimes I need a little burst of the phone/music to serve as a distraction and force me to unplug from the hard problem that i'm fixated on. once i've successfully started thinking about something else, phone/music off and let the productive mind wandering begin
It makes sense. It hard to think creatively when your environment is stagnant. You need some new sights and sounds to kick things along, especially when you’re stuck on something.
I like the story of Shigeru Miyamoto getting the idea for flying through archways in Star Fox from walking through archways in a Shinto shrine near the Nintendo headquarters. It wasn’t from playing other video games or reading about game development, it was just from thinking creatively about his real world environment right outside the office.
I have really noticed recently that a lot of modern media (film, TV, videogames, etc) seems much more based on prior media than on the author's experience of the world. Like everything is now operating at a meta level. It's a little sad.
I wrote a response to this, but then I realised I was responding to the claim that modern media was more derivative, rather than what you actually said, which was that modern media is more _meta_.
Can you go into that a little more? Do you have specific examples that make you sad?
The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.
P.S. an article I linked to in my original response was https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/the-crpg-renaissance-part-1-f... which I mentioned as it talks about a historical standout in the genre but puts it in the context of the copycats and the schlock. It's now irrelevant to my comment, but I'd like to link to it anyway.
Not OP, but there is a wide chasm between what Community does and what OP was referring to.
Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)
What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.
We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.
Ah, thank you very much for this reply, because I haven't watched Community myself so I didn't realise the confusion between a show that's intentionally about a meta situation vs. ... well what you've written explains my meaning exactly.
You should watch some episodes, even if you don't watch all of it. There's a reason why it influenced popular culture (even if no one remembers it doing so).
Incidentally I did see a film recently which included both intentionally meta elements and the kind of "simulacrum" meta elements I'm talking about: The Fall Guy. Although it's a meta film about making a film, the entire thing also operates in a kind of film universe that isn't really connected at all to the real world.
I don't know if I have a good argument for it myself. I have seen a lot of people saying specifically that they based their {thing} on {prior thing} rather than something from life, but I haven't exactly kept a list. Beyond that it's mostly a feeling.
The very brief (and bastardised) summary is that we're cutting ourselves from what is real, so we base our art on the fake reality that we're experiencing.
I'll never forget when one of my teachers asked: "who has seen a sheep?" The entire class put up their hand. The next question was "who has seen a live sheep, in front of them?" more than half the class put their hand down. We all know what a sheep looks like, but not because we've been near one.
Yes indeed, I'm aware of it, though I admit I never finished the whole thing. It did make me notice this situation even more acutely.
It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)
I started doing "powerwalks" on most of my mornings. I aim for the upper end of zone 2 (ca. 135 bpm in my case), which is basically walking as quickly as I can without running, for about 30 minutes. It's really great, as it's both a form of sport/cardio and a mentally refreshing walk. No headphones or input, but I do take a pocket notebook with me so I can write stuff down that pop in my head. On the days I manage to do it, I feel better, calmer, more focused, and my sleep the following night is more restful.
I was chatting to a therapist friend the other day about EMDR [0] therapy. In short it’s often used in treating PTSD through alternating eye movement, but also alternating sound in headphones or tapping the body on alternating sides.
The theory is that it helps connect the left and right halves of the brain to allow trauma to be processed emotionally.
I’ve been wondering since if that’s why walking / running helps with creative processing?
Days after I graduated high school in 2004, my parents moved me and my family out to a 15 acre property in the middle of nowhere. Mowing the lawn on a riding mower was an all-day affair. The time I spent on that mower with just my own thoughts were some of the most meditative and creative of my life.
This is exactly why I am bullish on voice AI! Walking and voicing my thoughts out to an AI agent who can talk back or take actions for me is very liberating.
This is great. Maybe before self driving becomes a thing we can convince our capital hoarding tech oligarchs who run the country we need more walkable cities to feed ai inputs
Realized this during a particularly stressful time in 2021 - back then, I used to spend hours walking just thinking through problems, all night long. I’ve since abandoned the all night long part, but have an almost daily ritual to walk around thinking about whatever problem - small or big - I’m working on at the moment.
I’ve also found that during these walks, the more I talk out loud to myself and move my hands as if I’m writing on a whiteboard, the faster I get to an answer.
Best habit, by far. I'd also recommend taking a walk free of any devices. I leave my phone at home and walk through the park few mins away form my home.
One transformation, for example, required getting permission to sell songs for $1 each when the labels all wanted to price each song differently. That required getting alignment from various titans at the record companies.
The way he accomplished this was to take these leaders on walks in the hills behind apple hq. Read about it in the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
> One place where you’d always find someone from Netflix: the Los Gatos Creek Trail, a paved walking path right behind the office. “We would take our one-on-one [meetings] by just walking out of the building, down to the river, up to the reservoir and back, chatting,” .. Among the people frequently seen on the trail.. was [Reed] Hastings himself. That walk-and-talk tradition is still alive: On a recent spring day, it took just a few minutes after arriving for two people to emerge from Netflix’s office complex to stroll alongside the water, deep in discussion.
I can attest to this. I work in Midtown Manhattan. You'd think walking around meant getting distracted by the all the activity around you that you'd forget about the problem you're trying to solve.
But I've found that distraction is the catalyst. Creativity for me comes when I focus on something else for a while, not grinding on the same problem with unwavering focus.
Lots of famous historical figures walked. Darwin, Jefferson, Nietzsche, Dickens, Thoreau. More recently (obviously): Jobs.
I wrote a small piece a several years ago on it but have found walking immensely helpful in my debugging efforts. And there's so much research that backs it up.
Some of the most complex problems I've ever solved were solved when I was mowing my own lawn with a push mower. Just in a trance. Many of the best life decisions I've ever made were when I was on a walk, thinking things through.
Completely agree. I used to take walks during the day to think through problems. I was put on a disciplinary for not being at my desk enough.
I did challenge it, saying walking helps me think, and asked whether they paid me to type or solve problems? They obviously said they paid me to solve problems, but at my desk... Sigh. Didn't stay there long.
I recommend moving towards a place, where you have access to peaceful, green places tomgo for a walk. In a busy city, I guess most people won't find their peace of mind. (I am just moving away from the city, partly for this reason)
I walk at 6.2 km/h average (measured over ~15km downtown distances). This means just weaving through the pedestrian traffic, with some practice it just them all fading into background, no different from lightpoles, bushes or cars. Though an actual forest path is ofc preferrable.
I've become very adept at passing inattentive/slow walkers and maneuvering through the cbd. I dont understand why the vast majority of people walk. so. damned. slow. (not not pay attention to their surroundings.)
I'm a largish guy as well so it probably helps that when people see me coming they get out of the way :-P
I am a runner and have a standing desk. When I run, my mind is more on than at the computer. These days when I run I mentally compose prompts for the LLM when I return to my computer. So beware the illusion that simply walking away is inherently, and unintentionally, meditative. Likewise at my standing desk, the physicality of standing turns all at-desk time into an almost combative wrestling match with my tasks. Just sharing… some optimizations from 15 years of life hacking but still can’t escape the deeper psyche stuff.
I depends. It helps clear my mind because I have to pay attention to the traffic here in the city, so solving issues is a step to far for me. I rather walk/shower/do the dishes.
And then it wants to edit some random upstream file that is not relevant to the task at hand and we should not edit it, so you tell it “and only edit the files affected by this commit”, and wait two more minutes.
And now it deletes a test, so you tell it “and don’t delete any tests”, and wait two more minutes.
And now it adds logic to disable the core functionality, so now you tell it “and don’t disable the core functionality”, and wait two more minutes.
> Taking a Walk May Lead to More Creativity than Sitting, Study Finds (2014)
Note publication year. This might have been very useful in 2014. But we’re now in the agentic era. Sure, I was a skeptic for the last three years, but as of December the models are bursting at the seams with insight and creativity. I personally haven’t had a creative thought since March. My agents work on one monitor, the other monitor has a YouTube playlist of videos about yak shaving agentic loops. But I imagine that my agents will be consuming those videos as transcripts by the end of the summer.
Always wonder whether this fits with Jeff Hawkin's "Reference Frames" where he ties movement to learning and understanding - and I would also say creativity.
Any form of exercise helps. Do not think of one second that it's only for your body -- it's equally important for your mind. I used to ride by bike by the coast every night, 365 days a year, 20km loop for exactly 40 mins. I couldn't have survived all the stress from work without it. Absolutely a lifeline. Don't keep reading my thread, go for a walk!
It's astounding how many work problems I've found the solution to in just. the 80 ft walk to the bathroom. If I ever managed people, I would absolutely mandate scheduled movement/calisthenics/walking breaks. Almost seems like a cheat code.
Dictation + Claude enable this to be an actual working modality now. Does anyone else find themselves working in this way. (In addition to decompression walks of course!)
There’s a Kmart near me that I sometimes walk around when it’s raining outside. Even though it’s not endless like outside, the tall isles block your sight lines so you can wander for a while.
Absolutely agree. I circumnavigate Lake Merritt pretty much every day mostly because it puts my brain a good place to be productive. The exercise is helpful too.
Two of the best things for my mental health is maintaining a 7 day moving average of +10k steps and working out every Mon-Fri during lunch time.
The best investment I've made in my mental health and productivity was a dog.
Don't know where I'd be without my executive assistant.
I was a doubter until COVID. Then I built a habit of 30 to 60+ minutes of walking a day, ~1.5 to 5mi depending on length and pace.
Geez, the amount of stuff I got done, problems I solved, and general boost to well-being I achieved was lost on me until a job pushed those walks out of the workday. My productivity wasn’t the same.
Definitely going to block off a walk around the harbor during most workdays going forward so I can refresh the slate so to speak.
It reminds me about this video where John Cleese talks about creativity. One of his points is that his work was better than some of his more talented peers simply because he set aside more time to let ideas mature:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Same here. I have a personal mind frame of:
This golden rule has given me more benefits - including finishing the task way faster I would have taken longer if I just sat in front of the computer.Do you listen to anything while walking, or just listen to nothing while letting your mind clear itself?
Not OP, but it has to be a walk with no headphones for me. As I walk, thoughts seem to bubble up from my subconscious and present themselves for consideration. This doesn’t happen as often if I’m listening to music.
I decided to go offline for this summer. I got a dumb phone and a card for public transportation, instead of the app I'm using now.
Downtime from the algorithmic manipulation has been the breeding ground for my creativity and this is one more step to this direction.
I wish more people knew you can turn iPhones and Androids into dumbphones through MDM and other methods. It would save people money , you wouldn't have to sacrifice security, and they wouldn't complain about losing Google maps or Signal.
Result is no ability to install apps and no web browsing. It's really a smart, smartphone because you get the benefits of it being smart without becoming dumb through the distractions.
Anything I can remove, I can restore. So yes and no.
Few people have the willpower to stand against the addictive design, but I'm not one of them :D
You can use a password to make it so you can't restore. That's the difference with my methods.
There are various ways to store the password to allow some level of management. Give half of it to a friend, write it down, make it super long.
Why fight the system when you can just leave the system?
So you have an article you can point to?
Cider9986 answered for Android, so I'll throw out a suggestion for iPhone.
Assistive Access on iPhone might be an option for people looking for something drastic. Turning it on is simple, but it's pretty brutal and a bit crude in some ways even compared to a feature phone. Your mileage will vary! It's something I often suggest, and never quite recommend.
https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
You pick the apps you want access to, and the permissions each should have, set a password, and then when you turn Assistive Access on, the phone reboots into a very limited mode. You can have every app you want, but when I've played with it, I've still found it felt too limited for daily use. Maybe I wouldn't find that if I was at the point of buying a feature phone. I can't remember what frustrated me, except that I remember being pleasantly surprised by how much worked, and frustrated by some basic things.
As an example, I was impressed that I could turn on and off a VPN through an app, even though I couldn't see the status of it outside the app. On the other hand, the location permissions felt buggy, and the locations permission changes in Assisted Access mode seemed to mess with the settings in the normal mode too.
I didn't use an article, I just followed the principles and had an LLM do the android debug bridge commands.
Here is an article I found later which did the same thing as me.
(https://jordanherzstein.neocities.org/posts/adb_vanadium/)
For Android basically:
Live in user profile, keep owner profile with appstores. Push apps that are distractions free into user profile.
Use ADB to remove the built in browser because you can't just delete it or not install it because it's a system app. On GOS it's the only system app that is distracting, but I can imagine other phones might have others. Same principle, just remove it with ADB from the user profile.
Never install an app store in the user profile.
Owner profile password mitigation. You have a few options. Make it way too long to easily type and memorize it, write it down on paper and put it away in basement/attic/friends house, give it to a friend, give part of it to a friend(so they can't unlock the owner profile, only you can, but only if you ask them so huge friction).
Personally, I just have a super long passphrase memorized and that's enough too make the friction large enough. And it's really peaceful on the user profile.
Result. Without the owner password, I am in the user profile and I can't browse the web(HN) or install a distracting app like TikTok or install a new browser. If I want to update an app or manage the device or when the device restarts
Back when I was on iOS I used Apple Configurator which is Apple's MDM solution. You need a Mac it borrow one.
You remove Safari and disable installing apps. This is the guide I followed. Pretty sure your have to factory reset your phone first.
https://redd.it/1731ozp
So, to install new apps you have to connect the iPhone to the Mac and optionally add a password.
MDM is supported by Apple, uninstalling the browser is not recommended by GOS developers, but I haven't had any issues. Soon, GOS will support MDM, so hopefully that will be an even better solution.
I don’t walk but I run 60-120 min 4-5x a week and could not imagine doing so with headphones. Firmly believe we need time away from the constant stimulation of modern life.
I wish I could do the same, but the running(even at low pace like 6mph) is too taxing without something fun to listen to
I always find treadmill running to be as much of a mental workout staying focused as a physical one
Too taxing in what sense? Too boring? Too hard? If it’s the later, slow down to a brisk walk to build some stamina.
If it’s the former, start watching your surroundings. There’s a ton of things that are fun to watch.
Sounds like they’re using a treadmill, and yes this is about the most boring way possible to exercise
Mostly boring, but in upper zone 2 and sometimes zone 3 does not help. Yeah, I find it helpful to run outdoor. It’s particularly enjoyable to run in a trip because the routes will be unfamiliar
Yeah I started walking a lot since 2021 (before I walked but just a few km to/from work, and sometimes I'd take a bus), since 2020 I worked remotely and I realized how much I need these walks, started walking around 7km daily on average, with 20-30km walks on weekends.
It fixed my back pains. It made me lose weight. It gave me time to reflect on my long-avoided problems. Productivity is like the least important benefit.
Walking, showering, sleeping, and riding a bike are great ways to debug code.
It's very cool to go to sleep and wake up knowing what the solution to the problem is.
The key for incubation for me is to make sure my brain can churn without distractions (that means no listening to podcasts, music, etc while performing said action).
Yup, that's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
It's the daydreaming/mind-wandering state that occurs when you're not focused on an external task. With all the stimuli of the modern world, I feel like we're being starved of crucial DMN time if we don't engineer conditions like the ones you describe.
Quite the interesting but unapproachable topic. Doesn't help that neurology logic on brain-level is dynamic and general rules are hard to extract.
I remember during covid, cyclists were the ones in my town in a poll answering they missed their commute. It's such a nice way of thinking things through and then clearing your mind, then arriving home not thinking more about work.
Walking with no music + not using your phone. Leaves you plenty of space to think.
but sometimes I need a little burst of the phone/music to serve as a distraction and force me to unplug from the hard problem that i'm fixated on. once i've successfully started thinking about something else, phone/music off and let the productive mind wandering begin
I find that even if I use my phone while walking I will eventually stop paying attention to the phone.
Truth. Nothing is a greater spurn to creativity (cyclic mental exertion) than time away focusing on cyclic bodily exertion.
It makes sense. It hard to think creatively when your environment is stagnant. You need some new sights and sounds to kick things along, especially when you’re stuck on something.
I like the story of Shigeru Miyamoto getting the idea for flying through archways in Star Fox from walking through archways in a Shinto shrine near the Nintendo headquarters. It wasn’t from playing other video games or reading about game development, it was just from thinking creatively about his real world environment right outside the office.
I have really noticed recently that a lot of modern media (film, TV, videogames, etc) seems much more based on prior media than on the author's experience of the world. Like everything is now operating at a meta level. It's a little sad.
I wrote a response to this, but then I realised I was responding to the claim that modern media was more derivative, rather than what you actually said, which was that modern media is more _meta_.
Can you go into that a little more? Do you have specific examples that make you sad?
The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.
P.S. an article I linked to in my original response was https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/the-crpg-renaissance-part-1-f... which I mentioned as it talks about a historical standout in the genre but puts it in the context of the copycats and the schlock. It's now irrelevant to my comment, but I'd like to link to it anyway.
Not OP, but there is a wide chasm between what Community does and what OP was referring to.
Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)
What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.
We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.
Ah, thank you very much for this reply, because I haven't watched Community myself so I didn't realise the confusion between a show that's intentionally about a meta situation vs. ... well what you've written explains my meaning exactly.
You should watch some episodes, even if you don't watch all of it. There's a reason why it influenced popular culture (even if no one remembers it doing so).
For example "Remedial Chaos Theory" is where the term "The Darkest Timeline" comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedial_Chaos_Theory
Yeah I should probably check it out.
Incidentally I did see a film recently which included both intentionally meta elements and the kind of "simulacrum" meta elements I'm talking about: The Fall Guy. Although it's a meta film about making a film, the entire thing also operates in a kind of film universe that isn't really connected at all to the real world.
I don't know if I have a good argument for it myself. I have seen a lot of people saying specifically that they based their {thing} on {prior thing} rather than something from life, but I haven't exactly kept a list. Beyond that it's mostly a feeling.
To give an extreme example, just to make what I'm talking about obvious, this recent Instacart superbowl ad comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGTaGjqERc
Nothing about the scene or anyone in it is really connected to any reality; the whole thing is like a second-level simulation of prior media.
Your observation reminds me of this book, Simulcra and Simulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
The very brief (and bastardised) summary is that we're cutting ourselves from what is real, so we base our art on the fake reality that we're experiencing.
I'll never forget when one of my teachers asked: "who has seen a sheep?" The entire class put up their hand. The next question was "who has seen a live sheep, in front of them?" more than half the class put their hand down. We all know what a sheep looks like, but not because we've been near one.
Yes indeed, I'm aware of it, though I admit I never finished the whole thing. It did make me notice this situation even more acutely.
It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)
I started doing "powerwalks" on most of my mornings. I aim for the upper end of zone 2 (ca. 135 bpm in my case), which is basically walking as quickly as I can without running, for about 30 minutes. It's really great, as it's both a form of sport/cardio and a mentally refreshing walk. No headphones or input, but I do take a pocket notebook with me so I can write stuff down that pop in my head. On the days I manage to do it, I feel better, calmer, more focused, and my sleep the following night is more restful.
Of course it does, and is it any surprise the most innovative city and urban centers in the world are the most walkable?
I was chatting to a therapist friend the other day about EMDR [0] therapy. In short it’s often used in treating PTSD through alternating eye movement, but also alternating sound in headphones or tapping the body on alternating sides.
The theory is that it helps connect the left and right halves of the brain to allow trauma to be processed emotionally.
I’ve been wondering since if that’s why walking / running helps with creative processing?
[0] https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-therapy/types-of-therapy/eye-mo...
There is even a latin phrase for it: solvitur ambulando.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvitur_ambulando
Nice, new to me. Similar in meaning to "cut the Gordian knot"
Solvitur bibando is Balmer’s peak?
Is there one for showering?
They didn’t have showers, but you may recall Archimides shouted “Eureka!” after a famous bath time discovery
auri imbres
Days after I graduated high school in 2004, my parents moved me and my family out to a 15 acre property in the middle of nowhere. Mowing the lawn on a riding mower was an all-day affair. The time I spent on that mower with just my own thoughts were some of the most meditative and creative of my life.
This is exactly why I am bullish on voice AI! Walking and voicing my thoughts out to an AI agent who can talk back or take actions for me is very liberating.
This is great. Maybe before self driving becomes a thing we can convince our capital hoarding tech oligarchs who run the country we need more walkable cities to feed ai inputs
Realized this during a particularly stressful time in 2021 - back then, I used to spend hours walking just thinking through problems, all night long. I’ve since abandoned the all night long part, but have an almost daily ritual to walk around thinking about whatever problem - small or big - I’m working on at the moment.
I’ve also found that during these walks, the more I talk out loud to myself and move my hands as if I’m writing on a whiteboard, the faster I get to an answer.
Best habit, by far. I'd also recommend taking a walk free of any devices. I leave my phone at home and walk through the park few mins away form my home.
Steve Jobs transformed four industries.
One transformation, for example, required getting permission to sell songs for $1 each when the labels all wanted to price each song differently. That required getting alignment from various titans at the record companies.
The way he accomplished this was to take these leaders on walks in the hills behind apple hq. Read about it in the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
Similarly, https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/24/los-gatos-netflix-headquar... (with trail photo)
> One place where you’d always find someone from Netflix: the Los Gatos Creek Trail, a paved walking path right behind the office. “We would take our one-on-one [meetings] by just walking out of the building, down to the river, up to the reservoir and back, chatting,” .. Among the people frequently seen on the trail.. was [Reed] Hastings himself. That walk-and-talk tradition is still alive: On a recent spring day, it took just a few minutes after arriving for two people to emerge from Netflix’s office complex to stroll alongside the water, deep in discussion.
I can attest to this. I work in Midtown Manhattan. You'd think walking around meant getting distracted by the all the activity around you that you'd forget about the problem you're trying to solve.
But I've found that distraction is the catalyst. Creativity for me comes when I focus on something else for a while, not grinding on the same problem with unwavering focus.
To add to the historical references, here's a quote from Nietzsche: all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
Kant was so famous for taking a daily walk at precisely 3:30 p.m. that the residents of Königsberg could set their clocks by it.
Hence the popular expression "It's good to be punctual, but you don't have to be a Kant about it"
Lots of famous historical figures walked. Darwin, Jefferson, Nietzsche, Dickens, Thoreau. More recently (obviously): Jobs.
I wrote a small piece a several years ago on it but have found walking immensely helpful in my debugging efforts. And there's so much research that backs it up.
Darwin was said to have a circular path in his garden that resembled a trench it was so well-worn.
Some of the most complex problems I've ever solved were solved when I was mowing my own lawn with a push mower. Just in a trance. Many of the best life decisions I've ever made were when I was on a walk, thinking things through.
In the field of hacking, a great way to make progress on a thorny programming puzzle is to be anywhere other than in front of an actual computer.
Completely agree. I used to take walks during the day to think through problems. I was put on a disciplinary for not being at my desk enough.
I did challenge it, saying walking helps me think, and asked whether they paid me to type or solve problems? They obviously said they paid me to solve problems, but at my desk... Sigh. Didn't stay there long.
Unless you like me, like to walk fast so you go back home ungrier than never because:
1. people walking like turtle in front of you
2. people on phone not looking at where they go
3. both
I recommend moving towards a place, where you have access to peaceful, green places tomgo for a walk. In a busy city, I guess most people won't find their peace of mind. (I am just moving away from the city, partly for this reason)
I live in a touristy town so you quickly learn how to weave around people or take the side streets if you want to get anywhere!
I walk at 6.2 km/h average (measured over ~15km downtown distances). This means just weaving through the pedestrian traffic, with some practice it just them all fading into background, no different from lightpoles, bushes or cars. Though an actual forest path is ofc preferrable.
I've become very adept at passing inattentive/slow walkers and maneuvering through the cbd. I dont understand why the vast majority of people walk. so. damned. slow. (not not pay attention to their surroundings.)
I'm a largish guy as well so it probably helps that when people see me coming they get out of the way :-P
Reminds me of this
Men who stare at walls (alexselimov.com) 724 points by aselimov3 28 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 337 comments
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920074)
I am a runner and have a standing desk. When I run, my mind is more on than at the computer. These days when I run I mentally compose prompts for the LLM when I return to my computer. So beware the illusion that simply walking away is inherently, and unintentionally, meditative. Likewise at my standing desk, the physicality of standing turns all at-desk time into an almost combative wrestling match with my tasks. Just sharing… some optimizations from 15 years of life hacking but still can’t escape the deeper psyche stuff.
Each morning, I take a 5K walk (about 3 miles).
It’s a good opportunity to “triage” the day ahead.
If I have a vexing bug, I often “fix” it, during my morning walk.
I read this book earlier this year, The Brain at Rest: The Life-Changing Science of Doing Nothing by Joseph Jebelli, It's on a similar thread
I wonder do the same benefits appear while cycling
I depends. It helps clear my mind because I have to pay attention to the traffic here in the city, so solving issues is a step to far for me. I rather walk/shower/do the dishes.
Hardest part is forcing yourself to leave the computer
Especially with a bug. Why think about it when you can just feed a stack trace to AI and wait 2 more minutes?
And then it wants to edit some random upstream file that is not relevant to the task at hand and we should not edit it, so you tell it “and only edit the files affected by this commit”, and wait two more minutes.
And now it deletes a test, so you tell it “and don’t delete any tests”, and wait two more minutes.
And now it adds logic to disable the core functionality, so now you tell it “and don’t disable the core functionality”, and wait two more minutes.
Etc
desk treadmill
(or should I listen instead of problem solving?) :)
True Story!!
> Taking a Walk May Lead to More Creativity than Sitting, Study Finds (2014)
Note publication year. This might have been very useful in 2014. But we’re now in the agentic era. Sure, I was a skeptic for the last three years, but as of December the models are bursting at the seams with insight and creativity. I personally haven’t had a creative thought since March. My agents work on one monitor, the other monitor has a YouTube playlist of videos about yak shaving agentic loops. But I imagine that my agents will be consuming those videos as transcripts by the end of the summer.
Always wonder whether this fits with Jeff Hawkin's "Reference Frames" where he ties movement to learning and understanding - and I would also say creativity.
Any form of exercise helps. Do not think of one second that it's only for your body -- it's equally important for your mind. I used to ride by bike by the coast every night, 365 days a year, 20km loop for exactly 40 mins. I couldn't have survived all the stress from work without it. Absolutely a lifeline. Don't keep reading my thread, go for a walk!
Possibly related to "showerthoughts", in that removal of stimuli allows for latent realizations to surface.
Or as Arthur Brooks puts it - the shower now is the only place where you dont have your phone on you.
Your comment made me look up "shower phone holder" on Amazon, and I regretted it.
I try to walk 10k steps every day. Not only for my health but also for my mind. It helps me to calm down and gain fresh energy for other tasks.
It's astounding how many work problems I've found the solution to in just. the 80 ft walk to the bathroom. If I ever managed people, I would absolutely mandate scheduled movement/calisthenics/walking breaks. Almost seems like a cheat code.
It’s good that they proved it I guess. But they could have just asked literally any person in history doing anything creative as a job.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf
Dictation + Claude enable this to be an actual working modality now. Does anyone else find themselves working in this way. (In addition to decompression walks of course!)
https://www.inferterra.com/the-new-workspace-a-first-princip...
Could have just asked me. I've taken advantage of that in the bulk of my life.
Absolutely. If the weather isn't nice, I will even walk around in the office.
How big is your office?
There’s a Kmart near me that I sometimes walk around when it’s raining outside. Even though it’s not endless like outside, the tall isles block your sight lines so you can wander for a while.
Walking in the cold and/or rain is also quite nice.
I intuitively agree. Some of my good ideas come from sprint walking...and sitting on the toilet.
There’s no way anyone who’s ever taken a walk doesn’t know this again the most obvious thing ever is now a paper
My secret is out
I especially despise sitting down right after lunch to get back to work.
I must take a walk first.
Taking a walk right after eating helps stabilize blood sugar and digestion.
Highly recommend.
"the only thoughts of value are those reached through walking" - Nietszche
(reading that in German might have more nuances)
Absolutely agree. I circumnavigate Lake Merritt pretty much every day mostly because it puts my brain a good place to be productive. The exercise is helpful too.
Yeah, and shift your eyes around, it gets you out of your head and makes you more aware of your environment as you walk!
In other news, water is wet.