I read something last night. Tim Ferriss' latest dare-to-be-awesome tract is hardly an inkhorn text, but I assure you that since shedding the shibboleths of my younger, swarthier self I have had difficulty sitting still for any endeavour. The time I can devote to a piece of media depends on the format: while I can usually manage a good 150 minute movie and work my way through a game an hour or two at a time, I still have trouble reading the same text for more than thirty minutes without nodding off. It's a curious and troubling development; when I was a kid I regularly burned through reams of cheap fantasy, adventure and historical fiction in my free time.

Let's put aside the anamnesic drivel for a moment: might the changes I made in my personal life to exact physiological change have affected my ability and interest in sedentary activities? Any day in which I don't walk at least 5 miles is physically torturous; I have trouble sleeping or concentrating, and small headaches develop when I can't move or stretch for an extended period of time. The Internet isn't helping; I have trouble focusing on a single page or story for more than a minute, and closing Google Chrome without 10+ unread tabs is a small, sweet victory.

Last night I read an exhortation from Ferriss to shed complacency, to welcome physical change as a catalyst for personal growth; he suggests that even the smallest changes can be maintained, improved upon and eventually lead to startling and seemingly impossible physiological feats. This matches my personal experience. Furthermore, he suggests that improving physiologically may significantly change seemingly unrelated areas of your personal life, to wit: losing weight or becoming stronger, faster or tougher tends to increase confidence and self-respect, which in turn improves how others tend to perceive you. In my experience, this is also true.

But what about the costs? What do we sacrifice for a life with so much emphasis on what is happening right now, at this moment? My father has oft encouraged me to focus on what is enjoyable about the moment, to savor the unique ups and downs of every stage of life; it's great and terribly Buddhist of him. But so much of "higher" education is future-focused: past the immediate lessons one learns throughout the natural course of life, sitting down to consciously educate oneself is a hedge against the future. Learning a language or a history has no immediate application or benefit; it's one of the benefits of quizzes and tests, that we can test and use the fragments of a skill before it has fully formed. How can we resolve personal agency and self-direction with the mandate to simply live in the moment?