Degeneration

My body is aching all over. A mere five weeks without any sport and the return to the gym has left painful results. It’s discouraging how quickly degeneration comes. You could spend a lifetime waking up early to exercise and then if you stop for a few weeks (say you break a leg) you could fall back so far. It’s positively Sisyphean.

Within a few weeks of going to Oxford I felt like a new person. From the regular rhythms of office work and some French studies in the evenings, I was suddenly plunged into the intellectual freedoms of constant brain-stimulation. My brain felt like a new organ. The flip side of this, unfortunately, is the degeneration of intellectual capacity – and the alarming thing is that this isn’t as apparent. Instead it’s probably an unnoticeable decline, which is almost certainly difficult to put your finger on.

If the symptoms are hard to spot, it might be best to look at whether the causes are in place. For me, yes, I’m reading and listening to podcasts; yes I’m in touch with the news; and yes, I read a fair bit online. But still, I think there are things far more important than this which give the brain the stimulation it needs to grow. For me, I need to be engaging with things in a more physical way – lectures rather than podcasts. Secondly, there’s the social aspect – I’m not really involved in discussions with my peers. In fact my social life has ground to a near halt with the departure of friends. Even if – as an introvert – I can live without society for extended periods, there’s definitely an imperative to get some social discussion to make sure intellectual degeneracy doesn’t set in.

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