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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2697 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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While I am not a progressive, I kind of suppose that they'd start with the same answer I would - neither of us wants to be Amish, so it doesn't really matter if some Amish outcomes are quite good. At most, one could learn a couple lessons, but if you're not actually willing to replicate the lifestyle those are going to be limited.

My other answer is going to hinge on this:

Start with lifestyle. Amish communities are agrarian, with no modern farm equipment, meaning all the work has to be done by hand. In 2004, the American College of Sports Medicine fitted Amish volunteers with pedometers to determine how much physical activity they performed. The results were dramatic. Amish men took 18,425 steps a day and women 14,196 steps, compared with non-Amish people who are encouraged by doctors to shoot for at least 10,000 steps–and typically fail. Including other forms of manual labor–lifting, chopping, sowing, planting–the Amish are six times as active as a random sample of people from 12 countries.

I would recommend that everyone do the same. When it comes to health outcomes, I would want to start with just moving around more before I gave much consideration to wearing old-timey clothes, growing a beard, and scrapping electric. I would expect marriage and community to be incredibly helpful as well, but from an individual perspective, my suggestion would be to just go ahead and start moving around more and see where you wind up. If you pick a decent movement-based hobby, you're apt to discover some community and improve your marriageability along the way anyhow.

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