Just this morning roommate brought up the fact that he's been using Epic Win, to which I responded in all seriousness: "oh yeah, I've been thinking of using that."
I then went out to go jump rope, and had to come back in early because my rope finally broke from wear over the years.
I couldn't help but satisfyingly think to myself, "hmm. Talk about tangible feedback."
A timely occurrence to help explain what I mean when I say 'tangible/intuitive.' The idea is that when you're jumping rope, you're performing an action that doesn't necessarily manifest itself in something you can intuitively see. The rope is indeed wearing down, but as far as our limited visual capacity is concerned, nothing is happening. The same goes for the weight one loses, of course. We need things like scales and body-measuring tape to make the results more tangible. That, or we feel compelled to craft a system that turns chores that seem like work into numbers and points that seem manageable.
We're limited to acting only in response to tangible/intuitive change we see in the world. In the case of evaluating the impact of our action (jumping rope) on the world, the reality of the world has indeed changed whether we can perceive it or not, we just need tools to turn that reality into numbers we can understand. Otherwise we feel like our action is a meaningless and uncomfortable waste of time ("why should I keep jumping rope/running/studying this book? I'm not getting anything out of it.").
This is probably a good time to insert a favorite recent thought of mine, that reality is just reality, and it couldn't care less about what humans think about it.
