On Walking

How many who attended Zcon3 walked from the airport to the Palms Resort?

I’m guessing not many.

Walking has become more counter-cultural than using cryptocurrency. Walking! An activity humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years. Now it is, as the French say *pas à la mode* or out of style.

I do understand why tho.

In Vegas, the walk from the airport was 100+ degrees, about 5 miles, through low-rent stretches of road, and past some homeless communities.

Speaking of the homeless, some of the transient people in Vegas are the nicest, kindest, most grateful humans. And many of them are unbanked. With a few tools like a QR code or a crypto handle and an internet connection at a library, it is possible (although not yet easy) for them to earn, accumulate, spend, and store value, digitally, privately, and without permission.

So why walk when there are other options? What is so great about walking that can outweigh the risk tradeoffs?

1. Exploration. There is no better way to see a new place. When you walk, you see things on a human scale, and you notice and retain more.
2. Mental Health. Lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, lower tension, and better sleep.
3. Making it easier for others. When you walk, you take a step toward critical mass. It’s far easier to walk alongside a road when others are doing it too.
4. Physical health. No surprise, but people who live in walkable cities have better overall health and lower body mass index than people who live in suburbs.
5. Connection. Side-by-side walking helps people connect to each other. When you meet someone for coffee, walk with them to & from the coffeeshop to increase your odds of connecting. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202002/wondering-if-you-made-good-first-impression-walk-together
6. Creativity. Steve Jobs was known for his walking meetings, and in his biography Jobs praised walking as the habit that helped him get the most out of his imagination. A study from Stanford University shows a persons creative output increased by an average of 60% while walking. https://news.stanford.edu/2014/04/24/walking-vs-sitting-042414/
7. Clarity. Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner said walking clears the mind — “I realize what I can do, what I should do, and what I must abandon.”

Some of the greatest people in history were known to walk a lot. Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle, Charles Dickens, Beethoven, Thoreau, Nietzsche, John Muir, Steve Jobs, etc. These were counter-cultural people who used walking to develop mindsets that differed from the prejudices of their social environments. And they ended up changing the world.