[Linkpost] “Athletic education vs. athletic torment” by KatjaGrace

This is a link post.

I don’t know if it occurred to me until my thirties to think of exercise as an enjoyable thing. I was familiar with finding obscure corner-cases that were fun, such as Dance Dance Revolution. But the idea of it just often being a good time was alien.

I hesitate to blame anyone for anything, but school seems culpable here. I got the impression so firmly that PE class (‘physical education’ or ‘physed’) was a kind of horror, I’m not sure I would have treated this fact as on less solid ground than ‘you’re supposed to put a methods section in your lab report’. It just seemed like the way of things.

For children like me, anyway. Some children liked PE, but those were a totally different kind of creature. What the PE telos included was being awful for nerdy children, maybe to punish them for not being jocklike children. Since nerd children generally like not being jocks, they do not take this punishment as any serious feedback on their way of being, and just nobly withstand it. This is the way it is meant to be, and so it goes for every nerd until they [...]

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First published:
October 1st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rt97G7LpYySgzdcQG/athletic-education-vs-athletic-torment

Linkpost URL:
https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/athletic-education-vs-athletic-torment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.