Scrolling aimlessly through Twitter (a terrible time and life wasting habit), a question on exercise and fitness caught my eye.
How do we get children, but people generally, away from phones and computers and into sport and exercise?
Exercise is important for both mental and physical health, of course. The good habits that you develop when young last a lifetime, a lifetime that tends to be a lot longer as a result of those good habits. Building confidence – and character for that matter – is not dependent on the number of 'likes' and 'followers' you may acquire on social media. Issues of mental health seem to have grown with the advance of an 'on line' sociality.
So the question was how do we get kids to interact with people rather than gadgets.
And someone mentioned Aristotle, the ultimate motivational, self-help guru!
Every now and then I am pleasantly surprised.
Strict discipline and philosophy is the recommended regimen for for the good life, for health in both mind and body. Discipline in the sense of developing, naturing, and managing good patterns of behaviour; and philosophy to discern what is good and to explain why it is good.
In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle showed the ways in which exercise and healthiness goes hand in hand with the virtues.
A culture of discipline within communities of practice and character is thus the order of the day. (I'm thinking Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas here).
by Stanley Hauerwas
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/the-virtues-of-alasdair-macintyre
That's good not just for a person's health, it's good for social health.