Too Much Freedom is Bad
What does it mean to live a healthy life? Certainly, a question with multiple “right” answers (though far more wrong ones)! So while everyone will find their own definitions, for me personally, I’ve latched on to the idea that living a healthy life mostly revolves around a healthy diet and a healthy body. And one main reason that I found my way to InfoTrust in the beginning was because I was looking for a place in time that would make me a healthy person. Man may have been born to be free. But rest assured, well into my fourth decade in this frail human vessel, I have simply learned the hard way that left to my own devices, I’d be free to eat frozen oven food and Kettle chips until the end of my days.
And so the dream became one of finding an environment in which there were healthy snacks (apples! carrots! bananas!) by simply walking to the kitchen, cupboards that magically replenished themselves every week (without any effort from me, of course), and tabletops on which lunch would just magically appear, every day, at a consistent and constant appointed hour.
When I was a child and an adolescent, I had yearned for freedom, a world in which I could go anywhere and do anything. Now as an adult I instead longed for a life that was comfortable and easy.
Man’s Search for Sustenance
For what it’s worth, while you may chuckle at my plight, it is actually quite common. More generally, economists call this challenge a “search cost”—that is, the time, energy, and money we need to expend in order to find a good or service in the world in order to engage in a value exchange. You may think it a trivial question but the mere existence of liquid foods such Huel and Soylent are literal proof that I am not alone in being bewildered by the dizzying food landscape that confronts the modern human being today. What to eat? Where to acquire it? Is it healthy? Precious mental cycles are burned every day to figure out these questions. So one of my absolute favorite parts about InfoTrust is that every day, for those who trek to the HQ office, we are fed! The food is delicious and healthy! (And additionally, scintillating conversation abounds with every lunchtime meal! (Pros and cons of the U.S. electoral college system! Geopolitics! Meditations on ’90s movie nostalgia!)) Every week, our most amazing office manager ever, Zoe, puts the week’s menu on the whiteboard and then we use emojis in our #org-cincinnati-lunch Slack channel to indicate if we’ll be there or not so she can order the right quantities in advance. This is what we call a perfect system.
Your Body is Your Temple
In addition to diet, one of InfoTrust’s other fantastic perks is the company’s commitment to encouraging employees to exercise! In ways both small and large, InfoTrusters are a healthy bunch. To this end:
- At the office, all InfoTrusters have the option to use standing desks! Standing desks have many benefits but the biggest one, in my humble opinion, is that after lunch, when standing, your blood sugar levels will return to normal much faster, which helps me either ward off food coma or obviate it altogether.
- In the summer, InfoTrusters divide into teams and we all embark upon the “Summer Shred Challenge”. Historically, until last year, it was the “Summer Step Challenge” in which all teams competed to see who would walk the most aggregate steps. But since last summer, other activities (such as swimming, lifting, etc.) are now included and the metric has been changed from steps to calories expended. Additionally, because we are an analytics company, of course we’ve got internal dashboards to track competition:
- Gym reimbursement! Up to $225 a year can be reimbursed!
- Various year-round extracurricular activities. Last year I wrote about our summer volleyball recreational league. But that’s not all! This year, various InfoTrusters have banded together to form a climbing club! We hit the walls once every two weeks, throughout the year. Personally, I’ve become a big fan of climbing because after you climb a wall, there’s then a lot of resting where you can talk with your friends while your arms recharge.
- And finally: The Pull-Up Bar. (We call it, “Going to the Arm Farm”!) Just about every day, a small contingent of us at the office gather around in the afternoon for our daily ritual to do pull-ups. When you’ve got a buddy system like this keeping you accountable, that’s the training montage!)
4,000 Weeks
In closing, life is far too short to live an unhealthy life! The average human lives about 4,000 weeks (~77 years). (And roughly a third of that is spent sleeping!) Thus, with your remaining weeks left, don’t you owe it to yourself to make the most out of the limited time we have left on this small blue earth? To fully see the world in all its vastness and vivid color? So in the immortal words of the inimitable Jim Rohn:
