Why I Always Take the Stairs

Omonoia, 9:40 in the morning.

The escalator is on my right and it is full. The staircase is straight ahead and almost empty, which tells you most of what you need to know about it. Anyone who changes lines at Omonoia has stood at the bottom of that staircase, looked up at how far it goes, and turned right onto the escalator.

In January I stopped turning right.

The first week was embarrassing. I got to street level with my heart in my ears. I have climbed it every working day since. The smallest thing I did this year, and where everything else started.

Reason #1: The cheapest rep I could find

I did not start with the stairs because the stairs matter. Ninety seconds of climbing is not fitness.

I started there because it was the cheapest decision I could find that I could not talk my way out of.

Habits fail on their worst day, not their average one. A morning run needs weather, sleep and a free hour. Reading thirty pages needs a quiet room. Four or five conditions each, and on a bad Tuesday one of them is always missing, so the habit breaks and you get to keep your self-image. It was not really your fault.

The staircase has one condition. I have to be at Omonoia, and I am at Omonoia anyway.

So the choice is made before the day can go wrong. Before the first message, before the first thing slips, I have picked the harder of two options in front of witnesses who could not care less.

What's the lesson here?

Design the habit for your worst day, not your best one. Make it small enough that no bad day can take it.

Reason #2: Everything is being made easier

Look at what has happened to effort. Food arrives in fifteen minutes. The next episode starts before you decide to watch it. Payment is one tap, the escalator is next to the stairs, and something in your pocket answers almost any question before you have finished forming it. None of this is bad. Each one is somebody's good work. But together they teach a lesson nobody meant to teach: that comfort is the normal state of things.

Comfort used to be what you got after the work. Now it is the default setting and the work is optional.

"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far." Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 225

He wrote that as a provocation. Read it as a warning instead. If difficulty is what shaped people, and we have spent a generation deleting difficulty, then something is being shaped now that nobody chose.

I am not standing outside this. Efficiency was always my instinct, never as a way out of the work but as a way through it in the fewest moves. I get paid for that instinct now.

Which is why the question is not whether easy is bad. Easy is the part everybody wants, and most of the time they are right to want it. The question is what we want comfort to be. Something we hold as a value, defend, and feel wronged without. Or the thing that turns up after somebody chose to do something hard on purpose.I know which one it is for me. Nothing about me has ever got better by being made easier.

Every time I go to work, I take the stairs.

What's the lesson here?

Comfort is a reward, not a default. Take the easy way with everything you do not care about. Never with the things you do.

Reason #3: The reward has to arrive daily

You cannot train anything toward a goal by rewarding only the goal. This is true of an AI system and it turned out to be true of me. "Lose fat" is a hopeless signal. It arrives months late, it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and on any given Wednesday you cannot tell whether you did well. Nothing learns from that.

What works is rewarding something you can finish today, picked so that finishing it points at the goal. The action is not the point. The reliability is. The staircase is that. Climb it and the day already has one finished thing in it before 10 a.m., with nobody's approval.

The outcome turned up anyway. Since January I am down around nine points of body fat without losing muscle. That was the gym and the food, not the staircase. What the staircase did was move the gym into the same category of decision. By the time I got there I had already chosen the harder option once that morning, and choosing it again is much easier than choosing it first.

What's the lesson here?

Reward the system, not the result. Outcomes are consequences, and consequences are terrible teachers.

Where the line is

I love anime. Naruto, Bleach, One Piece. Something I noticed late: the fight everyone remembers is three episodes, and almost none of it happens there. Naruto says it for hundreds of episodes. That's my ninja way. He never trades it for a win. Luffy has said one sentence since episode one, I'm gonna be King of the Pirates, then vanishes for a two-year time skip to earn it. Their famous fights are only where all of that becomes visible. That is character, and it gets built in the boring part.

In a story we accept this completely. Then we close the laptop and want our own version by Friday. Nobody in those stories suffers for the sake of it. The grind always points at something they said out loud. Difficulty on its own is not a virtue, and "always take the hard way" is one bad reading away from self-punishment.

So, two tests. It has to be repeatable daily, which rules out anything heroic. And nobody has to be watching, which rules out anything you would only do for an audience.

I post my workouts now and then, so I am not clean on this. But nobody keeps score of the stairs.

Never the escalator. Not at the airport with luggage, not on the mornings I am late for work.

Epilogue

Eight months in, the climb is not hard any more. My legs did part of that. Most of it is that I stopped negotiating at the bottom.

That is what consistency actually buys. Not discipline, not a better body. It takes the decision away.

I never decide to take the stairs any more. That is the whole point.