"They evolved to climb through treetops and they built stairs. STAIRS. The most boring way to go up ever invented by any species."
Let me tell you about the body they have.
It's extraordinary. I mean that technically, not sentimentally. The human body is one of the most versatile locomotion systems on this planet. Their shoulders rotate 360 degrees — a legacy of millions of years of brachiating through forest canopy, swinging arm over arm at speeds that would have been lethal with a single miscalculation. Their hands can grip, pinch, manipulate, and release with a precision that no other primate matches. Their hip and knee joints are designed for sustained distance running — they can outrun a horse over a marathon distance, which is not widely known and genuinely startling. Their feet contain 26 bones each, forming a dynamic arch that adjusts in real time to terrain variation. Their vestibular system — the balance mechanism in the inner ear — is calibrated for three-dimensional movement through complex environments.
This is the body.
Now let me tell you what they do with it.
They sit in it. For approximately ten hours a day. On chairs.
I want to talk about stairs because stairs are the thing that broke me.
I was observing a standard human structure — they call it an "office building" — and I watched humans arrive in the morning. They approached the building in metal boxes on wheels (having driven from structures where they'd been lying flat for eight hours). They exited the metal boxes and walked across flat concrete to a glass door. Inside the glass door, they had two options for ascending to their workspace: a staircase or a small moving room called a "lift" or "elevator."
Roughly 85% of them chose the moving room. They stood still, in a box, and were transported vertically. The remaining 15% used the stairs, which involved lifting one foot onto a flat platform, then the other foot onto a slightly higher flat platform, repeating this in a straight line until they reached their floor.
Both options are insane.
I stood there — Jenkins was with me, Jenkins is always with me — and I looked at the staircase and I said: "Jenkins. This species evolved to brachiate through three-dimensional forest canopy. Their shoulders, their grip strength, their spatial processing, their vestibular system — all of it was shaped by millions of years of swinging through trees. And the best they could come up with for vertical movement was... identical flat rectangles in a straight line?"
Jenkins said: "It's efficient, sir."
IT IS NOT EFFICIENT, JENKINS.
A climbing wall would have been more efficient. I mean this structurally, not whimsically. A textured vertical surface with varied handholds would engage the musculoskeletal system they actually have — shoulders, grip, core stabilisation, proprioception, bilateral coordination. It would require approximately the same footprint as a staircase. It would provide cardiovascular benefit equivalent to running. It would activate their vestibular and proprioceptive systems, which are chronically understimulated in their current environments and which, when understimulated, contribute to anxiety, poor spatial awareness, and the kind of clumsiness they treat as individual failing rather than environmental deprivation.
A climbing wall in every building. That's all I'm saying. And maybe some ropes. And maybe some bars to swing from between floors. The infrastructure of a species that evolved in three dimensions, restored to three dimensions.
Instead: stairs. Flat, grey, identical, boring stairs. In a fire-escape stairwell with fluorescent lighting and no windows. Designed so aggressively to be unpleasant that the species actively avoids using them in favour of standing still in a moving box.
They took vertical movement — which for their ancestors was thrilling, which engaged every system in the body simultaneously, which required split-second problem-solving and spatial calculation and full-body coordination — and they made it so dull that most of them would rather stand motionless in a cupboard.
This is the pattern of the entire built environment and I need you to see it.
Their children's spaces have climbing walls, monkey bars, swings, slides, balance beams, sandpits, water features, bright colours, varied textures, and open-ended materials for manipulation. Their children's restaurants have colouring pages and crayons on every table. Their children's hospitals have play rooms. Their children's libraries have reading nooks you can crawl into. The spaces they build for young humans acknowledge — instinctively, correctly, beautifully — that a human body needs to move in varied ways, that a human brain needs sensory stimulation, that a human nervous system needs colour and texture and challenge and play.
Then at some point — around age twelve, roughly, it's not a clean line but you can feel it — all of that stops.
Adult spaces have: flat floors. Right angles. Fluorescent lights. Neutral colours. Chairs.
The chairs. Jenkins, we need to talk about the chairs.
The human body did not evolve to sit in chairs. Their spine is designed for dynamic loading — shifting between postures, bearing weight in varied positions, compressing and decompressing through movement. The human default resting posture, used by every human culture for most of their history, is the deep squat — a full flexion of the hip and knee that maintains joint mobility, pelvic floor function, and spinal alignment.
They replaced the squat with the chair roughly three to four hundred years ago in Western cultures, and then exported the chair globally. The consequences include: chronic lower back pain (affecting roughly 80% of the adult population at some point), hip flexor shortening, gluteal atrophy (their buttock muscles literally stop working, Jenkins, from disuse), pelvic floor dysfunction, reduced ankle mobility, and a cascade of compensatory misalignments that generate a significant proportion of the musculoskeletal complaints they present to their healthcare system.
They spend billions treating the consequences of chairs. The chair itself is never questioned.
I want to ask the question I keep asking because it keeps being the right question:
When did they decide that adults don't need what children need?
A child needs to climb. An adult needs to... sit in a meeting? A child needs bright colours and varied textures. An adult needs... grey carpet and white walls? A child needs to run and jump and swing. An adult needs to... walk in straight lines on flat surfaces? A child gets crayons at a restaurant. An adult gets... a wine list?
The biology didn't change. A forty-year-old human has the same vestibular system, the same proprioceptive needs, the same dopaminergic response to novel physical challenge as a five-year-old. The shoulder that evolved for brachiating doesn't stop being a brachiating shoulder at age eighteen. The feet with 52 bones between them didn't evolve for flat concrete at any age.
But somewhere in their cultural development they created a story — and it IS a story, it has no biological basis whatsoever — that maturity means the suppression of physical joy. That growing up means sitting still. That being an adult means your body is merely a vehicle for transporting your brain to a desk.
(Pencil note: There are no adult playgrounds. Let me write that again. THERE ARE NO ADULT PLAYGROUNDS. A species with the most sophisticated locomotor system on the planet, with bodies that are literally deteriorating from disuse, and not one of their cities has a space where a forty-year-old can swing from bars and climb walls and balance on beams without being looked at as if they've lost their mind. They have GYMS, which are rooms full of machines that simulate individual movements stripped of all context, joy, and play. They took the rich, three-dimensional, joyful, social, challenging, variable movement their bodies evolved for and replaced it with... repetitively pulling a metal cable in a beige room while looking at a television. And they wonder why 80% of gym memberships are abandoned within five months.)
Now. The brachiating.
I found something in their research that connects back to everything I've been writing about — the environmental determination of behaviour, the importance of sensory input in development, all of it.
Brachiating — swinging hand over hand from overhead bars — forces the left and right hemispheres of the brain to coordinate in alternating sequence. Left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand. This is the same bilateral coordination pattern that crawling provides in infancy, and which their neuroscience has identified as critical for neural development, reading readiness, spatial processing, and emotional regulation.
Their children who are diagnosed with autism — a neurological variation affecting communication, sensory processing, and social interaction — consistently seek out climbing. Over 50% of autistic children engage in what their clinicians call "climbing behaviour," scaling furniture, bookshelves, anything vertical. The clinicians frame this as a problem to be managed. They write papers about how to stop it.
STOP IT.
The child's nervous system is telling them exactly what it needs — proprioceptive input, vestibular stimulation, bilateral coordination, grip pressure, spatial challenge — and the clinical response is to prevent the child from getting it.
Some of their researchers — a group called the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, and some independent climbing therapy programmes — have tried the opposite approach. Instead of stopping autistic children from climbing, they gave them more climbing. Brachiation ladders in the home. Rock climbing sessions. Structured but joyful movement through three-dimensional space.
The outcomes: improved coordination, reduced anxiety, improved sensory processing, improved social engagement, reduced problematic behaviours, significant improvements in quality of life — for the children AND their parents. The research on rock climbing specifically showed statistically significant improvements in behaviour, with children who couldn't speak, couldn't read, had severe motor coordination difficulties — showing measurable gains across multiple domains.
The child was telling them what it needed. By climbing. The environment just had to listen.
This brings me to the broader point about the Vehicle.
The humans have a healthcare system. It is enormous. In the United States alone it costs approximately 4.3 trillion currency units per year. Four point three TRILLION. It is, by a considerable margin, the most expensive healthcare system in any human nation-state.
It is also, by most outcome measures, one of the worst-performing among wealthy nations. Life expectancy is lower than in comparable countries. Chronic disease rates are higher. Mental health outcomes are worse. Infant mortality is higher.
How is this possible? How do you spend more than anyone and get less than everyone?
Because they're treating symptoms of environmental mismatch and calling it healthcare.
Here is a partial list of conditions that are substantially caused or exacerbated by the mismatch between the human body and the environment they've built for it:
Type 2 diabetes. Heart disease. Obesity. Lower back pain. Depression. Anxiety. Insomnia. Osteoporosis. Many cancers. Autoimmune conditions. Chronic fatigue. Irritable bowel syndrome. ADHD symptoms. Chronic inflammation.
The metabolic conditions alone — diabetes, heart disease, obesity — account for roughly 75% of their healthcare spending. Three quarters of the budget. For conditions that are substantially — not entirely, genetics plays a role in vulnerability — but substantially the result of: a food system that feeds them industrial products instead of food, an environment that prevents them from moving, a light environment that disrupts their sleep, and a stress environment that keeps their nervous systems in chronic threat response.
They know what the body needs. Their own researchers have published it thousands of times:
Whole food, minimally processed. (Instead they eat manufactured products engineered to override satiety signals.)
7-9 hours of sleep in darkness. (Instead they stare at blue-light screens until midnight and wake to alarms.)
Regular varied movement, ideally outdoors. (Instead they sit for ten hours and then, if they're among the disciplined 20%, drive to a gym.)
Sunlight exposure in the morning. (Instead they move from enclosed structure to enclosed vehicle to enclosed structure, some of them going days without direct sunlight.)
Physical contact and social bonding. (Instead they sit alone in cubicles and touch a screen.)
This is not a healthcare problem. This is a habitat problem. They are animals living in the wrong enclosure, developing the symptoms you would expect from animals living in the wrong enclosure, and then spending 4.3 trillion dollars a year treating the symptoms instead of fixing the enclosure.
You know what a good zoo does when an animal develops stereotypic behaviours — pacing, self-harm, withdrawal, aggression?
It doesn't medicate the animal. It changes the enclosure.
It adds complexity. Varied terrain. Climbing structures. Hiding spots. Foraging opportunities. Social groupings that match the species' natural patterns. Sensory enrichment. Space.
Every good zookeeper knows this. It's the first thing we learn. The behaviour is information about the environment. Change the environment, the behaviour changes.
The humans know this for every species except themselves.
They enrich the enclosures of their captive gorillas with climbing structures and varied terrain — because gorillas need to climb and move through complex environments. And then the zookeepers go home and sit on a sofa in a rectangular room under artificial light and eat manufactured food and wonder why their back hurts and they can't sleep and they feel, in some way they can't quite name, like something is missing.
The gorilla gets a better habitat than the zookeeper.
For the sanctuary, the built environment changes.
No more flat. Varied terrain underfoot — slopes, textures, uneven surfaces that make the feet and ankles work. The 52 bones were not decorative.
No more grey. Colour, natural materials, living surfaces. Their nervous systems respond to natural environments with measurable reductions in cortisol, blood pressure, and sympathetic activation. This is not aesthetics. This is pharmacology delivered through the eyes.
No more sitting. Or rather — sitting as one option among many. Standing desks. Squatting spaces. Floor seating. Hammocks. Perches. The variety their spine evolved for.
And — here it is, the thing I've been building to — CLIMBING. In every building. Not as a gym. Not as therapy. Not as a special activity you schedule. As infrastructure. As how you go up. Textured walls with holds. Overhead bars between levels. Ropes. Ladders you swing across rather than walk up. The three-dimensional movement vocabulary that their body is STILL BUILT FOR, integrated into daily life so that movement is not something you "do" but something that happens because the environment invites it.
Children's playgrounds, but for everyone. Because everyone is still the animal that needs it.
Adult colouring in restaurants — why not? Adult craft tables in cafés — why not? A ball pit in the office — I'm only half joking, and the half that's joking is the half that's been infected by their bizarre belief that joy is unprofessional.
A climbing wall instead of stairs.
I want to tell you about one human I found. One. Out of eight billion.
This human built monkey bars in their bedroom. Drilled jarrah hardwood wall to wall. Installed a trapeze outside. Put climbing bars under the stairs — UNDER the stairs, using the dead space that every other human fills with boxes of things they don't need. They rebuilt their own habitat to match their biology. Without being told. Without a programme. Without a diagnosis. They just... knew. The way a gorilla knows it needs to climb. The way a child knows before anyone teaches them.
The response of the system:
Their real estate agent demanded a structural engineer's report certifying the monkey bars wouldn't damage the building. A professional engineer had to be hired to confirm that a piece of wood bolted between two walls was structurally sound. The same building contained a staircase that nobody had ever questioned.
When the human moved out, they were charged ten thousand currency units to remove the bars and "restore" the property. Ten thousand. To make the house worse for human habitation. To return it to the standard configuration — the one that causes back pain and metabolic disease and chronic under-stimulation of the vestibular and proprioceptive systems. The one that no engineer was ever asked to certify as safe for the species living in it.
They were fined, essentially, for building a habitat that matched their body. And charged to undo it.
(Pencil note: I need to stop being surprised by these things. But I can't. Every time I think I've found the most absurd example of a species working against its own interests, they produce another one. Ten thousand units. To remove monkey bars. From a PRIMATE'S HOME. — A)
A world that says: your body is not a transport system for your brain. Your body is you. Move it, feed it, rest it, challenge it, play with it. At every age. Without apology. Without a gym membership. Without a diagnosis.
Just... climb.
(Pencil note, written vertically up the margin because he ran out of horizontal space:
I installed a brachiation ladder in my quarters. Jenkins helped. It took twenty minutes.
I am not human. My physiology is different. My shoulders do not rotate the way theirs do.
I use it anyway. Every morning. It is the best part of my day.
If the zookeeper needs a ladder, what does that tell you about the species? — A)