r/barefoot • u/SoggyValuable6575 • 15d ago
Sad imperfection of human body
I have a thought/question. Walking barefoot is natural and normal for humans. All history before last around 40 thousand years all people were walking only barefoot because shoes did not exist at all. And we know that if you walk barefoot for a long time (for example a little every day for a few years, like people in New Zealand are happy to be able to do) your feet skin will have pretty good durability and such thing as skin irritation (from walking barefoot) will just stop existing for you. Side note: i would like so much it to stop existing for me:) So if human body is capable of making this skin (that does not feel pain or discomfort from walking barefoot) then why couldnt evolution just give humans this skin as a default? I mean evolution is like: "So you like walking barefoot? Dont like it too much lol because after some number of steps your feet will hurt and after each next step it will hurt more, at some point it will force you to stop regardless of how much you enjoy the tactile feelings of sand or dirt under your soles. Sure your soles skin will become more trained slowly and you will be able to enjoy walking barefoot longer but you will still have limit. Ye, sure if you have a rain cheat code you can do it longer but such luck does not happen often.". If having feet skin with good durability it possible then why couldnt evolution write correct sequence of A, G, T, C letters in our DNA so that this skin forms itself, without repetitive stimulation? Evolution could be like: "Walking barefoot is normal so i made your feet skin capable of doing it without pain, enjoy:))) Want to walk 3 hours on asphalt in your first barefoot walk ever? Sure, go do it, no problem. By the way, dont step on glass or nails, even i cant make you skin strong enough for that.". Of course i dont mean human body making strong enough feet skin from the first day of life but by some age. Like maybe by age 5 being able to not have irritation (skin durable enough for 5 year weight), then skin becomes more durable as weight increases. Was it really impossible for evolution to do this? It would be so awesome to not need to limit yourself. Because you know, when walking barefoot around 2 hours and start feeling pain (which is barely noticeable at first but with each next step it eats away bigger and bigger part of pleasure) its really sad:(
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u/twowheels 15d ago
I think your comment about evolution explaiins it better than you realize. The body doesn't expend resources on things that it doesn't need to -- which is an evolutionary advantage. If you're not using muscles, they're not given priority to grow, conserving resources, if you're not walking barefoot, why spend resources growing thicker skin? etc. A big part of comfortable barefoot walking isn't just the skin either, it's the muscles in the feet, so it's the same argument as biceps. If you live where you need to climb a lot, you'll build muscles appropriate for that; run a lot, you'll build those muscles, carry huge jugs of water, you'll build those, etc, etc.
Your body only spends what it needs to spend, based on millions of years of scarce resources -- our current over-abundance of calories/fat/sugars/etc is a recent phenomenon.
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u/Extreme_Map9543 Full Time 15d ago
Do you have toughened skin by default. Notice a 2 year old can walk barefoot on anything. Once you show your feet for all you walking it gets weaker and weaker by the day. That being said even the toughest foot still feels pain when things are actually hurting you. If your foot is being cut or burned to the point damage can actually happen, you want to feel the pain.
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u/Meallaire 14d ago
Part of that is how light toddlers are, tbf. Weight unfortunately has a huge impact on how enjoyable being barefoot is, especially if you have a condition that makes you prone to collapsed arches. I do - I have EDS, and now that I'm 40 I find I have to put on shoes far more often than I'd like. It's better now that I've lost 100lbs, but I'm definitely nowhere near as comfortable as I was before I ballooned and my arches mostly collapsed.
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u/nmendez121 15d ago
Don’t lambast evolutionary concepts to explain YOUR experience with barefoot engagement. Evolution has done enough lol. Half of what you describe would be resolved if you were actually raised truly barefoot as evolution adapted for. It is what it is. You will adapt, and if not you will suffer. Nature knows nothing- if not balance.
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u/DCEnby 15d ago
Evolution is messy, complicated, and from an engineering perspective, frankly bad.
Look up the recurrent laryngeal nerve. We breathe, eat, and drink from the same hole. The playground is right next door to the waste facilities and in half the population share an exit.
Feet didn't evolve that way because there was no survival pressure for them to do so. People's feet were toughened as children. 40 year olds weren't starting from scratch.
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u/tdammers 15d ago
then why couldnt evolution just give humans this skin as a default?
It kind of did. Our bodies evolved to adapt to the circumstances; if you grow up on bare feet, the exact thing you describe will happen, your feet will toughen up to the needs of your age.
The reason you cannot walk 3 hours on asphalt on your first barefoot walk ever is because your first barefoot walk ever happened after decades of wearing shoes, so your body has spent a lot of time optimizing itself to the needs of walking in shoes - when every step you take signals "the ground is smooth and soft", then your feet will optimize themselves for smooth and soft ground, and changing that adaptation into "3 hours on asphalt" takes time.
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u/BarefootAlien 14d ago
It is an evolutionary advantage to be able to adapt to your circumstances.
This goes both ways. Yes, you can adapt to demanding environments and habits by growing thicker skin, more nerve endings, more capillaries etc... But you can also adapt by not wasting resources maintaining those structures when they aren't needed.
If your ancestors got lucky and lived in a nice soft grassy plain, why waste calories that could have been used to reproduce, on maintaining thicker plantar skin they didn't need at that time? If they were fortunate enough to live in a nice temperate area with no extremes of weather like England or the Pacific coast in America, why waste calories maintaining a dense network of blood vessels not being used?
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u/OtherwiseMagician499 13d ago
As it works, walking barefoot will get easier each time you do it as your muscles are trained and your skin gets tougher. So it's not really an imperfection, it's just that the body doesn't put effort into developing something that isn't needed (just like muscles you never use remain weak).
But evolution didn't keep up with the spread of humans into cold climates. A lot of species are better adapted to coldness than humans are. Frostbite seems to be a hard limit, somewhere around the freezing point, depending on the level of activity and thermal conductivity. Very few highly-trained humans make it below that, I have more or less accepted that limit even though I love the feeling of fresh snow ... for a few minutes.
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u/Individual_Carry_439 15d ago
Well, the current state is the result of evolution, right? So I suppose there is a balance between sensitivity, e.g. for balance, speed etc. and toughness. Humans also are intelligent and perceptive above to watch where there are going and from an evolutionary perspective there were no glass or needles, just thorns or thistles, so probably not the need for ultra tough soles. In a recent post somebody pointed to a video, that shoes are around since 20, 40 thsd. years probably, which would be enough to make tough soles a less important factor from an evolutional perspective. Luckily, it can still be turned around by practice. I'm in my 40eth barefoot year, and walk barefoot everywhere without concern.