The treadmill was originally invented as a torture device for prisoners. Prisoners were chained in place on a cycling belt that simply continued to move. The prisoners were forced to run or walk in place for hours at a time as a form of torture. It’s a pretty ingenious torture device, if you think about it. You work all day, exhausting yourself, but never accomplish anything for your efforts. After sweating and straining all day, you are still standing in the same place you were when you started. I recently read a book by a philosophy professor named Svend Brinkmann about the self-help industr...
