Imagine explaining to a Paleolithic ancestor that you drive a machine to sit in another cave, stare at a glowing rectangle, and then—get this—you drive back to a different cave full of metal weights and artificial lighting in order to “exercise.”

They might laugh. Or simply blink in quiet confusion. Why not just move and make and carry and dance and walk and lift and live...where you already are?

This is the heart of the cyber paleo perspective shift—a way of seeing our blurred world of bits and atoms through the open eyes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It is not a call to regress but a call to remember. To re-integrate. To reclaim the ancient, embodied wisdom that time is not something to manage but to live.

Our family’s recent seminomadic jaunt—working remotely, living more lightly—brought this to the fore. The old borders between “home,” “work,” “school,” “play,” and “exercise” start to soften when the walls are flexible and the routines are lived, not scheduled.

The Forge Protocol grows from this intuition: that movement is not extracurricular, it is essential. In the age of climate disruption, fitness is not aesthetic—it is adaptive. Strength becomes service. Endurance becomes resilience. The forge is not a gym in the modern sense. It is a space, real or symbolic, where one hones the body to meet the world.

Remote work, when embraced with intention, makes this far more possible. You can start your day with a sun salutation in the actual sun. You can break up a tense meeting with a deep asana, letting the breath speak where words fail. You can run a game of tag with your kid and call it agility training—because it is. Play becomes practice. Parenting becomes partnership. You stretch, literally and metaphorically.

The internet, for all its distractions, also offers a positive garden of earthly delights—an abundance of free or low-cost workout plans, from martial arts flows to calisthenics to breathwork. Many require no equipment, only the willingness to begin. And again. And again.

This shift is not just from gym to home. It is from industrial segmentation—work here, move there, parent later—toward a blended rhythm, where movement is not siloed but woven into the web of one’s day. Strength lives in the small rituals: the stretch before a call, the push-up after a paragraph, the dance while making lunch.

What our ancestors called life, we are just beginning to remember.

Further Reading & Inspiration

• New Old Home project on intergenerational, climate-resilient living: yakcollective.org/projects/new-old-home

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons – for a mythopoetic vision of how homes might evolve in time, space, and soul

• Explore your own Forge Protocol: calisthenics, sunlight, movement—where you are, as you are. The Strength side YouTube is great to start.

• The Cyberpaleo ethic and spirit of postcapitalism.