One thing that might be learned from bicycles is that their wonderfulness is partially contingent how you come to use them, and how much you seek out improvements in your relationship with them.
Most people ride with the saddle too low and their tire pressure too low (though recreational cyclists on road bikes will often have too much air in their tires). People tend to ride too close to the side of the road, and ride in too high of a gear (that is, they pedal too slowly). These are not universal. Many people get some or all of these things right or have good reasons for not doing them.
I’m not entirely sure why people get these things wrong so often, but it is at least partially because the wrong way feels intuitively correct, at least to begin with. And things like saddle height and gear ratio seem to have a lot to do with how the bike was configured when the person first started riding it. But all of these are things that can easily be learned from talking to experienced people, which most people never do.
So I think the lesson is: Seek out the correct ways of doing things, even in cases where you can just look at a thing and see basically how it works, so that it seems hard to get it wrong, and where it seems pretty wonderful even without help.
One thing that might be learned from bicycles is that their wonderfulness is partially contingent how you come to use them, and how much you seek out improvements in your relationship with them.
Most people ride with the saddle too low and their tire pressure too low (though recreational cyclists on road bikes will often have too much air in their tires). People tend to ride too close to the side of the road, and ride in too high of a gear (that is, they pedal too slowly). These are not universal. Many people get some or all of these things right or have good reasons for not doing them.
I’m not entirely sure why people get these things wrong so often, but it is at least partially because the wrong way feels intuitively correct, at least to begin with. And things like saddle height and gear ratio seem to have a lot to do with how the bike was configured when the person first started riding it. But all of these are things that can easily be learned from talking to experienced people, which most people never do.
So I think the lesson is: Seek out the correct ways of doing things, even in cases where you can just look at a thing and see basically how it works, so that it seems hard to get it wrong, and where it seems pretty wonderful even without help.