Thanksgiving Day Challenge: "Earn Your Feast"

Join us: Do something hard this Thanksgiving day.

People have always had big communal feasts like Thanksgiving. But for most of history, these feasts often came after hard work.

We’d have a giant feast after collectively busting our butts to harvest and store grain for the winter. Or after an arduous and dangerous hunt timed to an animal migration. Or after winning a battle.

The arc was clear: Work hard —> feel grateful —> feast together.

In the past, the gratitude and the feast were often inseparable from effort and hardship.

Humans still have big events of collective food consumption, which are typically still timed to harvest seasons or game migrations. Germany has Erntedankfest. India has Pongal. Japan has Niiname-sai. The American version, Thanksgiving, evolved from a 1621 harvest feast between Pilgrims and Wampanoag tribe members.

But we’ve broken the ancient cycle. The feast now comes without the effort and hardship that made it so special and instilled legitimate gratefulness.

And so, for the last decade, I’ve been trying to get back into that ancient rhythm.

Here’s our roadmap for today:

• How we broke the historical link between effort, food, and gratitude, and why it matters.

• My method of reigniting the ancient arc of hardship leading to feasting and feelings of gratitude.

• The metabolic and psychological reasons why “earning it” makes the turkey taste better (and your relatives less annoying).

• A simple call to action to help you reclaim the true spirit of the holiday this Thursday—and an invitation for you to share your challenge with us in the Two Percent chat.

Kids harvesting potatoes in Maine in 1940. Schools didn’t open until the potatoes were harvested.

Quick housekeeping

• In case you missed it:

  • On Wednesday, we covered the Harvard formula that spots steroid users and what it can tell us about how much muscle you can build naturally.

  • On Friday, November’s Expedition post covered 15 new ideas that can improve your life, including the ultimate quick warmup.

• Shoutout to Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency. Go to my page here to sign up and receive a $100 discount.

Audio version

My Thanksgiving tradition

Every Thanksgiving morning, I’ve woken before sunrise, laced up my trail shoes, and headed into the Mojave Desert.

I head to the beginning of a trail called Bandana. That’s where I start running.

The sun is peaking over the horizon by the time I get to the Cleod 9 trail—which takes me to the Secret Menu trail, which then leads to Wicked Garden.

The landscape gets rougher with every mile. By the time I’m at Wicked Garden—with its razor-sharp limestone outcrops, talus slopes, and punishing switchbacks—I’m in country that only the desert bighorns go. It all ends in an incredible view of the Las Vegas Strip, and then a long run back home.

I’ve done my Thanksgiving run in windstorms, rainstorms, and below-freezing temperatures. It’s one of my favorite mornings of the year.

Why I do this

There are, of course, practical reasons for this run:

• It’s damage control: I know I’m going to overeat on Thanksgiving. We all do. This run burns a lot of calories—probably 1,500 to 2,000 due to the elevation and harshness of the terrain. New research shows that exercise can offset gluttony.

But the real reasons are psychological.

• It makes me grateful for the modern food system: Criticize industrial agriculture all you want. But it’s truly miraculous. I, for one, don’t want to go back to toiling away in fields all day, one bad harvest or dry season away from famine. During the run, I think about how amazing it is that we have a food system that requires minimal effort and money for thousands of calories. (Food might seem expensive today, but it isn’t compared to most of history. Consider that in China and the UK around 1900, people spent 40 to 80 percent of their income on food¹. In the US today, that figure is about 11 percent.²)

• It makes me grateful for my health. Thanksgiving is a day of gratitude, and I extend that beyond food. We often don’t appreciate our health until something goes wrong—and then health typically becomes the primary thing we care about³. The hard run reminds me to be thankful now—to remember that my aging legs and lungs can still get out, do hard shit, and take me into beautiful places other humans don’t go. That won’t always be true.

• It makes me appreciate the Thanksgiving meal more. Research shows the harder we work for something, the more we value it⁴. My hard morning run leads me to enjoy every calorie of Thanksgiving dinner—and every lazy minute of football watching—that much more.

• It chills me out. This run gives me a massive dose of nature and exercise, both of which have been proven to make people happier and less stressed. Exercise has been shown to be just as effective as medications and therapy for poor mood⁵. Translation: the run makes me tolerant of my relatives.

• It’s my annual reflection: As I run, I think about the past year: What went well? Where could I have done better? Sure, I could sit at home and think these thoughts. But the silence, emptiness, and challenge of the desert terrain bend those thoughts into deeper and more interesting territory.

• It’s a weird annual tradition: I wrote about the power of traditions here. In short: they’re important for our culture and wellbeing. They provide stability while helping us forge our identity.

Now, a challenge for you

Get out and do something hard on Thanksgiving morning.

Get back into that ancient cycle where a feast requires hard work beforehand.

Do it outside, no matter the conditions. Go harder and farther than you want. Be grateful along the way.

It can be anything you want. Walk with a heavy pack. Do a turkey trot run. Bike a long and winding road. Chop wood to burn later. Burn the ships.

Then sit down at the Thanksgiving table knowing that you’ve honored that old rhythm: Hard work —> gratitude —> feast.

I’ve just started a chat about this topic. Enter the chat here. Tell us what you plan to do in the chat, then follow up with photos on Thursday.

Have fun, don’t die, earn your feast.

Michael

1. Laudan, R. (2013). Cuisine and empire: Cooking in world history. University of California Press.

2. Zeballos, E., & Sinclair, W. (2025, September 29). Share of disposable personal income spent on food continues to decline in 2024. Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Link.

3. Bünnings, C., Simankova, I. & Tauchmann, H. Health shocks and health behavior: a long-term perspective. Eur J Health Econ 26, 1293–1332 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-024-01747-2

4. Inzlicht M, Shenhav A, Olivola CY. The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued. Trends Cogn Sci. 2018 Apr;22(4):337-349. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.007. Epub 2018 Feb 21. PMID: 29477776; PMCID: PMC6172040.

5. Here’s a study on this topic that was well needed. It corrected the narrative that exercise was 1.5x better than SSRI’s and therapy, but still showed exercise to be as effective: Fabiano, N., Puder, D., & Stubbs, B. (2025). The Evidence Is Clear, Exercise Is Not Better Than Antidepressants or Therapy: It Is Crucial to Communicate Science Honestly. Journal of Physical Activity and Health, 22(2), 161-162.