…According to Adam Sternbergh’s recent New Yorker article, You Walk Wrong, your feet are unhappy because you treat them as insensate supports for more important parts of your body, when, in fact, they should be getting as much attention as your hands. Here’s the most striking quote:

Admittedly, there’s something counterintuitive about the idea that less padding on your foot equals less shock on your body. But that’s only if we continue to think of our feet as lifeless blocks of flesh that hold us upright. The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on.

Think about that. Our feet were not originally developed just to be props for the rest of our bodies. When our hands and feet were less differentiated, both of them served to explore our environments with delicacy and sensitivity, as well as to move us around. In relegating feet to the status of lumps used for locomotion, we have deprived ourselves of a huge percentage of our sensorium.