A friend recently told me what they would do with unlimited time and money. They wouldn’t buy a yacht, start a company, or travel the world in first class. They would go to university, sit in on lectures, and listen to professors explain things they never understood before. They want to feel that small shock of realization—"Oh, so that’s how it works"—for the pure joy of knowing. Afterward, they would walk to a noisy cafeteria and eat a hot, simple meal.
This struck me as the perfect definition of wealth. Not the absence of work, but the presence of curiosity. It is a state where the mind is free to wander without the pressure of performance.
I thought about this while hanging from a wooden edge in my garage last night, my fingers screaming, a timer ticking down the seconds. On the surface, hangboard training has nothing to do with auditing philosophy classes. One is an activity of the mind; the other is a brutal, repetitive stress test on the tendons of the hand. But they are actually the same thing.
The Hangboard as a Lecture Hall
For those unfamiliar, a hang board is a simple tool: a slab of wood or resin with edges of varying depths. You hold on to them. That is it. There are no moving parts. There is no gamification. It is just you, gravity, and the clock. To the uninitiated, it looks like the most boring activity imaginable.
Yet, for a climber, the hanging board is where secrets are whispered. When you first start climbing, the sport feels like a mystery. Why do some people float up a wall while you shake and fall? You assume it is strength, but strength is too simple a word.
When you commit to climbing hangboard training, you begin to understand. You learn that the body adapts in ways you cannot see. You hang for seven seconds, rest for three minutes, and repeat. Nothing changes in the moment. You do not get bigger. You do not look different. But weeks later, you touch a hold that used to feel like a razor blade, and it feels like a door handle. You realize, "Oh, so that’s how connective tissue works. That’s how neurological adaptation feels."
It is the same feeling my friend is chasing in that lecture hall. It is the quiet epiphany that comes from dedicated, low-stakes observation.
The Meal After the Session
The other part of my friend’s dream was the cafeteria meal. Not a Michelin-star dinner, but a tray of something warm eaten among students who are stressing about exams and relationships.
In climbing, the equivalent is the "session ending" meal. After two hours of trying a single sequence of moves, after falling twenty times, after your skin is raw and your forearms are pumped, you finally clip the chains or you don't. You pack up your chalk bag. You walk to the nearest diner, or the food truck, or your own kitchen. You eat something simple—a burger, a bowl of rice, a plate of pasta.
That food tastes different. It tastes like context. It is not just fuel; it is the reward for having tried hard at something meaningless. In a world obsessed with productivity, climbing is beautifully useless. You are not building a house. You are not earning money. You are simply moving on rock. The meal that follows is a celebration of that uselessness.
The Freedom to Be a Beginner
What my friend really wants is to be a beginner again. They want to sit in a room where they know nothing and have no stakes in the outcome. No grades, no career advancement, no networking. Just the raw input of information.
Hangboarding offers the same freedom, though it feels physical rather than intellectual. When you start hangboards routine, you are terrible at it. Your fingers hurt. You fail on the smallest edges. There is no shame in this, because there is no audience. It is just you and the edge. You are learning the limits of your own physiology.
In a culture that worships expertise, choosing to be a beginner is a radical act of wealth. It means you value the process over the result. It means you have the time to suck at something.
Conclusion
Rock climbing, at its core, is a vehicle for small revelations. A hold that was impossible last month is now possible. A route that looked blank now has a sequence. The hangboard is the slowest, most boring path to those revelations. It strips the sport down to its raw data: how long can you hold on?
My friend wants to sit in a lecture hall and feel the world expand. I want to hang from a piece of wood and feel my tendons rewrite themselves. We are both looking for the same thing: a moment where we get to say, "Oh, I didn’t know that."
And afterward, we both want a hot meal.