After his bags and head were packed, and his trajectory was doorward projected,
a boy’s father proffered these parting words:
“In the city will be those who will tell you that being myopic
is no reason for not appreciating the audio arts, but remember this:
those who will tell you that will be musicians.
My boy: that is how things are balanced and arranged in that part of man’s mind.

Now off you go  --   and don’t bother coming back until you
comprehensively understand the pleasures of being city-ized,
and have become overwhelming desirous of something else;
I will always be here for you, just as the Garden remained after Adam departed,
and as once born DNA can’t be unraveled, and as the setting of the sun
is not an event separate from its apparent subsequent rising.”

To the body: any unnecessary effort is totally unnecessary,
while to the mind: all effort is unnecessary:
thus it be that lions are lions, men, men, and in a sense,
all real mental effort  --  mystical.

The only mental effort ordinary men exert is in science:
matters ultimately having to do with their survival
via understanding the environment so that they can better use it to their ends;
it does require mental effort to develop more fruitful food strains;
to design more informative medical diagnostic machinery;
to construct safer buildings, airplanes and bridges, more efficient computers;
but other than this clearly distinct area of human activity,
men do not make mental effort.
In all the other matters that fill his life (here commonly called his cultural-world ,
[as opposed to the technological one of science]
or his second-reality [as contrasted to his first one of the  physical environment])
no effort is required in any manner resembling that necessary to just stay alive.
Every day, in some way, each man must exert the physical effort needed to
raise himself from his bed, and to pursue whatever activity it be in his case,
to acquire the food necessary to keep his body running,
but no effort at all is required to keep his mind running;
it does not need to be fed; for all routine intents: it has no upkeep;
it is just there: it lives, it breathes, it thinks, it speaks  --  all with no effort involved,
(of passing note is the fact that men will work up a quick sweat denying this).

Setting aside that quite specific area of man’s life known as science-&-technology,
what remains, though much larger than this in the personal lives of most people,
are activities that demand no mental effort on the part of the participants:
this includes: religion, psychology, sociology, history, politics, economics, art, drama, music, literature, sports  --  every subject that men list under the heading of:
Culture, or  The Social Sciences;
their ordinary mind refutes this, and they even make themselves go to school
for many years, and award one another diplomas to have something they can point to as material refutation thereof (“How can being a Psychologist or Theologian: ‘require-no-mental-effort’ when it took me ten grueling years in college
to qualify for the title!”)
Ordinary minds cannot see that no mental effort in such matters is required,
if they could, they would not be ordinary, and  have the interest they therein do.
Routine minds can enjoy completing a crossword puzzle, which does involve
the mental effort required to retrieve stored info from mind’s memory;
even (after momentary frustration and effort) receive pleasure from finally recalling
the name of one's first grade teacher,
but such entertaining activity involves no effort in the sense of creativity;
being able (after some head scratching, and brow squinching)
to eventually remember the year man first landed on the moon,
is not the same effort that was involved in designing the machinery that took him there.

Real mental effort is always creative, and useful, and nothing creative or useful
comes from man’s intangible, cultural world of his second reality:
much is there that he finds entertaining, and the more civilized you are,
and thus time free you have, the more the mind must be entertained,
but the mind’s enjoyment of the many named facets of this unique incorporeal realm
is totally passive;
no creative effort is required of the audience member;
men do not go to church, the movies, political rallies, sporting events, the theatre,
the library to exert mental effort; the entertainment has already done that for them.