a barefoot substitute?

Do not ask me why, but i can't go barefoot, so i was thinking of taking the insoles out of my shoes, putting a little dirt in place, and then instead of wearing socks, i cut of the top so it looks normal.

will it have a similar barefoot feeling?

 

No, because your feet won't get no oxygen. That is about the same thing as wearing shoes, because your feet don't get no outside air. Whatever reason that you can't go outside barefoot, you should try and do it anyways..

 

Oui, c'est ça!

It's all about allowing the airflow around your feet so that for one thing, the are allowed to breathe and sweat naturally so they wont' get hot and smelly!

Also your feet will still be confined in all sorts of other ways.

And I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you why. it just doesn't make any sense if i don't.

 

You live in ORLANDO! You should be able to barefoot. And the point of barefooting, at least for me, is to allow your feet to breathe! Couping them up in sweaty, bulky, hot, uncomfortable shoes is exactly what barefooting is against! Not to mention, I don't think even barefooters like the feeling of gravel in their shoes, if they happen to be wearing any!

 

One of the most important parts of going barefoot is not just *one* interesting surface, but the constant change... everything feels different. There are some 'interesting' soles -when I just started to go barefoot I tried some of those 'massage slippers' and thought they were kinda cool- but they get boring pretty quick if you are used to the feel of all the different surfaces underneath... smooth and rough, warm and cold...

 

Here are some weird experiments I tried in the past:

1. In high school I actually cut the soles out of a pair of sneakers. So that they would stay on my feet, I stretched a couple of wires across the bottom and would pull them tight around my feet. I walked around in them and it looked pretty convincing that nothing was peculiar, unless someone looked very close. A friend of mine eventually found them in my closet and busted up laughing, rolling on the floor even.

2. At one job I had, I took my birkenstocks and drilled partial 1/2" diameter holes in the uppers. I made lots of holes, spaced close together. Then I glued in sharp gravel pieces I found along the railroad tracks in each hole. I walked around in these at the office. I remember being very careful not to let people see the sandal uppers beneath my feet. This caused me to walk funny sometimes, since the sandals had no heel straps (I cut them off). During this time, I was already going barefoot everywhere else when I wasn't at work- I just wanted to feel some texture even while working. They gave me some pretty thick callouses.

 

Can you wear flip-flops? That's better than torturing the bottoms of your feet. O.O

 

Torturing? Who said anything about torturing? If we didn't enjoy going barefoot we wouldn't do it. It's not as uncomfortable as you might think, and it becomes far less so the more you do as not only do your feet acclimatise to being exposed, but your mind does as well. You can feel everything but your brain soon realises that it's not doing your feet any harm so stops treating the information as pain. The reason it seems intense at first is the same effect as staying in a dark room for a long time and then suddenly turning the lights on, it's a big difference but one you can get used to reasonably quickly and ultimately find very comfortable indeed.

It sounds to me as though you really don't want to go barefoot. So if you don't want to, don't do it, it's as simple as that.

 

If I may assume, there may be some sort of physical thing... Since injuring my ankle, I'm actually a LOT more comfortable wearing shoes... I still go barefoot occasionally, but most of the time I need to wear shoes, so I have the support for my ankle... The tendons and crap are all screwy, so walking without shoes too much gets to be uncomfortable and sometimes painful...

Of course, I can't answer the question for this person, but rather offer a likely reasoning

 

It might not be. It might be a social thing, peer pressure. Or perhaps a bossy mother like mine who thinks it's unnatural.

 

Unnatural? If it would have been natural to wear shoes you would have been born with them, right?

 

What else do you think you know about my mum, Siegmund?