Humans are bi-pedal animals who walk extensively over long distances. However our feet are soft and not well suited to the task. However dogs, monkeys, and other animals have paws that serve as shoes to protect the feet.
No other mammal has such unprotected - but we are known for walking the farthest distances / nomadic behavior. Is this a joke?
I mean honestly this is the answer. I used to long board barefoot as a teenager and I also ran track. Often ran barefoot. By the time I was 16 I could walk on some glass without bleeding.
Yeah shoes were optional for a solid chunk of change of my lifetime and I used to have some real rough feet and damn do I miss them =P! How do you do nowadays? I am still pretty minimalist. I like the heel of my shoes to be as thin as I can take them. But hiking, when I use those minimalist shoes I keep torturing myself my poking a fat rock right into a nerve that sends pain rushing up my being =P! I don't think I'll ever have it like I used to.
Yup! I didn’t wear shoes much when I lived at the beach and I got to the point where I could walk on hot asphalt or through broken glass without even noticing.
As others have said, you wear shoes, keeping your feet soft. There was a time in my life I walked everywhere, and did it barefoot. My feet became pretty well calloused and protected, to the point I could walk on gravel no problem. Even hot pavement wasn't too bad.
It's just you. You're weak, and soft, because you've been trained by society to wear shoes.
There are many people who never wear shoes, and they have tough soles. From indigenous tribes, to modern Olympic athletes.
That said, even your dog can step in sharps and hurt their feet; cuts, thorns, stabs - shoes provide protection that paws and tough soles do not; this is the main reason we wear footwear.
If you're interested in a more back-to-nature approach without giving up extra protection, there are dozens of companies that sell minimalist footwear - in essence, modern moccasins. Vibram is one such, but there are many more. Fitkicks is a cheap version (~$20). Look for "active" and "water shoes."
Gotta use Duck Duck Go + Tor + VPN on a burner phone you can yeet into the middle of international waters when you're done. Make sure to sink the boat while you're there, too. That way, under international law, nobody owns it.
personal anecdote; I spent a year barefoot as a teen after dropping out of high school. The only time I had anything on my feet was orthodontist visits they said i couldn't go on without flip flops but nowhere else cared.
After about a year of this the callous on the bottom of my feet was so thick i could walk a few hundred meters on summer asphalt without a break and once got a small square of windshield glass embedded in my foot and it just plucked right out and left a square hole, zero pain at all. The pads were about 3/4 cm thick at the ball of my foot and 1/2cm at the heel.
I did this after reading about this effect in a book and wanting to see if it was true and it really was!
edit: also if you try this i should mention that your feet pads turn black and are impossible to clean really just get to a less dark black. most other people find this offputting.
cw: gross, blood
Tap for spoiler
don't read this part if you're squeamish
I would often have to pick tiny rocks and slivers of metal out of my feet when I did this because I walked to my friends house all summer and there was no sidewalk so it was on the streets.
So i had my dad's tools like these little snippers and needle nose pliers to grab the stuff and pull it out. So one day i'm like picking at my toe where the callous is really deep and I see something black embedded in it so I start digging for it. And damn this one is deeper than most I'm snipping into the toe deeper and deeper with the metal snippers and i can't quite reach it and it's starting to get to sensitive tissue.
And that's when I snip some little blood vessel in my toe that i had mistaken for embedded road debris. Ooze not squirt so i suppose it was just a big old capillary but oof it hurt and was a mess and that was the end of my messing around with my feet I started wearing shoes and socks again after that!
You have to walk... barefoot. My feet are messed up and I have some impressive callouses on the balls of my feet. They are a little better after surgery, but recovery sucked. Ultimately, your feet build up protection. Caking on mud probably helped. Animal skins, rudimentary sandals from various plants, and other natural resources could provide extra protection. Unfortunately, we have built an environment made for shoes and evolution is doing the rest. Walking on pavement is not great without shoes. Especially when it bakes. Walking on soil and grass feels a lot better.
I'd argue it's not always comfortable for them. Consider how hot black pavement can get on a summer day. I never make my dog walk across a parking lot when it's been baking under a 100 degree sun. I carry him to a shaded area, at least.
Because we are primates, and none of our forest-dwelling ancestors had paws.
Humans developed footwear before we started walking long distances. We didn't evolve for it, we built tools that let us do things we couldn't do before.