Welcome to Therapy Evolved, where we outline how modern life affects a person’s physical and mental health, and then go into techniques that can help a person move toward enhanced growth and happiness instead.
1. A Disconnected Lifestyle
Life within industrialized countries during the 21st century is in many ways easier than ever before in recorded history. Aspects of life such as medical care, education, food, clothing, shelter, cultural growth, and travel are orders of magnitude improved from when our ancestors first became homo sapiens sapiens.
But under the surface of how great everything is in comparison to prehistoric times, there have come to be these unforeseen consequences to humans individually and culturally. Each of these will be covered in greater detail, but let us give initial mention to inactivity, stress, poor nutrition, overcrowding, pollution, mind-numbing distractions from tv to sex to drugs to sugar, technological dependency, and the overspecialization of human skill sets.
But the consequence I as a writer would dare to call the most destructive to human health, is that of the unprecedented amount of control required over human urges. Modernity requires unnatural levels of long-term planning, delayed gratification, and protracted discipline that we as a human species were not designed to handle without agitating a runaway stress response.
One could be well-justified in arguing that society’s pressure to force ever greater acts of impulse control is the biggest loss to a person living in the modern world. With the economic system, with records of performance ranging from childhood to death, and with 7 billion people competing for resources in a world civilization enslaved by debt where vast income and power inequalities are nigh-insurmountable barriers to a sense of security, and where humanity exists in the most bloated environment of rules and regulations ever seen in history, what chance does a typical member of society have for living optimally and happily under the boot of such external pressures?
So the result is a society of people which on a whole possess great knowledge, convenience, and safety, but are burdened with a decimated sense of physical and emotional health. Be it poor fitness, boredom, anxiety, depression, chronic illness, stress, distraction, or exhaustion, the unspoken disconnect between the hunter-gatherer life humans were designed for, and the industrial civilization of modernity has a staggering impact on the vast majority. And one lynch-pin that seems to be holding it all together, is that we are not taught that things could be any other way. This series is not designed as a social justice piece, but the backdrop of modernity requires just a little bit of depressing illumination before the good news of adaptation can be discussed in actionable detail.
Obeying immediate urges is a very common way for modern humans to cause serious problems for themselves. Whether this is expressed as overspending, infidelity, aggression, lethargy, substance abuse, complacency, or carelessness, it can trigger countless sources of mental and lifestyle conflict. Very often the most well-adjusted people seem to be those who are successful at suppressing their natural impulses across the board in daily life.
Why on earth do we have these drives to cause ourselves all this trouble to begin with? Wouldn’t it have been much easier if our genetic code guided our formation into a bunch of hard-bodied natural accountants with iron discipline and the charisma of a Kennedy? After all, we’ve been hearing about natural selection and Darwin awards ever since our middle school days. The best of human selection over the generations could surely do better than a knuckle-dragging suburbanite whose vast intellectual capacities are laid low by the latest season of the ‘Real Housewives of..?’
It turns out that traits which bring you into a world of financial, legal, and social hurt and disrepute were often just what the Darwin ordered. Our current reactions may have played a role in our ancestors’ abilities to survive in a hunter-gatherer environment that made up for about 90% of the time that your ancestors have been homo sapiens sapiens. Do you suffer from overspending and poor long-term planning? These features were irrelevant when there was no reliable way to preserve the majority of the food you obtained through hunting and gathering. As long as the food could be plucked or dug up or stabbed from week to week, and the herds could be followed consistently, that was good enough. Maybe your genome has blessed you with being easily distracted or careless. That would be excellent news in a world where being able to very briefly examine every small detail could alert you to the presence of resources or danger. There was no 5 hour block of concentrating on homework. Make the campfire, bring back the water, check your snares, scan your surroundings for danger or opportunity. Maybe you’re a descendant of a long line of people with the tendency to be lazy. Great! The average primitive workday only consisted of a few hours of hard labor, with the rest spent on rest, leisure, travel, or idle work. These modern lifestyles of 12 hours in a high-rise with 2 hours wasted away on the interstate getting home are completely alien to everything the human body was built for.
The sociologists C. Wright Mills and Max Weber both saw the writing on the wall, calling the scenario we live in today an ‘over-regulated society’ gently, or ‘the iron cage of modern life’ more bluntly. In short, the qualities we strive to cultivate today were often either irrelevant or even detrimental throughout most of human genetic development. Today, we live in a trap of society where doing the effective thing doesn’t feel good and motivate us the way our bodies crave. And doing the things we crave often leads to problems rather than solutions.
Each post to follow will tackle one problem of modernity in somewhat laborious detail followed by a series of actionable solutions available to most of us. So stay on the hook for the next post as we cover how we have come to require such exhaustive levels of delayed gratification to get by in society, and how we can adapt to to the runaway stress response caused by having to adapt to modernity.
To end this on a positive note, there are reliable ways to fulfill the emotional and physical health deficits that the standard modern life yields without having to disappear into the wilderness.
These posts are meant to offer practical information that can be leveraged to enhance lifestyle details. If you as a reader (or someone you know) are experiencing considerable emotional difficulties, or wish for a more intensive program of introspection and disciplined action, book an appointment with Paragon Wellness @paragoncounselor@gmail.com or call 985.276.9816.
Reference:
Buss, D. M. (2016). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind. London: Routledge.