Is the Good Life Killing Us?
“The real problem with humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” — Edward O. Wilson
Modern life and its effects on us is a big subject for me. In fact, I devoted a whole chapter to this topic in my book, A Life Yet to Live. My editor and publisher wouldn’t let me title that chapter “Is the Good Life Killing Us?” as I had wanted, so we opted instead for a watered-down title: “Modern Life: Friend or Foe?” For this post I am reverting to that original title! Hopefully you will see why in the following paragraphs.
Evolutionary Mismatches and The Story of the Human Body
In that chapter in my book, I focused partly on how modern life is out of synch with our prehistoric bodies. This is a subject that Daniel Lieberman takes up in his well-known book, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. In it he shows how our overabundant modern diets and lack of movement have negatively affected our health. He calls into question everything from eyeglasses to footwear as “improvements” that can actually do us more harm than good.
I have spent my entire life in the age of “labor-saving” advancements. The great promise of dishwashers, washing machines, automobiles, and other technological advancements in the past hundred years or so assured us that we would have oodles of free time to do whatever we wanted to do. That was supposed to be the road to “the good life.” Yet today there is more junk out there to fill that “free” time (which ironically always seems to cost something) than ever before. Our lives are endlessly busy and hardly the paradise that all these “panacean” advancements promised. It was all a big lie, a hook we all swallowed and still believe in to a great extent.
Enter Paleolithic Emotions
In order to have the courage to take control of my life and my health, I had to “wake up” to the world around me as well as the world inside me to realize what they both were doing to me as I blindly followed society’s prompts. I had to become aware of what it was inside me that caused me to “buy in” to the demands of the voracious and unbridled free-enterprise culture I lived in and had become a part of. Over the decades, I became more and more exhausted—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The pursuit of the so-called good life had killed a part of me and had caused me to live much of my life chasing smoke and mirrors, thinking money and success were rewards and true motivators, when in reality they were not. Replacing that motivation with love for my daughters and what I could do to be a better, healthier father for them started to remove the filter I had over my eyes.
The Paleolithic emotions that we all have, that Edward Wilson alludes to in the quote above, are usually associated with aggression, greed, sloth, jealousy, gluttony, and other “sinful” traits that most religions caution against. Yet the “greed is good” ethos of free enterprise, that “bigger is always better”, thrives on these “primitive” emotions. I know this ethos was a big part of my life when I was feverishly working for success, status, and “progress.” We justify the “greed is good” belief by saying that competition “advances” society and results in innovation when the results are questionable at best. And we admire the “successful” people who end up at the top of that heap.
In my case, I pursued the so-called good life because I didn’t feel good enough about myself as I was. I was chasing what I didn’t have, trying to meet others’ expectations of me, and trying to become a version of myself that was better than the “self-judged” me that I didn’t like very much. It was a version of myself from childhood that still lived underground inside me that needed to be uncovered and realized. In doing so, I began to see what I had been missing out on and the person I really am, the wonder of me, and the simple yet wondrous joy of life that I experience now.
Out of Time
Perhaps the biggest disconnect between modern life and our inner world of physical and mental health is the that these worlds operate on different rhythms and timing. The demands of instant gratification and “faster is better” that fuels much of the promise of the good life is completely out of synch with the slower, almost timeless, world that governs our bodies and subconscious minds, as well as life itself. A tree takes many years to quietly grow. Our bodies grow and heal at a very different pace and in different ways than many of the current theories out there. Witness even the simple challenge of finding enough time to exercise, or shoe-horning sleep and eating times into modern schedules. Rarely do we make enough time to pursue health in the face of the time pressures of modern life, and especially in the light of quick-fix promises held out by a variety of commercial interests.
Our Stone Age ancestors had other emotions as well: care, wonder, curiosity, and sympathy. All of these were able to be cultivated because of the slower, natural pace, of the lives they lived. Their lives were also full of danger and finding enough to eat, which was a challenge every day. As farming and civilization developed, the promise of having enough to eat on a daily basis, led to enough time to consider these other emotions and the wonder of our place in the world. It spawned a whole new era of consciousness called the Axial Age 2,500 years ago. It allowed these other emotions more room on the stage of human experience than ever before, so much so that they solidified into belief systems about a “better world to come”, not through material progress but through spiritual progress, that have permeated our existence ever since.
Don’t get me wrong. There are many aspects of modern life I would not like to be without, modern medical care and the many daily services that are provided for us that we mostly take for granted. I do think, however, that we have gone overboard on indulgence, comfort, appetite (both nutrition and consumer), and impatience, at the great expense of our health and our experience of life.
So, when I say that modern life may be killing us, it is not only the part affected by diet and movement that Daniel Lieberman discusses in his book. For me, I realized that modern life was killing my soul (as well as my health), and I am now reclaiming a more natural pace of life and its rightful place in my being. It isn’t always smooth sailing, but it is one of the wonders of my current “Life Yet to Live.”
