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For the last few months an idea has been rattling around in ye olde noggin. I've been wondering why everyone (myself included) is so stressed out all the time, because the usual answers of "too much work" or "too many responsibilities" just didn't suffice.
An idea came rather suddenly.
I realized that our nervous systems are over-loaded for a simple reason -- we're making at least 100 times the amount of decisions that our ancestors made.
Set the mental way-back machine to just five generations. Trains had been around for a few decades but most people were still getting around by horse-propelled transit. Everything was slow... transportation, goods and services, information. To get to the general store for provisions you'd either walk or ride a bike. The nearest danger was probably stepping in dung or being cautious to not startle the livestock.
Imagine that pace as your routine. Sure, everyone was working hard and it was usually back-breaking labor. I'm not suggesting it was easy, just simple.
Now mentally switch forward. Imagine yourself hurtling down a freeway at 70 miles per hour on the edge of rush hour. Mentally compare 10 minutes on that freeway to a 10 minute walk in a 19th century town. The contrast should be jarring.
In 10 minutes on a highway you're making hundreds of minute decisions for your personal survival and the safety of everyone else surrounding you. The task becomes routine with time, but doesn't change -- there is a constant underlying stress that a mistake in your personal judgement could cost dozens of lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Even basic city driving brings similar risks. We've become normalized to the process but I don't think the stress of making so many instant, life-threatening decisions is unnoticed by our nervous systems.
Now start to factor in your job. How many decisions do you have to make a day? How many requests do you get from co-workers? How much do you have to read, ingest, digest and regurgitate on a daily basis? Even the laziest office worker is likely processing as much information in a day as a person a hundred years ago processed in a week.
Tally up the stress total but don't stop there. Add in family and friendships, processing all of their personal issues and dilemmas. What stressors are unique to our era? Climate change, politics, the global economy, wars, disease. Its true that a lot of these things existed five generations ago (except for the obvious threat of global warming), however, today we're saturated with hundreds more information inputs.
Physical items like desktops, laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, televisions in the home and nearly every conceivable public establishment, newspapers, magazines. Digital inputs from email, websites, searches, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other social networking tools.
I'm convinced the reason we're so stressed out is that our nervous systems were not designed for the amount of stimulation they're receiving and that what's needed is for us to gently slam on the breaks and re-examine the runaway train that is our culture. Its getting us nowhere fast. Whole eco-systems are in collapse, our climate has been dramatically warped by our fossil fuel and consumption addictions. Which brings us to the "numbing effect."
Another part of this nagging question about stress was related to feeling utterly numbed out by tragedy. The oil spill in the Gulf, the continuing, utterly pointless wars in Central Asia, climate change and the appalling lack of action to mitigate it, the dramatic swing towards crazy in American politics, the sheer brazenness of the manipulators of our economic/legislative system...
It's enough to keep one up at nights, but it doesn't. I rarely feel anything about these issues anymore and that scares me. Maybe its because I'm an expat living so far away from it all, but I doubt that's it. I think everyone is suffering from this problem and I think its because of everything I've been saying already... our nerves are over-capacity so we can't emotionally or intellectually process these issues to the degree that is required. This IS the modern horror and it should be stopped.
I'm not suggesting a return to the "good ole days of yore" because really, they had it hard. Really hard. But we've really got to slow down and give our nerves a break. Fortunately a dramatic combination of peak oil and climate change may do exactly that. In the meantime, keep exercising as it really helps wipe out stress. Meditate, do yoga, hell, just SIT STILL for 15 minutes and do nothing and it'll help.
And above all... imagine that future world where we still have some of the benefits of modern technology but the pace of agrarian life. I'm sure we'll get there someday. Better to chose it than to have it chosen for us.
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