Having a discussion about -many things with a friend over a coffee today, he mentioned that rather than focus on some of the health care they do, he would rather effort put into combatting the obesity epidemic, which is undoubtedly, one of the largest health factors we face as a society. Whilst we went into how there is no centralized incentive to fix the problem due to it being a consumptive and therefore a revenue-earning issue, it reminded me of part of the conversation from an article I wrote last week, on the socio-economic factors that impact obesity figures in Finland.
What I was then thinking about is that in a place like Finland where opportunity is largely available to all, higher education is likely correlated with higher earnings, but also likely with higher intelligence. Or perhaps, a different kind of "mindset" when it comes to learning.
And, just as a very quick exercise, I raised the conversation where perhaps it is possible that our thinking also impacts on our ability to lose weight at a more physical sense also. After all, our brains take up 20% of our energy reserves (under "normal" conditions), and a person thinking hard will burn a bit more, which might not be that significant. However, what about not thinking more, for instance, whilst watching TV which requires close to no thought at all?
It seems to be a doubling down on our inactivity, where not only are our bodies still, but our minds too. And, it also likely has some kind of compounding effect also, where the more we consume, the stupider we get, and the stupider we get, the more we will consume - because we aren't going to do the mental work ourselves. Then, because we aren't doing the mental work, we are going to be increasingly influenced by what we are consuming, which is essentially messaging to consume more of something, speeding up the spiraling into oblivion.
And then, there are the other factors that play into this, where the people who "think a lot" are also likely to be the ones who will actively search for new thoughts, which will often give them chance encounters that bring in randomization of information. This not only requires additional thought, but can also lead to alternative action. However, when we can pick and chose, curate our content lives to keep us comfortable, we are surrounding ourselves with information that signals we are doing the right thing and encourages us to stay the same.
I strongly believe that the challenge to address growing health issues isn't too big to overcome, but it is too valuable to fix. There is far more being made from sick people than the healthy over a lifetime, so the drive is to maintain illness, not promote health. Part of this come through the messaging, where people are influenced to "love themselves" no matter what condition they are in or what activities they do. However, the better message would be to love yourself enough to improve yourself, right?
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
Agent Smith [The Matrix]
None of us are perfect by design. Humans are made to improve. So, even if we did have a perfect world, our humanness would reject it because static isn't enough, and that is what perfection is - the point where change is no longer possible. Effective death. We shouldn't be working out ways to consolidate and accept ourselves no matter what we do or the results we get - we should accept ourselves as imperfect and try to do something about it, act toward perfect - even if we inevitably fail because perfect as an endpoint is a moving target that is impossible to reach.
This is likely why we push things like forgiveness and perfection out to a magical god of some kind, because humans are incapable of achieving these things. They are not part of our nature and never truly will be. Those who think they are, just haven't yet been pushed hard enough by the conditions to prove them wrong. We might believe ourselves pacifists, but we are all capable of violence under the right circumstances.
So, instead of encouraging ourselves to be better, we are being conditioned to consume what is available, to eat what is served us, unthinkingly, endlessly. It is far cheaper to produce engaging content for the mindless masses, than it is for the thoughtful minority, because the minority will keep changing, keep growing, keep pivoting away from the trends, because they will grow. The masses however evolve more slowly, because they are products of their environment too.
If we are looking at it from a type of nutritional makeup, we can predict that poor nutrition will stunt our growth and affect everything from our IQ to our emotional wellbeing. And, good nutrition will affect in the opposite direction. However this is the same for the content we consume too, where there is a difference in nutritional value between different kinds of content, because they encourage our body, our brain, to think in alternative ways.
But, if you are running a business on volume, you don't want alternative thinkers, you don't want healthy people, you want the masses to consume what is cheap to produce and easy to distribute. You don't want divergence, you want homogeneity.
And, this world is driven by supply and demand - it is driven by economics and the value is counted in money, not in health. If the currency generated was wellbeing, we would have fundamentally different business models across the board. But, instead of building business to make health, we build them to make money and then say, being healthy is too expensive and is therefore, not available for all.
Thinking more doesn't burn significant amounts of calories, but thinking about the right things can help us change our behaviors to align our actions with our goals. We become more resource efficient, evolving through the actions that lead us to where we want to be as a society, rather than spending the majority of the resources we have, convincing us to stay the same.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
