How comfortable is modern man? We live now in a time of unprecedented decadence and comfort. A single Dorito chip has more flavor than our ancestors would consume in a single year. HVAC advancements and comfy clothing allow us to stay at room temperature year round. The average person today lives the life a medieval king could only wish for, but is that a good thing?
The United States is often laughed at for being the fattest country and with a meme economy based on useless consumerism. We eat and consume, larger than life in build and influence. In reality, this country is sick. The availability of cheap, low quality food has the “unintended consequence” (read: intentional result) that over 1/3rd of adults and almost 1/5th of all children are obese. While the U.S. has actually been surpassed by several countries, falling out of the top 10, that doesn’t mean we’ve fixed our problem, we’ve just been out paced.
In addition to the cheap food, we’re more sedentary than we’ve ever been. We’re more comfortable day to day, and we live in an age where peace and “prosperity” have lulled us into a foggy state. We’ve also largely forgotten that church was once the glue that held people together. Communities were tight, centered on religion, and the simple act of going to church helped us live longer. The stresses of keeping one’s self in line with the teachings of their faith gave people meaning. People are more sluggish, we’re sicker and unhappier than we’ve ever been. As of 2014, over 12% of people in the US are taking antidepressants, a 65% increase in just 15 years. You can see a correlation between the rise of obesity, and the increased use of these antidepressants. Some antidepressants even have the side effect of increasing appetite.
Obesity, by nature, represents a natural reaction to decadence, in that you are eating in such a surplus that your body cannot burn it off, and instead it stores this as fat. We are, at base, creatures made to survive and adapt to the environments from which we emerged. The pathway from biological evolution, or creation depending on your beliefs on the origin of mankind, to the globohomo consumer society in which we now find ourselves, is relatively short.
We were created to survive and represent an unbroken chain of reproduction that has existed since your basic components coalesced out of the ether. Our ancestors scratched and fought, raging against all challengers, including our savage hominid cousins, Mother Nature itself, and the viciousness of their fellow man, all in the hopes of procreation so that you could exist. Mankind has built itself from the earth, coming to dominate and subjugate the land and its resources. You will never know the stresses that your ancestors overcame to pay for you to be born. This is why I find it hard to witness the self-loathing and nihilism of this modern era. Do not squander the gifts your ancestors bled and died to provide to you. Do not call your birth luck, or assume that you are privileged to be where or who you are. In doing so, you trivialize everyone who kicked and clawed before you.
Something we have largely forgotten in history is that despite our modern comforts, we are still the physical equals to those savages from which we descended. As such, our bodies have not caught up with the decadent lifestyles that even the basest in our societies can afford. Your life will remain unfulfilled, and you will do yourself a great disservice, by failing to use it. While too much stress is often harmful to the heart and can impair our mental faculties, it is necessary to keep our bodies going.
Most of us are familiar with the term – “catfished.” It’s used to describe the situation in which the person you thought you were meeting fails to meet the description provided. Allegedly, the origin of the term comes from the practice of adding catfish to cod tanks during sea transportation. Asians in the U.S. decided they liked cod so much that they were going to open a market for them back home. They’d transport them in tanks to keep them alive, and hopefully fresh for consumption. When they cut them open, they found them colorless, soft, and tasteless in comparison to what they’d eaten in the States.
What they found was that during transport, the cod would basically become lethargic and lose motivation to move around in an environment where they were well fed and safe among their own. To correct these fish from becoming tasteless, a catfish would be added to each tank, to chase and nip at the cod. They’d stay active, darting away from the predator, and as a consequence, their meat would stay firm and tasty for their impending demise. The cod needed to get catfished to keep them on their toes. Similarly, your own body will start to degrade in the absence of stress.
Don’t forget who you are, where you came from, or what it took to create this world of comfort.
We are witnessing, not the natural end of a great human civilization, but the birth of an inhuman civilization that could never have come into being without a vast, an immense, a universal sterilization of life’s highest values
