So, you've got it worse than 800 years ago?

I forgot about how good of a blog that Mistress Krista in Toronto has until a few moments ago when I decided to see what's new on her slice of the world wide web. She wrote a nice article about her health predictions for the next decade. I thought there were some pretty good guesses and it's obvious she knows her shit but I still found stuff to disagree with.

The one point that I got pretty flamed about was the notion that modern life is more stressful than it's ever been. I quote:

"Problem is, modern life is more stressful than ever before, and it’s showing no signs of abating.

A global high-tech world means that along with the usual woes that have always plagued humanity (food, shelter, getting out of bed in the morning, getting and maintaining sex, mean people with pointy objects and thundersticks, malevolent power-grubbing bosses, etc.), we have new ways to stimulate ourselves, to which our physiologies (see #6) have not yet adapted."

Really? It's worse than it's ever been? It's worse than it was, say 70 years ago? I mean, could we consider that as part of the modern world? I was watching a History Channel show about the labor union movements a couple of months ago. They discussed how the average American worker in the cities could expect to work 12 hours a day, sometimes 6 days. I've met several people who thought that such a workday was just inconceivable and could barely get past an 8 hour workday. Did you know that back then, there was still the idea that if you dumped sewage into the rivers and lakes, that these bodies of water would take care of themselves?

It may be not be modern by any standards, but let's go back farther, back to Medieval Times. Mist-Kris talks about bad people with sharp & explosive stuff and mean bosses. Well, back then, the leaders established authority over their populace by mercilessly slaughtering those who opposed them. Vikings nearly destroyed the Western education. Peasants barely moved in the winter because they didn't have enough food work, or even live, through the winter. They couldn't keep the rats, and the diseases, out of their food supplies (hello, plague!) People had lots of kids since maybe half would survive to adulthood. Do you realize that, for a several hundred years, the ancient Roman doctor Galen (died 199 AD) was the leading medical authority in the Western World? Think about that: a guy that lived 1000 years ago, still being used as a reference for medical care. How's that for stress?

I could keep going but I think that you get the idea that life has gotten easier than it's ever been for those of us capable of reading this. If we can't deal with the stress of our lives, it's our own fault. Mist-Kris nailed it in the same blog entry: a lot of us, frankly most of us, just don't take very good care of ourselves at all. We eat shit and don't do shit. We eat stuff that we know is poisoned, or at least very unhealthy. We don't look for the truth about diet and exercise with any sort of zest or sense of urgency. We sit around and make excuses (most of the time, we bring science down to suit our laziness) as to why it's not our fault. More-over, we expect someone else to take care of the problem ourselves.

Call this what you will, just don't call this more a more stressful life. It's a lazier life, and it's a life that's decaying our bodies to the point where OUR CELL PHONES STRESS US OUT! Hello! If that's getting your underwear in a bunch to the point where you need to reach for something to calm you down, then you need to make some serious changes, because your individual conduct in life isn't working.