Take food for example.
In the US, over two thirds of Americans are overweight, and over one third is obese.
From what I gather, this means something like over two thirds would be better off, in terms of health, if they ate less, according to nutritionists.
Conversely, over three quarters may suffer from chronic dehydration.
So it seems Americans eat too much food and drink too little water.
How did this happen?
Evolutionary psychologists may say something like, food energy is typically scarce in nature and hard to come by, so we evolved the instincts and means to store as much as possible whenever it was abundantly available, but isn’t water also just as scarce, roughly?
Why isn’t water a more pleasurable activity then?
Of course regardless of whether you’re an evolutionist or not (I’m presently not, but I’m not a creationist either), even if evolution is true, nature makes mistakes, or rather, not every trait, nor any trait for that matter a species or individual possesses is perfectly adapted to its environment, as there’s no such thing as perfection.
If we’re more chronically dehydrated than we are overweight, then why aren’t we doing just as much or more to increase our hydration as we’re doing to lose weight?
Probably only because we can be superficial beings, chronic dehydration probably doesn’t detract from our appearance as obviously as overeating or underexercising.
Anyway, what I mean to get at is, while some instincts, like our desire for water or to exercise, may be too weak, when I observe human behaviour, it appears to me our instincts are generally too strong for our own good, or for our health and well being.
Some of this can be corrected, just as we’ve taken measures to cut back on how much we eat and to exercise more, we can take measures to cut back on other activities.
That being said, we’re more overweight and underexercised than we’ve probably ever been thanks to science, technology and their misuse and abuse, so it appears we’re in damage control now, perhaps we would’ve been better off if some technologies had never been invented, or we spent more time thinking about what we should be doing, and less time thinking about what we could be doing.
I think you can have too much of a good thing, any good thing taken to extremes can become a bad thing, or at least become temporarily more detrimental to ourselves and others than beneficial.
I suspect many if not most of these superfluous activities go largely unrecognised as such, some are even encouraged.
Of course we can only be so disciplined, we may only want to be so disciplined, if we try to be too utilitarian, life may no longer be worth living.
Still, I think if the human race is to survive and really, truly thrive, we’re going to have to significantly cut back on our activities, not just collectively, politically and publicly, but as individuals.
I would like to use this thread to talk about how we can become our own worst enemies, by doing, or even thinking too much, how we extract and expend too much energy, or waste it on the wrong things, as well as some of the ways this can be corrected.