While there are many reasons why the modern human being struggles with daily living, two big changes in the way we live over the last 100 years (and especially over the last 50 years) have contributed silently but massively to our misery. In part I of this two-part series, I explore the first change
The first big change is the increasingly sedentary nature of life. In 1950, out of the total US workforce, only 30% did white collar jobs while the remaining 70% of the workforce was involved in Agriculture, Manufacturing or other similar manual & active work. By 2022, the vast majority (83%) of the US workforce had shifted to doing white collar work and just a small group (17%) was left doing all other active work. This same kind of extraordinary shift is seen in most other societies and countries across the world over the same period. In just 70 years - much less than the the blink of an eye in Nature's time - the human species transformed itself from being mostly active to being mostly sedentary & inactive
Imagine what a profound shift this has been. The human being is an animal gradually (and superbly) designed over millions of years by Nature to be a hunter-gatherer; designed to run long distances every day in groups, chasing and hunting prey. The first big shock to nature's evolutionary method was our discovery of agriculture. As humans rapidly started settling down on fertile lands in order to cultivate crops, the degree of physical movement & activity dramatically reduced. While agriculture still demanded significant physical labour, it happened mostly during certain parts of the year when key farming activities such as sowing or reaping were being done. (Incidentally, it was our discovery of agriculture that created - for the first time in human experience - free time; and which eventually led us to create a new notion - leisure). However as farmers, the human was still very much a "manual" being
The next stage in the progress towards being sedentary happened with the arrival of the Industrial revolution. As factories started to absorb a lot of people who were earlier farm workers, a substantial part of the workforce went from being highly physically active to having a constrained physical activity inside a factory. For example, a welder in a factory would indeed do physical work, but the range and extent of that physical work would be a lot less than that of a farm worker. This was the next shock to nature's evolutionary method
However, the arrival of white collar work and the mass shifting of humans to such white collar work (with very little physical activity) in just a century or less has been the biggest shock for Nature's evolutionary method. Evolution is a slow process that takes hundreds of thousands of years to make constant and small incremental changes. Therefore, this dramatic reduction in our physical activity in one century will need a long time to show up in various evolutionary adaptations. In the interim period (which is likely to be long), our bodies and minds are not evolutionarily suited for our life
Effectively, the modern human being & nature are now firmly out of step with each other in the great dance of the cosmos. Ergo, much misery!
