One of the great functions of churches was offering places of belonging that you didn’t have to earn
From this tweet.
I think the reason why people today are unhealthy—in a broad sense of the term, not just physical health—is that there is no fallback mechanism for many of our needs. For the social need it is pretty clear, as exemplified by the tweet. It is perfectly possible for someone in the modern to have zero interaction whatsoever with real people, and as such the floor for someone's sense of belonging is by default significantly lower than in previous societies. This is the same for physical health, since so many jobs are now intellectual or digital, which results in a lifestyle that doesn't provide any physical activity by default, as well as the abundance of unhealthy food around us.
What those examples show is that the default modern lifestyle is significantly worse for individual health than that of previous societies. It means you have to get out of your way to be physically healthy for instance, or have a place to belong to, or have work that genuinely impacts those around you, as opposed to having a default level for all your needs be provided by your environment. As a result, the vast majority of people are incredibly deficient in at least one key area of life, and because your general quality of life is bottlenecked by those deficient areas, it requires effort to address all your major needs. It doesn't matter how much money you make and how great the people around you are if you're constantly exhausted and have tons of physical problems. Likewise if you have a good income, nice relationships and are in shape, you might be miserable because your job feels so unfulfilling and doesn't provide you with any freedom. 3
I think a lot of unhealthy situations can be seen in terms of them being the easiest thing to fall back to. People turn to porn because it's the easiest way to feel good in your body when you don’t have any fulfilling relationships or anything good going in your life. People turn to video games because it's the easiest way to feel agency in your life, by getting better at something. People eat junk food because they don't have the time and energy to take care of themselves.
The modern world focuses a lot on improving the top, such as pushing the frontier of technology or sciences. But ultimately, this is not sustainable if it leads to the floor of quality of life being lower and lower as the years go by, because more and more people feel left out, without a place to come back to.
2 I think the people who can draw well without any references are quite rare and have decades of experience, and that it is quite toxic for people like me to try to replicate what they do. It just doesn't work, and it isn't enjoyable for me.
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2024-08-05