New Problems, Old Solutions // Variant Perception #26

A favorite quote of mine is from (but apparently wrongly attributed to) management guru Peter Drucker, where he shares, “[only] what gets measured gets managed.” The idea crystalizes an observation about life. You'll likely struggle to obtain consistent progress if you’re not focused on measuring a result.

This quote speaks about business, apply it to your personal life, and works just as well.

The human mind’s unique ability to track progress allows us to create more consistent, progressive results.

But what if you have the wrong measuring stick for tracking progress?

If you’re building a deck with a measuring stick that only shows meters and centimeters, but your project quotes all measurements in feet and inches, sorry, bud, you’re SOL.

That’s a clear-cut example, but what if using the wrong measuring stick is more difficult to identify? What if you desire to experience more joy in life? How do you measure that?

What if using the wrong measuring stick represents how we track progress in modern society?

By many data points and over long time horizons, the modern world has made fantastic progress that’s been dutifully measured. Life expectancy has skyrocketed over the last 200 years, the same with literacy rates and global wealth. The world has become more peaceful. Corporal punishments have declined, along with death from wars and murders.

Objectively, the world is a wealthier, safer, well-fed, and more educated place to live today than in the 1800s. Yet, in 2023, large cracks have begun to form in today's world, especially in the countries that have already made the most progress.

Life expectancy in America has decreased for two years in a row (yes, Covid, but that’s only one part of the equation). There’s been an explosion in “diseases of modernity,” such as diabetes and autoimmune disorders. We’re struggling through a loneliness epidemic as the nuclear family attempts to take on all the struggles and hardships of providing financially and emotionally for a family with just a mother and a father, a far departure from how families have operated throughout human history. Drug overdoses, addiction, and mental health are now commonplace, touching the lives of most everyone I know.

And the growth rates of these trends continue to remain positive. The human experience has fundamentally changed in the last 100 years. Everything has changed. We process far more information. We get exposed to new, synthetic materials and chemicals never seen in nature; even the light we get exposed to from LEDs and fluorescent bulbs has drastically changed.

Many countries worldwide have a long way to catch up to America and the West regarding those same data points. That path seems clear. Use financial and technological progress to help people meet their essential health, education, and safety needs. This will raise lifespans, lower infant mortality, increase literacy, lower violence, and advance broad social equality.

Is more technological progress the path forward for countries already achieving that type of success? In fact, more of that is breaking our existing way of life. Will more technological engineering create better health outcomes? I’m not discussing health outcomes such as managing diabetes or treating symptoms. That’s the equivalent of following an arsonist around a dry forest with a bucket of water, expecting to control a forest fire.

A friend of mine paraphrased a quote from author Charles Eisenstein sharing a relevant observation on progress. Old problems, the problems that have been with us forever, such as infections, broken arms, and war, require new solutions.

Antibiotics, casts, and global alliances are all new solutions to old problems. They tend to work well and without creating a cascade of new problems.

But new problems, the problems that ancient humans did not encounter, require old solutions. A reintegration of the life our ancient ancestors lived without thinking about it.

Our modern ancestors seldom encountered type 2 diabetes. If they did, it was from the largely stationary wealthy people who could afford not to move their bodies all day and eat large quantities of food (which is more an example of modern life and the direction culture went).

Is the answer to the problems I laid out above not a new pharmaceutical pill but a reintegration of ways of life that prevented these maladies from arising in premodern humanity?

In the service of building the wealth that’s brought billions out of abject poverty, we have lost much of what makes us human. Life in the suburbs centering around the nuclear family removes the ingrained social interaction from living in intergenerational households close to neighbors and friends. Our wealth and pursuit of wealth separates us in different cars, different homes, different states, and different countries.

Although I would never trade my cushy office job to become an agricultural laborer, the amount of time modern humans spend under artificial blue light leads to natural yet subtle issues.

So, how can we continue to bring people out of poverty and struggle without trapping them in a different cage of autoimmune diagnoses and health struggles?

It would be so easy to point at one behavior or product that’s making our society sicker. Except, it’s not that way. The cracks forming today come from complex and interconnected systems.

It’s impossible to study how the glyphosate covering our food interacts with the microplastics and chemicals in our water. We don’t know how those effects compound when you spend most of the day under artificial blue light.

Oh, and don’t forget almost all of the clothes you wear contain polyester (a petroleum product), your shampoos, conditioners, febreezes, candles, and diffusers contain endocrine-disrupting fragrances. Your food has been so processed that it never spoils and has lost everything that makes it healthy. Then, to top it all off, so many people spend their days stationary, mostly sitting and just rinsing and repeating the general stress of trying to make life work in 2023.

To say that none of these massive departures from how humans evolved and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years impacts what’s happening to the health and well-being of regular people today is asinine.

Yet, reintegrating the ways humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years can eliminate many of these problems. Pre-modern humans lived surrounded by family and close community (many still do outside of America). From birth until death, they were deeply connected by proximity to the people who cared for them most.

They lived outside, feet on the grass, hands in the dirt, sun on their skin. We ate the freshest fruits, vegetables, and meats, never coated in waxes, chemicals, and fertilizers before getting shipped thousands of miles to sit in a grocery store. We drank water out of springs containing minerals that get stripped out of the water today and replaced with chlorine and fluoride.

I don’t say any of this to glorify one way of life over another. Ancient humans had many struggles that we’ve overcome today. Broken limbs and infections are one example where incidences are almost all easily solvable (except for the antibiotic-resistant strains!). Let’s leave those problems in the past.

But, with rates of autism, cancer, depression, addiction, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases continuing their relentless march higher, when will we stop to see that the engineering and technology choices of the last 100 years are culpable in creating the conditions that drive this outcome?

The measuring sticks we’re using for progress have broken.

And, I don’t believe that the way forward, the progress that’s possible, only means one path or another. So many of the problems we face today can be solved with old solutions, reintegrating an old way of life into the modern context.

Spending more time outside. Eating real foods. Drinking fresh, clean water. Not polluting our homes with toxic chemicals. Wrapping our largest, most porous organ (the skin) in natural fibers instead of engineered petroleum (spandex, polyester, nylon, acrylic, and even vegan leather). Spending even more time surrounded by the people we love.

There’s much more to say about this topic. But the newsletter is getting preachy. I’ll close with this; progress does not only get measured by how many new gadgets get invented or what the latest GDP number is per capita. Progress comes from an improvement in a human's average, day-to-day life. Making it easier and more natural for everyone to experience regular comfort, joy, laughter, love, and wellness.

The systems and incentives of the modern, developed world today are not set up to deliver that. The changes over the last 200 years have brought billions out of poverty and provided real, beautiful changes. These same changes are now what’s driving the cracks forming in the system. The trends are moving in the wrong direction, and the momentum is increasing. What we’re doing today does not work, so it must change.

Will we try to engineer our way out of this problem? Probably. Is that the only answer? No, certainly not.

-Jared