Myths Involving Life Expectency

The quote found a few paragraphs below is an absolute force to be reckoned with, as it highlights one of society's most pervasive myths, regarding life expectancy.

Yet it is only one powerful implication of another more subtle, underlying assumption which lays the foundation for it.... that all of the improvements, technological and otherwise, that have been made throughout our civilization are grand upward improvements on the general state of being human.

More accurately, these, more often than not, seem to be improvements on our own ongoing adjustment to civilization, our relatively new way of living. These improvements are largely evidence of a system adjusting to itself. When society makes this small distinction, in a particular discipline, revelations tend to abound.

This is probably something I began obsessing about when I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn some years ago. For if we recognize that being human extends beyond our own, essentially new, and often off-kilter culture, it is implied that there are life-enhancing nuggets of wisdom to be found, those which pertain to being human, among indigenous populations...

Take for instance the image of an indigenous woman carrying a sizable load of rocks on her head, with seemingly little effort. The strength comes in part from proper skeletal alignment... rare in our culture.

In our culture, children are put into supportive shoes very early on, hindering the micro-adjusting, adaptation of the foot, and thus the body, to its historical terrain. For us, specific exercises have the potential to help bring us back into balance, somewhat mimicking the range of motion evident there.  We can teach modern bodies to operate in alignment. Of course, we are better off removing the quick change back at the beginning, but still... this one thing can redefine our lives as we age.

As the physical therapist Pete Egoscue points out in one of his books... often technology lets us dig in close, as in the case of an x-ray, for instance, and we follow by performing something radical... like replacing a hip or knee... but if the basic alignment is ignored, the problem is likely to manifest itself in some other way. It is necessary to see the forest for the trees... or however that saying goes. Here is the powerhouse quote:

"Increasing Life Expectancy Is a Myth

The impression that human life span is increasing is mostly a myth. We are confusing maximum human life span with average life expectancy. The numbers usually quoted are the average of all deaths, including infant mortality.

Average life expectancy has been steadily increasing mainly because fewer babies are dying. In fact, the increase in life expectancy is almost entirely due to decreasing infant mortality.

In 1907, the average life expectancy for a male in the US was 45. It is now 75. Were men really dying at 45? Not exactly. In the early 1900's more than 50% of all deaths involved children under age 14, bringing the average down to 45 years.

By 2001, only 1.6% of the total deaths occurred among the young, bringing the average up. Likewise, the average life expectancy for men in ancient Greece was 40. Yet the Greek philosophers typically lived over the age of 90.

It is the inclusion of infant and child mortality in calculating life expectancy that is creating the mistaken impression that, historically, adults died young and that life expectancy for all ages is now greater than ever.

The truth is that the maximum human life span hasn't changed much for thousands of years............

The point is that today more children make it into adulthood. Infant mortality has decreased dramatically b/c of a lack of famine, good sewer systems, safe water supplies, less crowded living conditions, and modern medicine's ability to treat accident victims successfully.

However, when we look at older adults, the picture is far less reassuring. In 1850, a 75 year old white male could expect to survive for ten more years. In 2003, the average life expectancy of a 70 year old white male was 13 years. That's only a three-year gain over the course of 153 years, despite enormous advances in science and technology.

Then consider that those extra three years are not healthy ones. We may be living a few years longer, but are we living better?......

This puts American life expectancy at 38th in the world, behind Cuba, Costa Rica, and Chile. This is down from 24th in 1999 and 5th in 1950...... Even though we spend more on health care than any nation on Earth, the WHO ranks us only 37th in the world in overall health.

"Our health care spending has increased, but our health and life expectancy have not."

-Raymond Francis

The point of posting the above quote is not to be dismal, but to be mindful and to encourage mindfulness, because the culture is often in this frame of mind that technology will improve & improve and continually rescue us as we continue upward (just as it has done before) And we should push forward into that next age.

But we can't just push, and we can't just delve into the nooks and crannies without seeing the big picture (like looking at that x-ray but missing the fallen arch on a foot that made the dysfunction possible to begin with)

As well as looking forward and refining what the culture does, it is paramount to look back (and sideways, as some indigenous peoples still exist today) and see the wealth of information... proper posturing of the body, proper nutrition, how a community operates.  Though every single detail may not entirely apply to this new way of living, maybe it can teach us something.

A person doesn't have to look too hard... plenty of books illuminate this from different angles. And take food for instance... One would generally improve nutrition by gradually eliminating technology such pesticides, herbicides, gmos, etc. and other quick changes that stress the body.

It is also interesting to consider the roots of most disease as radical changes to our bodies, in the form of deficiency and toxicity, often from foreign chemicals/particles. These are newly created, and accompany newly created mindsets with huge levels of stress and the associated chemicals that stress releases over a long duration of time... to increase inflammation of the body, among other things.

We may need to be especially mindful as technology progresses. Civilization, on one hand, has this upward arc, which is an easy thing to build story after story upon with our ever increasing technological feats, but this has come at great cost... much of that cost being our adaption to newly created variables.

If we go back a bit, one example of this is newly encountered diseases which came with close-in living associated with certain types of agriculture and our exploding population.

This is not to make a judgment on that way of living, in this instance, as obviously it was a transition... but that doesn't change the fact that it was a radically new way, leaving the need for adaptation.

Likewise, we have continued throughout our bubble of history... to improve upon the radical changes we have made... but also thereby creating new radical changes that someone else will have to improve upon.

So we have to be careful not to be the little old lady who swallowed a spider. We may do well to really consider the big changes we make, even as we are fascinated by new technology...

We spend more time looking at small screens now (I am doing that right now), and even that is a big change in terms of our sight. We look less at big open places & it seems this manifests later on as eye strain.

Indigenous people tend to use wide range vision when hunting/gathering. There is also evidence that wide angle vision activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The opposite... a very narrow focus can be associated with a heightened nervous system.

This is one small example (and is not to say that tribal / indigenous living or life in general is without strife or a perfectly carefree affair)

The hope is that civilization will look forward, but with the wisdom of the past in tote and with the presence of actually being a living thing, right now, as well.

Consider the house of representatives, in a pure sense, the idea that no matter the size, there is representation. While the value of that may be somewhat debatable, when we miss out on popular vote and deal with corruption and financial entanglements... it would, in a pure sense, be interesting on a global level to have all cultures (including small tribal ones) represented.

Population size, especially when out-of-balance, can artificially inflate... So does that population own the right to make decisions simply as a function of size?  It is a tricky thing.  The exaggerated size of modern peoples clouds over the reality that there are hundreds of versions of us out there.

Huge population growth leaves in-balance populations in the shadows. However, nonetheless, hiding in those shadows still, there is another way of life in existence.

It would be interesting to integrate wisdom into our moving forward, especially before these ways are eclipsed entirely. A technological genius may sway us from disaster to positive influence by integrating a few basic principles.

AND THESE PRINCIPLES ARE NOT EASILY SEEN IF ONE LOOKS DOWN UPON THE PRESENTER AS IF S/HE WERE SOMETHING OBSOLETE AND EVOLVED FROM.

That is why the point about our improvements being within our own bubble of civilization is such an important one. Imagine there is a 3-D poster and people can't see the 3-D part, so they start tweaking it and tweaking it and fixing the little cubes that make the puzzle, but then one day someone sees the 3-D version and little parts of it are all effed up, b/c those parts weren't even visible, or conceived of, from the angle the fixing was coming from. What angle is the fixing coming from?  What relative impurities may be attached to it, like riders on a bill?

If we operate with wisdom of times past... and with the resources at hand, our image of old age in this culture may become less corrupted... less confused with the side effects of long term deficiencies, for example. One doesn't have to look to hard to hear complaints of getting older.  Perhaps our earlier state was to live more robustly, eventually to spiral downward for a few weeks leading up to our death/transition/what-have-you.

With a less fearful outlook, we may free ourselves to see other things and to become other things. This applies not only on a personal level but on a community and global ecosystem level. Lots of unlearning to do.

Consider yet another quote from Daniel Quinn:

"Instead of teaching our children that humanity began just a few thousand years ago, we teach them that human history began just a few thousand years ago (and didn't exist before that)."

And so our indoctrination begins... Perhaps here, at the beginning, is an opportunity for our advancement to truly take place.