The quote found, a few paragraphs below, is a force to be reckoned with, as it highlights one of society's most pervasive myths (regarding life expectancy.)
Yet, this myth is held up by an even more subtle, underlying myth... that our civilization's improvements, technological and otherwise, have been grand, upward improvements on the general state of being human.
More accurately, these improvements, more often than not, are improvements on our own ongoing adjustment to civilization, our own radically new way of living. These improvements are evidence of a system adjusting to itself. When society makes this small distinction, within a particular discipline, revelations tend to abound.
This is something I began fixating on, some years ago, when I read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The definition of being human extends beyond our own, essentially new, often off-kilter cultures. There are life-enhancing nuggets of wisdom to be found, those pertaining to being human, among indigenous populations.
Take for instance an image, found in National Geographic, 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 therefore 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 would have been better off removing the quick change back at the beginning, but still... this one realization 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 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 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 backwards (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 apply fully to this new way of living, maybe it can teach us something.
A person doesn't have to look very hard. Plenty of books illuminate this from different angles. For example, a person could generally improve nutrition by gradually eliminating technology such as pesticides, herbicides, GMOs (which invite even more pesticide use) and other quick changes that stress the body.
We can consider the roots of many diseases as radical changes to our bodies. These come 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... increasing inflammation of the body, among other things.
It may help to be especially mindful as technology progresses. Civilization seems to have an upward moving arc, something to build story after story upon (with our ever increasing technological feats.) Yet, this has come at a great cost... much of that cost being our painful 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 an exploding population.)
This isn't to make a judgment on that way of living, as obviously it was a transition... but that doesn't change the fact that it was a radically new way, leaving the need for radical 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 (as I am doing that right now.) Even that is a big change in terms of our sight. We look less at big open places & this can manifest, later on, as eye strain.
Indigenous people tend to use wide range vision when hunting/gathering. There's evidence that wide angle vision activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The opposite, a very narrow focus, may be associated with a heightened nervous system.
This is one small example (and is not to say that tribal / indigenous living is without strife or is 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 here, right now, as well.
Consider the house of representatives (in a pure sense.) No matter the population size, a state has representation. While the value of that may be somewhat debatable, when we drift from 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? This 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 are other ways of life in existence.
It would be interesting to integrate some "best practices" principles into our moving forward, especially before those other ways are eclipsed entirely. 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 notion of our improvements, being within our own bubble of civilization, is such an important one. Imagine there's a 3-D poster, but people can't see the 3-D part, so they don't know any better. They start tweaking it and tweaking it... trying to smooth out the little cubes that make the puzzle. But then, one day, someone adjusts their eyes and sees the 3-D version. They also notice the little parts that we've 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 that fixing, like bad riders on a good bill?
If we operate with the wisdom of times past (and present)... and with the resources at hand, our image of old age may become less corrupted... less confused with the side effects of long term deficiencies and toxicities. One doesn't have to look too hard to find complaints around 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.
Heck, when I was a kid we were shown graphs of radically deteriorating muscle mass, as people grow older. While there is some truth to that, what we weren't told was that those studies were of people who did not stay active. I've known a number of older women and men who kept up with their yoga and weight training and so on, and operate in beautiful defiance of that chart.
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 level. We have lots of unlearning to do.
Consider another quote from Ishmael by 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 there, closer to the beginning, is an opportunity for our advancement to truly take place.
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