Big picture aside, most of what afflicts us today – cancer, obesity, mental illness, diabetes, stress, auto-immune disorders, heart disease, along with those slow killers: meaninglessness, clock-watching and loneliness – are industrial ailments. We create stressful, toxic, unhealthy lifestyles fuelled by sugar, caffeine, tobacco, antidepressants, adrenaline, discontent, energy drinks and fast food, and then defend the political ideology that got us hooked on these things in the first place. Our sedentary jobs further deplete our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing, but instead of honestly addressing the root cause of the illness we exert ever more effort, energy, genius and money trying to treat the symptoms and contain the epidemics.
Which is to entirely miss the point. We get all these diseases because that very industrial capitalism means that we don’t all die of smallpox, diarrhea, dystenry, whopping cough, scralett fever and the rest before we are 5. And we tend to live past the 35 at which those who lived wild and ate only organic lived.
And no, it’s not just conquering those killer childhood diseases which has expanded lifespans. Expected lifespan at 15, at 30, is very much higher now than it was 300 or 1000 years ago.
Without the market Tim most of us would live lives on the edge of semi-starvation never mind the “bonus” of which disease is going to kill you.
These Marxian eco-fucks need a new Gulag in which to serve their time. In the form of an Iron-age farm.
No need for long sentences tho’–most of them would be dead in six months or less.
“Sleep comes and goes with the light – I find six hours of peaceful rest sufficient.”
So he obviously hasn’t been doing this long. Will he survive winter on his foraging and will he imitate the peasants who went to bed for the duration of winter?
Not unreasonable to liken Mark Boyle to a stylite for Guardianistas ?
I do love a good hair-shirt flagellation. Although usually I like it at the hands of a couple of spry young Thai girls but you take what you can get.
Big picture aside, most of what afflicts us today – cancer, obesity, mental illness, diabetes, stress, auto-immune disorders, heart disease, along with those slow killers: meaninglessness, clock-watching and loneliness – are industrial ailments.
He does have half a point here. Auto-immune disorders may be linked to excessive hygiene. It is industrialisation that has removed sh!t from our diets, by and large, and so we don’t die bleeding from the rectum after dehydrating quite as often we did. But we may get allergies and hay fever instead.
The same with stress. People may have been impaled and flogged half to death all over the place but they did not complain about the stress. They just prayed a lot more.
As for those “slow-killers”, obviously before the modern world relatives had to look after their old themselves with the burden, I expect, mainly falling on daughters-in-law as in most good South Asian families today. Whether this is a step forward or not is another matter. I think many potential daughters-in-law may disagree. I wonder where he stands on industrial birth control? Has he discussed these issues with the wife? He had the snip – with or without modern chemical pain control?
at 38 I’m relatively young
That is the point. Few serious health issues these days kick in before you are 40-50. So you can ride those knees all you like. Until you can’t.
I avoid sugar, caffeine and stress like the plague.
Indeed. In fact he describes the life style of many Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists who live in the West. Who are also the healthiest population in the US. All he needs to do is add some radiation from fall out due to the occasional nuclear test, as with the Mormons, and he might live a very long time indeed. Good for him.
I hope he gets eaten by a bear.
&SMFS
“he might live a very long time indeed. Good for him.”
If so, he’ll be bored to piss. He sounds awful, his life sounds dull.
As TW says, the lifestyle he is lauding is one that would have seen him dying as a broken, worn out husk years before his 38th birthday.
He’s complaining about the thing that has facilitated his ability to complain about.
He’s an oroboros of idiocy
He could just join the Amish. But he obviously prefers virtue signalling.
“cancer, obesity, mental illness, diabetes, stress, auto-immune disorders, heart disease, ..”: let’s take them in turn.
cancer: should be cancers – a thousand diseases with similar symptoms. I assume one, lung cancer, must be in substantial decline. Increases in other cancers that appear in the stats are probably a consequence of better diagnostic methods and of mass screening. In other words, I doubt that more people are contracting cancers.
mental illness: the figures will reflect, perhaps be dominated by, fashions in diagnosis.
diabetes: the figures are distorted by redefinitions and by incentivisation of diagnosis.
heart disease: CVD has declined enormously for the people it used to kill – mainly men in middle age and early old age. It’s now largely a bumper off of the very old.
obesity; there’s a lot of it about; it’s particularly conspicuous in hospital staff. But it’s not an illness. It can even be a life-preserver.
stress: how’s that measured, then?
auto-immune disorders: I plead ignorance. But I’d be mildly surprised if it made any sense to call them industrial ailments.
Nice piss take in the Daily Mash:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/i-have-done-without-any-form-of-technology-for-six-months-and-my-life-is-utterly-shit-20170922136332
“And no, it’s not just conquering those killer childhood diseases which has expanded lifespans. Expected lifespan at 15, at 30, is very much higher now than it was 300 or 1000 years ago.”
The childhood diseases were the bulk of it. If you lived to be 15 you were more likely than not to reach 60 in the countryside. In cities, the diseases were much more likely to kill you.
So what made life expectancy significantly longer even for those who have managed to get past the childhood diseases? In order of importance:
– Clean water and sewage going away
– antibiotics, so the 10 bouts of strep throat I’ve had since childhood went away in three days with penicillin rather that getting a chance to kill me. Similar to any injury with infection.
– vaccines
– (lately) modern medicine pushing life spans so that reaching 90 is normal rather than exceptional.
Questions and comments just jump up.
Reading his articles he clearly has land and livestock. How did he afford all this?
Does he have planning permission for his shack?
He clearly doenn’t wnat to talk about vaccines.
CO2 is giving him hay fever!
I do wonder if he is an elaborate hoax.
I note he has been doing this for less than a year. I wonder if we’ll be told when he stops.
I also note in 2008 he tried to walk to India with no money but had to turn back just after Calais as he couldn’t speak French. Turns out you need the lingo to mooch.
And he’s gone too far enven for the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2017/sep/22/why-rejecting-the-modern-world-is-a-privileged-fantasy
“I’ll admit Boyle’s annoyed me in the past. I keep assuring people that the Guardian’s not just privileged middle-class white people, convinced of their own superiority and using their own half-baked theories to lecture the less fortunate on how to live their lives, then up pops a Mark Boyle column. It’s like insisting your good friend isn’t that drunk, only for him to suddenly vomit on his own shoes. “
DevonChap: a breath of fresh air. I was just thinking yesterday that I miss Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column in the Grun.
The cause of diabetes is unknown. Period.
‘If we continue pursuing this political ideology of mass industrialism’
Political ideology? WTF is he talking about? Did he mistake nightshade for tomatoes?
‘Industrial civilisation, itself only 200 years old, is already causing the sixth mass extinction of species of the last half billion years.’
Simply false. He heard the assertion somewhere, and he BELIEVES IT, showing he is a maroon.
Is Ted Kaczynski out on parole?