The cost of progress

PROGRESS??

We have come a long way since the caveman days, baby.  

We have moved from barefooting it with a club in our hands, to the invention of the wheel, firearms, electricity, electronics. And it keeps getting better every day. People used to go on foot wherever they needed to go. We are now experimenting with the hover board and landing on Mars

We used to worry about where our next meal came from now we worry more about how fancy our next exotic dish will look and taste, and mostly who will prepare it and clean afterward.

People in the 1800s never went to a gym, they walked or rode horses everywhere, and they worked. Workouts at the gym would have been superfluous.

Medical advances have been amazing. You can transplant organs, re-attach a finger, save lives. At the same time our lifestyle has brought on cancer, diabetes, auto-immune disorders.

Preparing a meal back then consisted on making your own bread, fetching the eggs out of the chicken coop (hoping they had laid some), churning your own butter, and hunting for or butchering your own meat. Nowadays, if you need something, you just go to the store. It’s so easy it requires very little thought or planning. And those stores are open 24/7. Most people have no idea where the food they eat comes from. Most folks would not know how to make their meal from scratch. Nowadays people get upset if their drive through order takes more than 3 minutes.

All the convenience we have grown accustomed to is amazing. You do not have to focus on your survival anymore. You can now focus on bettering your lifestyle, spoiling yourself, entertainment. It has freed the mind to create art, literature, movies. And for some it has freed them to become lazy and non-productive. It has made most of us soft. It has robbed us of our basic survival instinct. I am pretty sure they did not need self-defense classes in the olden days. You knew how to use a gun, a club, a rock, your hands. We have reached a level where we are spending more time on entertainment than we do in basic survival skills.

The price of easier living and higher thinking comes at a cost.

With the popularity of apocalyptic movies, I can’t help but wonder if people secretly wish they could go back to simpler days. Days when all you had to worry about is eating, sleeping, surviving. You did not have to worry about bills, writing that report, paying your taxes on time, planning that perfect Christmas party with just the right food and beverages, keeping up with the Jones.

  But somehow, like the armchair quarterback, just watching movies about it or reading books on the subject is not going to make you proficient. Watching every episode of the Walking Dead does not make you a zombie killer. If you want survival skills, self-defense skills, you need to train and train properly. Bad conditioning is never going to create good skills.

So get off the couch. Seek good training, workout, train your body as much as your mind, set yourself some challenges.  Don’t let life make you too soft.

Be smart, stay safe.