One of my clients this morning is having some body issues. He has had back problems most of his life due to a sports injury as youth and is now also having an issue with his knee. This led into a discussion about exercise, where we talked about how a lot of people focus on parts of their body, yet fail to consider the overall condition of the body as a whole. They split their workouts into zones, but do not necessarily connect the zones to each other so that they function well together, which sets up an imbalanced body that can look okay, but feel and perform quite poorly.
I have been in Finland for almost 20 years now and on arrival, I was surprised at how few overweight people there were. While there weren't a lot of fit people either, the average was pretty well in okay condition and people were walking a lot and spent a great deal of time outside. That seems to have changed however and while still relatively rare, now there are the people who need motorized support to move.
I decided to have a look at some numbers in this area and found a pretty cool site, that I reckon I could use for other things too, though it is kind of sad it exists perhaps.
https://data.worldobesity.org/
I thought I would firstly compare some countries, Finland, Australia and the United States on a general level.
That is quite a variation and what is really interesting from the US stats from the site, is that in both men and women, there are more obese people than just overweight people and the difference across countries for childhood obesity is significant.
However, this conversation led further into a rabbit hole of raising children and how we seem to want our children to be happy, but we tend to treat it like many people go to the gym. We parent in components, rather than holistically and we also tend to favor the present moment far more than the future. A lot of people talk about "living in the moment, rather than the future" - but I see it as the future is made up of moments - what we do in this moment is going to affect those to come.
When considering a child's happiness, it has to factor the progression over time, where the moments of life are able to be supported with skill and opportunity in conditions that facilitate a "happy life". I don't put a lot of value on the term "happy" as an individual state, it is more about life satisfaction as a whole. The problem comes in when we do not consider the "whole" as while we can consistently do tasks that make us feel good, unless they are linked to some kind of common thread, they tend to get unbalanced very quickly - disjointed activities that do not add value to the entire body.
We were all children once however, but do we learn as we get older how to take care of ourselves, how to build a body that works well, whether it be our physical or mental selves, or the conditions in which we live - or do we carry the lessons of our past so ingrained into us that we cannot escape our results?
I get the sense that while we might be more connected technologically, we are becoming far more disjointed as individuals, getting pulled this way and that, wanting one thing that is inconsistent with another that we desire, constantly having our attention drawn to focus on far too many things than we can process, each stealing a little bit of our bandwidth so that nothing gets done well, let alone consistently.
I feel this often in my work lately, where there are so many diverse tasks to preforms and so little time to be able to spend on each, that nothing really gets the attention it needs or perhaps deserves. Apply this to the rest of life including parenting, and the lack of attention can lead to doing the opposite of our spoken intention - "I want my child to be happy".
My client was saying how he dislikes how parents use screens and social media as a babysitter or time filler for the kids, while they can spend their time on social media. I agree. However, we aren't allowed to judge the parenting styles of others, because people take offence. But, if we look at it from a more holistic view of society, the way people raise their children is going to impact on all other children within that same group. For example, if my daughter was to one day want to find a partner, how other children have been raised is going to have an influence on the behaviors of that partner - perhaps, "good men will be hard to find" - Perhaps it will be no easier to find "good women" either - and whatever else people want to identify with in between and outside of those definitions.
I think that part of "being happy" is related to feeling safe and while there are many aspects to this, if the society we engineer is not one where people generally feel safe with others, opportunity gets limited - society fragments, people struggle to build trust and healthy relationships and there is likely a higher chance of social disconnection, loneliness and depression. But, the body doesn't switch off its inbuilt circuitry, it still wants what it wants, creating conflicts in many ways and setting up environments and circumstances that do not lead to where a person wants to go.
I have mentioned weight in here a bit and often use it as an example, because it is something that is quite easy to see in the world and a lot of people struggle with it, including myself. Yet, while obesity is a specific problem, it is likely more a symptom of the environment we have created and gets influence and has interactions with hundreds and thousands of other factors in the world. While a lot of people do not want to acknowledge it, the fact is that we are all part of the same body in some way and when parts of it aren't working well, other parts are going to suffer also.
Each of us will experience the world as an individual and we can never fully have the same experiences as another, but this doesn't mean that we aren't influenced by and do not influence other people's experiences. I don't think any person wants to walk down their local streets in fear of being attacked, let alone want that for their children, yet this is become an increasing reality for many, even in places like Finland where economic conditions are relatively good and education is high.
While we often look at the impact of economics on society, society itself is not made from money, it is about the relationships between people - alliances, unions, communities. It is when we disconnect from each other and no longer concern ourselves with what others are doing in relation to ourselves that society fails, because the body becomes disjointed. Joints in the body are necessary for us to move, to run, to jump and to speak and when we stop moving, we stop growing and our muscles atrophy.
It is impossible to accurately predict what the future will look like, as it is all based on assumption on what is known today. But in my opinion, if we do not consider what satisfaction means for us, it is likely that we will continually fill up our space with randomness that satisfies the moment, but degrades the life.
A healthy mind, body and society are all parts of the same whole.
Taraz
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