If you talked to a person from the 1950s about all the
modern marvels we have today they'd likely drool at the
mouth. What? You don't have to get up to change the TV
channel? You can reheat leftovers in 1 minute? You can
access any information at any time without leaving your
house? No way!
Be Careful What You Ask For
But are our lives really getting any easier? Do all these
time saving devices allow us to work less? Well, sort of.
It certainly takes less work to do any specific task. When
I was in graduate school writing my thesis, I thought of
the poor slobs who had to do that without the aid of a
computer or the internet. It must have taken people an
entire day to go to the library to find references that I
can now get in 10 minutes (God bless Google). The trade-off
is that we are expected to do a lot more tasks as part of
our normal day.
I was reading an interesting paper by Kelly Lambert
recently that put some of this into perspective as it may
relate to rates of depression in our modern society. Even
with all our modern conveniences, high-end medical care and
plethora of designer drugs, we have a huge mental health
crisis. In fact, today mental health accounts for about 15%
of disease burden worldwide. So why are we so unhappy?
The Thrill is in the Chase
Dr. Lambert argues that one factor in our overall societal
unhappiness is the fact that we have it too easy,
especially when it comes to feeding ourselves. Years gone
by, dinner was more than a phone-call away. We actually had
to track our food across the tundra and risk death by
saber-toothed tigers or violent weather, in order to feed
ourselves. Even if we were successful, we had to do it
again the next day. As time drew on, we learned it was much
easier to plant food in the ground. But this still required
intensive labor and patience to bring our sowing efforts to
the fruition of harvest.
All of this effort made the reward that much more
enjoyable. The magnitude of the reward may actually depend
on the magnitude of the effort required to achieve it.
Meaning the harder we have to work for something, the more
we enjoy it when we are successful. Since successfully
finding food is a major factor in our survival, and we used
to work very hard to stay fed, we had ample opportunity for
regular high intensity rewards.
Appreciate What You Have
Today, however, we take for granted this major facet of our
lives. Finding food does not require much effort at all, at
least for most of the lucky people living in our society.
Because we don't need to put out effort, we don't activate
reward centers in our brains that our ancestors activated
on a regular basis. We are essentially robbing ourselves of
a major 'happiness factor', and this, argues Dr. Lambert,
may be a problem. It may be that today's lack of regular
reward, due to lack of necessary effort, may be a factor in
high rates of depression.
Whether or not she is right, I don't know. She provides
many examples and scientific studies to back up her
argument and I thought it was a very interesting point
worthy of a post. In fact, I have two cats that seem to
agree with her. They are not content just eating their chow
out of a dish. Instead, they enjoy scooping out one nugget
at a time, batting it across the kitchen floor and then
pouncing on their prey before eating it.
There's not really much we can do about this unless you
want to pull a Grizzly Adams and drop out of society, move
to the hills and live off the land. Alternatively, you
could do all your grocery shopping in full camouflage,
crawling around on your belly through the frozen food
aisle. Or, maybe we can be more appreciative of what we
have and not take all our modern conveniences for granted.
Reference: Lambert, K.G. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral
Reviews 30 (2006) 497'510
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