Thoughts From, Of, and About a Simple Life

            This is an attempt to jump start my blog.  The original experiment, I am confident, succeeded.  That is, Crossfit and the Paleo diet will whip you into shape in no time.  I am not currently Crossfit, Paleo, or any combination of the above.  I have a four month old daughter, so I am simply in survival mode.  That goes double for the little monster’s mother. 

Our hungry little monster.

           

            I recently caught my reflection in the mirror, which served as a stark reminder that I was not in great shape at the moment.  It’s always my intention to return to my little home gym, but I also thought that I should revisit this blog as well as the weights.  After all, the gray matter deserves a work out as well.  My synapses fire double time when not obsessed with work on questions and ideas from all subjects.  So a blog on diet and exercise is limiting.  So for starters, what would a more broadly interpreted paleo lifestyle look like?     

            The thrust of the paleo diet is that we are still essentially identical to our cave man ancestors, who evolved prior to the agricultural revolution.  Therefore, we should eat what they ate to the extent possible: nuts, berries, vegetables that resemble more or less the wild plants they ate, fish, and meat.  The more organic and natural you can obtain these items, the better for your health.  Therefore, grass fed beef sans antibiotics is superior to the typical feed lot beef.  If you can get wild game, even better. 

            The agricultural revolution introduced domesticated grains into the diet: wheat, barley, rice and others, which we had not evolved to eat.  Anthropologists saw a decrease in the size and stature of humans in the post-agricultural revolution era.  Grains provide energy but little nutrients as compared to spinach or broccoli. 

            So we currently eat foods that we did not evolve to eat, to the great detriment of our health.  An extension of this theory calls into question our entire hamster-on-a-treadmill lifestyle.  Our bodies did not evolve to spend hours behind a desk followed by hours in front of the television or computer.  More importantly, neither did our psyche. 

            Technology has made more available to us the essentials of life: food, shelter, and clothing.  But what’s next?  What are we working for after we achieve the essentials?  The latest flat screen TV, designer label fashion, or luxury car?  Your average cave man’s rat race was a matter of survival, of gathering food and finding shelter.  What joy he had was derived from his interaction with others in his group.  What is our rat race about?  And to what degree can we opt out?

            Obviously, if I thought I had all the answers, I would start my own religion.  But there are some guides. 

The Pew Research Center released a study on happiness in 2006.  It showed that happiness was related to income.  But the percentage of people stating that they were very happy has been fairly stable since the early 1970s.  But real income has risen in those forty years.  Why hasn’t the number of happy people gone up?  Researchers have found that it’s not what we have that makes us happy, but what we have relative to others. 

We work as hard, have more, but are no more satisfied.  Our lifestyles are consumed by goals we never meant to have for things that didn’t exist in the wildest imagination of our prehistoric ancestors. 

Warren Buffet said something that sums up our lifestyles.  I am paraphrasing here: Greed doesn’t run the world.  Envy does.

The search for a way out begins.