Modern Life Compared with Early Humans'

We often hear about the stresses of modern life, and how they lead to heart attacks and so forth. So I decided to give a little thought to what stresses or worries are present in modern life, and what stresses our early human ancestors had to cope with.

First, early humans had these risks to life and limb present in their world:

• Being made ill or killed by disease
• Being killed or maimed in war with other tribes
• Being killed or maimed by wild animals
• Fear of hunger or starvation if the hunt or the crop failed
  

Now let's look at modern, western life.

• Despite medical advances, we are still subject to diseases, many of which (cancer, heart disease, etc.) can kill us.
  
• We still have wars, and certainly, worldwide, thousands are still killed in wars each year.

So two of the four in the first list are still present, even after all these hundreds of thousands of years of human existence.

Now--in contrast to our ancestors--we are subject to little risk to life and limb from wild animals. (The risk definitely still exists for people in some parts of the earth.) But, for too many, modern life has added some new hazards such as being killed in an auto accident or in a shooting (hopefully the odds of dying due to being shot by some civilian's gun are not large).

As to the last item in the first list: in modern, western countries, fewer people rely on their own hunting or even farming for their sustenance, so they may not worry about starvation. (But people who do produce their own sustenance are still at some risk, and it's only 150 years ago that large numbers in Ireland died due to the massive failure of the potato crop.)

But, to the two items in my second bulleted list, we need to add some worries which, if not usually fatal, certainly add to the stresses that we moderns often live with:

• Financial worries such as lack of money due to unemployment.
• Worries about mortgage foreclosure, which can mean loss of one's home.

So I think I'd say that modern life still has some of the same stresses that humanity has faced for millennia--plus some worries that are part of the modern age and that our ancestors did not face. And we work harder. I read one time that the Bushmen in Africa--a hunter-gatherer society--spend about fifty percent of their time in finding their food, and the other fifty percent sitting around telling stories!

So, are we more or less stressed than our ancestors very long ago? It may be a wash. I somehow tend to think that the worries of modern life are more insidious.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein