Fumigation Rumination

This morning I got up nice and early, which I always mean to do but for some reason lately have a hard time making happen. The couch cushions on the living room floor ended up being really comfortable and I didn't feel like getting up to do exercises but I just made myself do it through sheer will. And it felt pretty great once I got started, and then I saw the sun come up and felt even better, and I continued to feel pretty great throughout the rest of the day.

So why — or rather how — is it that I can not want to do something that's going to feel good and increase my physical health, even when I'm conscious of that fact? And not only not want to do it, but regularly act in an unhealthy way, based on my not wanting? Shouldn't someone who acts like that be an anomaly of the species, a glitch that will soon work itself out through the normal mechanisms of evolution, rather than the norm? How have we learned to so easily override evolutionary biology?

People smoke cigarettes, for instance, and it kills them. Shouldn't that decrease the chances of more people being born who will be dumb enough to light up a cigarette even though they know the health risks? No, because as intelligent, social animals, we have a culture that has evolved meaning and signifiers, like non-conformity and looking cool, that transcend the biological laws that have brought us here. Or rather, those biological laws have lost significance because the culture that has evolved out of us who have evolved out of the biological laws can adapt and in fact change the very environment in which it exists much faster than anything purely biological.

But the culture still depends on our existence, which in turn depends on very physical, material criteria. Having transcended these criteria, though, the culture would like to forget about them. Having conquered the physical world, we would now like to live in a purely mental one, even though it doesn't take much inspection to see that we're still very unsure of our footing in that realm. And meanwhile, the "conquered" physical world has started to behave in some unforeseen ways since we turned our backs on it.

If I had more knowledge about history, I might feel confident enough to make the argument that the downfall of Rome came about from a similar forgetting of roots. But I guess I just want to say that it kind of bugs me, and I think that this broad view of the problem is the best kind of environmentalism. Maybe activists should start going around with alarm clocks at 6 in the morning, forcing people out of bed. Yeah, that's always a good bit of salesmanship.

- Andrew