Fat or Manic?

There are some great bits of terminology evolving out there, amongst the people who think hard about the world as we know it.






Some examples are:

• The Joyless Economy
• The Overwork Culture
• The Hyperactive Workplace
• The Manic Society
• The Wage-Slave System

These terms are great.  They make neat and emotive short-hand for long, complicated concepts and arguments. I have slipped into using them, on a not irregular basis. But sometimes... I have to take a step back, and say "hold on a wee minute there!" What they describe and assume, doesn't always ring true. Sometimes I wonder if we're all playing a game, signing up to notions that tell half a story, because they excuse us from our mistakes and our failures.

Take an example, the Manic Society. This is one of Robert Holden's bits of jargon that I came across in his book Success Intelligence: Timeless Wisdom for a Manic Society (2005). But while he's responsible for the term, he's certainly not the only writer out there describing this phenomenon.  The way he tells it, we live in this 'manic society', where everyone is so busy, busy, busy all the time.  So far, sounds so true.

But it strikes me that we're also a society characterised by quite a lot of stagnancy and sloth. Now that would never be acknowledged in the writings that are focused on unpicking this 'manic society' for readers who are already interested, and identify with feeling too busy, and too pressured, and too stressed.  But come on. Look at this carefully.  We're so manically busy, that we're too busy to physically do things for ourselves:

• We're too busy to wash our own cars, we'll drive through a carwash instead.
  
  
• To busy to carry our groceries from the shop to the house, we'll get them delivered.
  
  
• Too busy to walk anywhere, we'll drive.
  
  
• Goddamit most of the time we're all too busy to move at all.

We are all so manically busy... that we're getting fat?

Is this not a contradiction? There's this trend in the media to describe ourselves as a manic society, to lament that we're all so busy, and never have enough time... Its a terrible problem, for which you deserve sympathy and maybe should demand change. And at the same time, it's a complement - there's kudos in being super-uncontrollably-busy. There isn't in being a lazy, apathetic, fat bastard.

Yet most of the time, admit it, most of us are manically sat on our bottoms.

Likewise, there's this trend to analyse how we're all so busy that our personal lives suffer, our relationships falter through neglect. The media is full of these surveys and stats around the breakdown of family life, parents spending 8 minutes per day with their kids or some such horror... But the same people do get through an awful lot of hours watching TV, and movies, or browsing online (me included)...

I'm not denying that people are busy, and stressed, and working very hard, and doing stupidly long hours, and worn out, and all the rest of it. I think we've nearly all been there, seen it, done it. But it's half a story. We're manically busy, and we're lazy sods.

Why is that? Is it the way it has to be?  And who gets to decide?

Image by herval

Cake Is A Political Issue

This post is not just about cake. But a lot of it is.

The other week, I was having a party, and I decided to make a cake. It's been a while since I've done such a thing, so out came the recipe books. "Using an electric hand whisk, whisk together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy," it said. No food mixer came with the flat I'm renting, so I was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way, by hand. I set to with the wooden spoon. Within a minute, I had to have a rest. My arm muscles were too weak to keep going! I got started again... knackered. I kept having to do a bit, rest, do a bit, rest... I was mortified.

(Where am I going with this?!).

I am lucky enough to live in a society where I can buy cakes, really really good cakes, for cheap, anytime anywhere. And if I do want to make a cake myself, there is a wide range of fancy equipment to take all the effort out of it. I am very lucky indeed. Must go out and buy an electric hand whisk...

Except... perhaps it is precisely that luck, and all those lovely electric hand whisks, that has resulted in me being so mortifyingly weak and feeble? The systems of our developed society work brilliantly together to save me time, and save me effort, and probably save me money too, while earning somebody out there a decent living. But what are the invisible costs? Lost skills, and atrophied physical capabilities? Ill-health and soaring health-care costs? They'd not show up on a balance sheet, but could it be?

'That link is so tenuous it's silly. Get a grip, and stop harping on about cake. Go down the gym if you're worried about being weak.'

Yeah yeah, I know. But that's kind of the case I'm making...

Making time, paying for the gym membership, and summoning the inclination to formally 'take more exercise' patently isn't easy for people - if it were easy, we'd not have the ever-increasing rates of obesity, diabetes and other fat-related illnesses that blight the Western world. Even for those of us who do make time, and passionately enjoy our preferred means of exercise - there's clearly something out of balance when 'a marathon runner' doesn't have the physical strength to whisk up a cake mix! 'Not enough cross-training,' the fitness freaks will tell me. They'd be right - runners are advised to cross-train in order to improve their running form, speed, endurance, and I know I don't cross-train as much as I should. The body is a system, and it works best when all aspects of it are trained. Wouldn't the same idea apply to everything we do? Why is physically using your body increasingly something separate from day-to-day activity? Ever think we're focused too much on component problems and not on the wider system?

'Taking more exercise' is an individual solution to our societies' health problems. But perhaps we should be focusing on all our activities. Perhaps society shouldn't be structured so that individuals are focused on sitting at desks/in cars/on sofas/in front of screens for most of each day, with technology doing all the other things that need doing. Perhaps then telling these same people to get off their fat arses and go down the gym for 30 minutes 3 times per week isn't helpful either.

We need to look instead at creating lifestyles where sitting on your ever-fatter-arse simply isn't what people do all day? Plus on tangent, think about the environment - so long as we have food (including cake), we are walking talking bundles of renewable energy. Since we're hell-bent on scoffing more calories than we should, why not use it for something?

Use it to live an active life. Not a passive grub-like one.

Mouthwatering Photo by shimelle