Welp, turns out life is definitely not all glitter and rainbows.
A new study out of the University of Zurich, published in Biological Reviews, suggests that the modern world is wrecking our bodies and minds. Turns out, our tech and the world we’ve built with it have evolved so quickly that we’re struggling to keep up.
Researchers Colin Shaw and Daniel Longman argue that for nearly all of human history, stress came in short bursts, mostly in the form of predators popping out of the bush to obliterate us. If you were fortunate enough to survive, that was generally the end of your peak stress levels for the foreseeable future.
Now, there are lions everywhere. The lions are traffic jams, constant notifications, smartphones, etc. Our bodies respond to all of this exactly the way they were programmed to—by panicking like you’re about to be pounced on by a beast. And since there’s no off switch, we’re just marinating in stress hormones that are firing off nearly 24/7.
The researchers argue that the chemical effects of constant stress show up everywhere. It’s in our rising inflammatory diseases, declining fertility, mental-health spikes, and the whole global “sperm counts are dropping” situation. The researchers say that this might be natural selection at work, just instead of the “strongest” surviving, it’s those who can best handle the constant barrage of madness that humans were in no way built to withstand, at least not in such high concentrations and for so long.
The core issue here is that evolution is slow and the world is fast. The minds that imagined and built our modern world weren’t built to survive it.
So…what now?
Shaw and his colleagues say we need to fundamentally rethink how we build and live in our environments. That means more green spaces, even in gray, unnatural cities — especially in cities. They’re calling for natural spaces to be treated like essential infrastructure, not just scenery.
The internet trolls were right all along. Maybe some of us, all of us, need to go touch grass.
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