Fix Me Up

I remember writing the beginnings of Fix Me Up while driving down a busy M6 around Manchester, then trying to record the idea into my phone. A little bit dangerous. Lucky that I didn’t end up needing to be fixed up myself at A&E, to be honest.

Body and mind are constantly being damaged, and repaired, throughout our lifetimes. But we’re a weird kind of creature. One that does things that we know will damage us. We cause ourselves to need repairing.

I was brought up with the idea that all of that started in a garden, with Adam and Eve intentionally going against God’s will. And thus humankind as a whole became cursed with this thing that some call “sin”. Something we needed “saving” from.

It’s an explanation of a kind. But it doesn’t do it for me, and hasn’t for a long while.

Rather, to me, and counter intuitively, our self damaging behaviour looks like an outcome of our more recently evolved intelligence finding itself unwittingly in conflict with some of its own more ancient evolved algorithms.

As an example, our more ancient brain evolved to need to find food. We gathered and hunted, because food was out there, and we needed it in order to live. As a result our bodies were very active and expected to be very active. And we ate less.

Then, with our more further evolved intelligence, we invented agriculture and domestication. And so we were able to keep our food sources a lot closer to hand. So much easier. And using minimum possible effort was something else our ancient brains were evolved for. So win-win, right?

Much further down the line we found ways to need fewer and fewer people to produce our food. On top of that we invented refrigeration. And suddenly I (lucky ultra modern human) can pop into the kitchen and eat as MUCH as like, with barely any effort.

A lot of the time I have done that. Because my ancient brain had also evolved to take advantage of food (eat it!) whenever it became available. You just never knew when the next chance to feed would come along. So it’s understandable that we take advantage of our luck.

And yet all of our modern illnesses have been born out of these advancements. Diabetes, heart attacks, cancer and fragile limbs in old age, being some of the big ones. Almost non-existent according to anthropologists before the agricultural age. We’re living longer (vaccines and other modern medicine helping in this regard) but we’re suffering far more as we grow older. And largely unnecessarily.

And it’s not just our diets and fitness. So many more of our self damaging behaviours can be seen through this lens of “intelligence leading to solutions, leading to more problems to solve”.

Maybe we will find further solutions to all of those self harming ones. Or maybe, as for many millions of extinct animals from the past, our evolutionary history is leading down the cul-de-sac of our own destruction. Who knows?

But hey, we’re very innovative, we humans. I’m optimistic. Our scientific fixers might even find solutions that don’t require any extra effort on our part. You never know.

In the meantime though, our brains are capable of getting a bit more tuned in to the ancient part of our smart grey matter, and adapting our behaviour to match our bodily needs.

It might a bit of work, but we can do that.


ps - No magical theological explanations are needed. They never are. And the actual explanations, when we slowly find them through observation and learning, tend to be far more interesting, helpful and awe inspiring.