The Problem with Society

“In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”

That is how Dr Brandon Hidaka ended the abstract of his 2013 paper, Depression as a Disease of Modernity. Hell of a sentence, right? It gets worse.

Last year I wrote about how the drastic effects sustained depression can have on the human body, effects that for the most part have been forgotten in recent years with the prevalence of Covid and other more dramatic diseases. 

While Covid may dominate the headlines, but depression has always been…. I’d argue that there isn’t a single person out there that hasn’t seen the effects of depression in someone close to them, whether they recognized it or not. The problem is that this disease is growing at an unprecedented rate, and worse, it is only a symptom of a much larger problem. This problem, according to Dr. Hidaka's paper; the way we have constructed our society. Let me explain.

There are two important ideas to understand here. One, we as humans are creatures of our environments. For the vast majority of our existence, over 85% of it, we were hunter-gatherers; collecting nuts and hunting woolly mammoths for food. This is the sort of lifestyle that our bodies spent the most time in, and therefore became the environment to which our bodies adapted the best.

Then someone decided to plant a field instead of collecting all those nuts. To round up some cows instead of hunting them when they were hungry. Tribes became towns, towns formed kingdoms and empires to protect themselves from other kingdoms and empires, and we created this thing called society. The next thing you know, the species that spent 50,000 years as hunter-gatherers is now getting their groceries delivered as the share their screen on teams from home in the suburbs, all in less than 3,000 years.

That's the second important thing to know; just how quick our environment has changed. We spent 50,000 years in one environment, and in less than 6% of that time… So quick, that our hunter-gatherer bodies have barely had the chance to adapt to this bizarre new environment. An environment that, as this paper argues, is not healthy for us.

This change in environment has led to all sorts of issues, but this paper explores this idea through how it has contributed to the rise of depression in recent years. In this exploration, the author identified six environmental changes that explicitly have contributed to the rise, them being a change in diet, the rise of obesity, a decrease in physical activity, exposure to sunlight, amount of time asleep, and finally an increase in the rate of isolation and loneliness. I expand on these changes below.

The change of diet and the rise of obesity are arguably the largest contributors to the rise of depression. The prevalence of obesity (defined as a person having a BMI of 30 or greater) has risen from 23% in 1994 to over 40% in 2019*, with now over 70% of the US population being overweight (BMI of 25 or more) (CDC, 2020). This is due to several factors, first in foremost being the food available to Americans. The American diet is primarily composed of the following, “1) glycemic load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3) macronutrient composition, 4) micronutrient density, 5) acid-base balance, 6) sodium-potassium ratio, and 7) fiber content” (Cordain et al., 2005)” foods that would be great to stock up on as hunter-gatherers who never know when the next famine will strike, but terrible to eat as routine. Unfortunately, the foods that are cheapest and most readily available in the United States are characteristic of this diet, and because of that, the obesity rate continues to rise.

On the same topic, our environment has led to a decrease in physical activity. It is estimated that the average hunter-gather expended over 3,000 calories each day. To put that in perspective, my apple watch told me that I burnt 106 calories of one mile run last week, meaning that to match a hunter-gatherer I would have to run 27 more miles at the same pace (assuming that the calorie expenditure remained at a constant rate and my watch wasn’t pulling my leg).

I wasn’t able to find any data on how many calories the average American burns per day, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it's not even close to 3,000. The extent of exercise for most people I know is maybe the gym three times a week, and even that is rare. Otherwise, the only exercise they get is a walk every once in a while when the remote work gets too boring.

With Covid, people are spending more time at home, an environment that is not often associated with getting exercise. More time at home forms habits, and leads to less time leaving the house for a walk or going to shoot some hoops. It doesn’t help that gyms are the perfect places for Covid to spread with all that huffing and puffing occurring right next to each other. 

This is especially alarming considering that exercise is the most straightforward and healthiest medicine against depression. It may go without saying that it also prevents obesity, which we’ve seen to be a reliable trigger to the depression cycle. 

Continuing on the idea that people are spending more time indoors, the lack of sunlight exposure and decrease in sleep has been linked to increased depression rates. It follows logically that the more time you spend inside, the less sunlight that you are exposed to. Vitamin D comes from this sunlight, and several studies have shown a correlation between low Vitamin D Levels and depression onset. Irregular Vitamin D levels also contribute to insomnia and poor sleep habits, which is worrying because Americans are no longer getting enough of it. The average American adult slept about 8 hours in 1960 (Kripke et al., 1979), but now sleeps 6 hrs and 40 minutes on weekdays and 7 hrs and 7 minutes on weekends. A low amount of sleep has been linked to several mood disorders, and is also a critical trigger of depression. All of this is certainly not helped by screens we are constantly glued to.

I bet you’re starting to see a pattern of interdependence we have here with our environment that contributes to the cycle of depression and why it's so hard to extricate yourself from. If I’m obese, I’m going to be depressed, which is going to cause me to stress eat and become more obese and not work out and stay indoors which will depress me even more because now I am not getting any sunlight and my circadian rhythm is all screwed up causing me to sleep less which makes me more depressed so I eat even more…takes a breath…and the cycle continues. The problem is that I haven’t even gotten to the worst of it yet.

Remember earlier when I told you that humans are products of our environments, which for almost the entire time we’ve been in this anatomical state has been the environment of a hunter-gatherer. Well, a primary staple of that environment was the tribe, the community of hunter-gatherers that joined together to increase their odds at survival. What am I getting at here? I’m getting at the fact that we humans are deeply social creatures, creatures that for most of their existence relied on these strong bonds to others to survive. Now in the face of a society built in a way that creates an isolating disease that needs the help of others to overcome, these integral bonds are nowhere to be found.

This is the main point of one of my favorite books, Tribes by Sebastion Junger, and I’ll go more into this at a later date, but ever since the birth of society, humans have become more and more isolated from each other. Agriculture and then industry allowed people to accumulate property, which in turn allowed them to live more individualistic lifestyles. We didn’t need to depend on each other as much anymore to survive, and because of that we began to have fewer and fewer relationships.

In 1985, the General Social Survey found that the mean and mode for number of confidants, people with whom one can comfortably discuss important issues, were both 3 and 3. In 2004, a repeat of the survey revealed that the mean and mode had respectively dropped to 2 and 0 (McPherson et al., 2006). Integration of the global economies has led to greater competition in the workplace and higher education and with that a greater disparity in equity. Increased rates of relocation for jobs disrupt social networks and the rise of secularism has removed a key part of common ground. On an anecdotal level, I see this with my college friends. After graduation removed the binding factor that kept us in the same place, my friends moved all across the country and have struggled to find new friends in these Covid times. Loneliness is up in America due to these factors, and that’s not even mentioning the prevalence of social media and its effects.

Lonely people have no one to lean on when they are depressed, and because of that have less of a chance of extricating themselves from that cycle. This lack of human connections creates yet another trigger to the positive feed feedback loop that is depression. 

Look, I’m not here to say that all of society is bad, quite the contrary. I don’t know about you, but I love my bed and home and electricity and youtube account. I love the hospitals that kept me alive when I was younger and the vaccines that are now protecting me against Covid. Society and modernization are great things, just the ways they were constructed have a few defects that lead us down some unhealthy.

The good news about that is that this all can be fixed. We created this environment, so we can damn well fix it as well. But that will be the exploration of a future piece. For now, make sure to get your exercise, your sleep, and get outside you nerd.