Lifestyle is more than just diet, there's the activity level, sun exposure, and different things in the water. I think we should just start saying that gray cubicles are bad for the microbiome and roll with that.
By the time you actually get the time to live like how you are supposed to live, you are old, in retirement, fragile from a lifetime of inactivity, and can't make up for your years lost of good physical health that you had to spend at a desk growing lethargic instead.
I frequently do 6 mile walks with my dog, 8 miles would only be about 3 hours. Considering how much time people spend planted in front of a TV each day on average that shouldn't be that hard to hit. Tell you what, have the corpos give me an extra 1.5hrs each day and I'll give up 1.5hrs of TV and then we'll have enough for that 8 miles.
We really need to take back our time from the exploitation class. A lot of problems go away if you work fewer hours a week, but there exist very few jobs that will pay anywhere near a livable wage for that. Like, I could easily survive on half my income if only someone would give me back half my time for it, but that just isn't an option.
Quit your job today and start providing a service for other people if that's what you will.
Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Walking is a terrible form of exercise, it's meant to save energy. You could run for 20 minutes a day and do strength training for another 30 minutes to an hour and never be in bad shape in your life.
Good job I'm not you then.
I don’t doubt that there are diminishing returns, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that “walking is a terrible form of exercise.” I was just reading _Built to Move_, and they contend that one hour of intense exercise followed by an otherwise sedentary lifestyle does not make you healthy. Walking might not be the best cardiovascular activity, but it is good for your hips, alignment, digestive tract, promotes healthy sleep schedule, etc.
To take it literally, it is impossible for eight billion humans (current world population estimate) to live as migratory hunter-gatherers on earth, even if the planet was terraformed back to how it was ten thousand years ago. It's highly unlikely even eight hundred million people people can live like this. In fact, it's possible there are not enough resources that even eighty million can live like this.
So aside from the terraforming, world population would probably have to shrink to less than 1% of what it is currently.
What changes the equation a little bit though is when we mine or extract resources like fertilizers and oil from below the surface of the planet. That is now adding nutrients and more energy to the system that wasn't around at least in premodern times. All that oil is old biomass anyhow, so burning it and adding it back to the atmosphere would potentially make it available again for species that take advantage of carbon fixation, if we give these species room to accumulate this biomass out of the atmosphere.
It's kind of interesting to think about how even with today's combustion engine tech, we could solve our climate change crises and set the earth to whatever greenhouse gas level we'd like, if we merely strove to balance this system by growing out sufficient biomass.
Abandon the idea of isolated nuclear family living towards more social small communities. Suburban life is terrible for every single happiness metric.
Embrace as much nature as you can. A city park stroll on Sunday ain't enough.
Many jobs still benefit from close proximity to other people and businesses, but cities have no business being 10+ million people and constantly growing, when many of us just spend most of our time behind a laptop screen.
We're at the dawn of an enormous social and civil reorganisation after the massive migration towards cities started in the Industrial Revolution, yet no-one is spending much time thinking about it. The pandemic has massively accelerated the disillusion of city life by knowledge workers, but the only voice we can hear are bosses wanting the return of the status quo, with everybody back in their downtown offices. I would expect more open push-back from us than just grumbling about it on forums.
Maybe it's only me, it feels like it's overdue but we're dragging our collective feet to reimagine better connection between the modern human and our natural roots, especially in the nascent era of climate awareness and loneliness epidemic caused by modern city life.
Why do so many people want to live in the suburbs then? Are they all myopic and stupid?
They want enough space to raise kids. They want a back yard. They want to still be close enough to restaurants and other amenities. They want to be in better school districts. They want to be around less crime.
But no one I know who moved to the burbs is particularly happy about it. They see it as a necessary evil.
The trouble for me personally is that it’s worse on most of the metrics that matters to me.
There are just some things about suburbia that are fundamentally worse and never won’t be. But that involves tradeoffs, and good luck finding or affording a place with a yard in the city. It’s just a bummer that the tradeoffs can be so severe.
At risk of stating the obvious: it depends on what city!
This is one of the things a lot of people say they want but almost nobody really wants. But the truth is that we like the way the western world works too much to give it up.
We like getting Amazon packages the same day we order. We like TikTok. We like pushing a button and getting a car to come pick us up. We like making a ton of money for stressing over deadlines and sitting in meetings run by pointless MBAs.
AKA "What do you mean 'We' Kemosabe?"
Even today, largely surrounded by industrial scale agricultural farming in the Western Australian wheatbelt (making frequent trips into the Murchison quiet zone for radio astronomy work) I don't see much of what you talk about despite people here using cutting edge tech in farming and many doing FiFo (fly in | fly out) work on largely automated mines that in toto shift almost a billion metric tonne per annum.
Western Society has some interesting slices to it that many miss due to being locked into their own bubble horizons.
Of course, we can't realistically go back to the paleolithic but there is a sense that you can't afford to not get a baseline of physical activity in.
No one is more productive being out of shape. You don't get less stressed from being less physically capable.
If a person can't find time in a day for enough physical activity but they are reading this then maybe they are making a poor trade off with their time.