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By Mark Lundegren

If we look around us, we can see that people often live far below their potential. 

I don’t mean materially or in terms of social standing, or even necessarily against reliable measures of our health and well-being.  What I mean, simply, is that we have a common inability to make the most of our time and personal resources, to consider and then act in ways that reliably get us what we most want.  Many of us miss important opportunities for larger and more satisfying lives, for new perspective and more optimal choices, literally each day. 

We often sense this truth of our time, even as we are apt not to admit it, even to ourselves.  In quiet conversation, people from various walks of life will often open up and tell you they should be doing more with their lives.  When pressed to explore or explain this thought, they often speak of feeling trapped somehow and limited by their circumstances, or uncertain about what changes might be best or possible for them, or that they fear change even as they know they might benefit from it.

This common finding and feeling of ours – amidst unprecedented prosperity and freedom in the developed world by any reasonable measure – underscores that human thinking and action need not be and in fact never is optimal.  That is, our general approach to life can be quite limited in many respects and still become widespread and even a dominant pattern in society.  Our culture can close important doors to better modes of living and still carry forward into the future and become deeply rooted in a people, even fostering reduced health and engendering irrational fear of change in our lives.  As we can see from our history, our patterns of ideas and actions similarly need not be optimal to advance technological and economic progress, and perhaps cannot become more optimal if they advance material enrichment above other important considerations. 

In truth, our patterns of thinking and action need only have certain identifiable qualities to make them enduring, qualities that cause them to be situationally functional and attractive to people, even when better alternatives can be found or even are recognized.  In a sense, many thoughts and ways of acting can be like a flu virus, always around and present in our communities, taking advantage of the fact of large numbers of people living in close quarters, but mostly to the benefit of the virus (though sometimes affording us new immunity).  None of us wishes to contract the flu, or to suffer from a life constrained by unconscious and limiting beliefs and habits, and yet we may do little to reduce either potential in our daily lives. 

For people in pursuit of healthier and fuller life, it is important to understand why some forms of thinking and behavior really can be contagious and self-replicating in society, just like a virus, moving through society and our lives without tangible benefit to us.  And we must consider how we each can better see, rid ourselves of, and protect ourselves against this potential for persistent, limiting, and unhealthy ideas and habits in our own lives. 

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To begin to explore this important and far-ranging theme, let’s begin by examining examples of the persistent ideas and habits of which I speak, ones that are popular and enduring, and often far from than optimal, keeping us from new and better ways of thinking and acting.  If we take the time to do this, we soon realize that there are different forms of persistent thoughts and actions, and that persistency may be far more widespread and powerful than we first imagined. 

Some persistent ideas and behaviors have an immediate appeal and special attractiveness solely in their novelty.  They captivate us with their freshness and crowd out more familiar alternatives, at least for a time.  This form of thinking and acting is thereby well-suited to take the shape of temporary fads and crazes.  Such phenomena are apt to die off quickly once their novelty is exhausted, perhaps to be replaced by still newer affections waiting for us to give ourselves over to them and their novelty.  New popular idioms of speech, fashions of all sorts, and music and dance trends often fit in this first category of persistence, coming upon us unexpectedly and passing over us in waves that can be measured in months, giving us new content and excitement in our lives for a time, and perhaps never allowing us to dry ourselves completely before the next wave comes. 

As an example of this first form of persistency, there is a teenage pop-star in fevered vogue right now as I write this, one who is on the lips or at least somewhere in the consciousness of nearly everyone I meet, by definition crowding out other objects of attention to a greater or lesser degree.  This young star, as you might have guessed, is far more sensational than exceptional, in both ability and trajectory.  There is of course a strong probability that this star will not be quite so famous and captivating by the time these words reach you, and that if I were to name her now, you might even think my reference passé, a curious artifact in our memory.  And yet, right now, she is a true phenom and an infectious force in our popular culture, as likely a different and not so different new star is in reading this at another time.  Like most pop stars, both will have a fresh face, an act that is novel and yet recognizable and aligned with the sensibility of their time, and the piquancy to all ages that comes from a young and ecstatic following, all of which are likely to lose these qualities over time, as their novelty is exhausted.  In these and similar forms of fads, we expect instances of persistence that may become quite passionate and widespread, but in the end also short-lived, though there are exceptions (suggesting different characteristics and another form of persistency).

If we turn our attention to other forms of persistent thinking and behavior, we can see two other related categories that typically last longer than the popular and fast-moving fads and crazes I just described.  One category involves affections that come and endure for a time, perhaps for several years or more.  The other category is similar, but differs in that the ideas or behaviors return to popular favor and the attention of culture more than once, perhaps even returning perennially over the course of a century or more (or becoming a permanent feature in some people’s lives, especially if in vogue during the identity-coalescing years of adolescence).  These two types of persistence take the form of trends, styles, or movements that may pervade a community for an extended time, until they finally begin fade, perhaps living on to frame or form the content of our memories of an epoch for an extended time.  

As an American, I immediately think of the wildly popular mid-twentieth century artist Norman Rockwell, the traditional life of his time that he enshrined in paint, and the equally popular early radio dramas and ballroom dancing and fashions of his time.  These national affections persisted for a decade or more, and now fill our often reverent thoughts and recollections of this period.  In this example, these deeply entrenched cultural phenomena are also not just simply remembered fondly but are potentially returning too.  There is continued interest in and periodically rekindled forms of these things and this epoch, as there are in and of many of the other seemingly discrete decades of the twentieth century, far more than any decade of the nineteenth century (in the United States, the nineteenth century themes of the wild west and civil war are strong and long enduring parts of the culture and history, not viewed as decadal phenomena and thus are likely persistency of a different variety).  The specific type of persistence that any remembered decade contains within it includes this potential for new outbreaks of attention and influence, if conditions align.  Here, instead of novelty in the sense of newness, we see novelty recast as uniqueness or distinctness, and it is the distinctiveness of any past era or preoccupation, its potential for both fit and contrast with a later time, that allows for the resurgence of old eras and their pastimes.  As I write this, the 1960s are back as a fashion style and not for the first time, so much so that we might wonder if this is more than a periodic persistency destined to eventually burn itself out. 

A fourth form of persistency has a recurring quality as well, but is not linked to any one period or evocative of a specific time and place.  Such recurring persistency, for example, might involve the feelings of nostalgia and nationalistic behavior that frequently emerge during an outbreak of hostilities, during an economic downturn, or around a major anniversary of a nation or historic event.  This type of persistency is less about a return to an earlier mood or time of life than it is a move to a specific and recurring general frame of mind.  It is instead a general reaction or patterned response that people adopt when faced with protracted stress or deviation from routine daily conditions, or when there is heightened attention to history and the society generally (with its perennial challenges and stresses).  As an example of this, notice the patterns of thought and action at the next major electrical outage or natural disaster, or even during the next election cycle in your country or the next round of Olympic Games.  Likely, you will find familiar conduct and thinking emergent and actively promoted (with expectations that you adopt this thinking and use of your attention), familiar discussions and debates of change that should occur for the future (and which sometimes do result in change), and often highly regular and predictable responses to these and other recurring events.

This rough exposition of persistency suggests, since it is a cross-cultural and expected phenomenon, that persistence is innate, driven by our human nature and inherent circumstances.  I think this is true, even if the content and manifestations of persistency can take forms that vary between cultures, simply because similar phenomena can be observed across all cultures.  If the fact of or our potential for persistent judgments and conduct is innate, we might hypothesize that persistency has been selected by nature and that it is functional to people.  I think this is true too, and here we must be careful not to accept the persistency of ideas and especially the content of specific forms of persistency simply because persistency may be natural (this is the lure of the naturalistic fallacy, a persistent idea in modern western culture). 

One reason for care is that what may have been functional in the more constrained condition of wild nature may be limiting or even detrimental to us now, in the context of advanced society and mass culture.  The second reason to remain cautious toward the potential naturalness of persistency is that while perhaps functional in nature, and a trait perhaps selected over millions of years, it is unlikely that natural persistency ever resulted in optimal thought and action for us – since functionality and survival of genes was its goal.  Natural human enmity and inter-clan violence, when intra-clan cooperation might have been consciously favored as a general model, is an example of this.  We are thus right to look at both natural and cultural persistency in a balanced way, as potentially useful but also potentially limiting, and worthy of our attention as we seek more conscious, chosen, and freer life.  In thinking through some of my examples, however, it does seem that much of our modern persistency is our innate nature taken over and infected amidst the new conditions of large settled societies and mass culture, likely crowding out alternative and more beneficial uses of our time and attention, individually and as a society.

All of the categories and examples of persistent ideas and behavior we have discussed raise our overall awareness of this phenomenon in our lives, but really are just a prelude to the deeper form of persistency I most want to talk about today.  A fifth and far more important set of ideas, feelings, judgments, and uses of our attention can last much longer than the fads, epochs, and the perennially recurring themes of a society.  There is persistence that can become deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day life and thinking of a people, part of its long-term culture and traditions, a constant and tenacious condition of persistency so to speak.  As a condition, this deeper and often unseen persistency can remain in our midst throughout our lives and the life of a culture, and really is the culture in its essence.  As I suggested before, such persistent ideas and corresponding patterns of action can even exist in spite of their being far less than optimal, defined here in terms of objectively promoting health, well-being, and quality of life. 

It is to this last and often most intractable category of persistent ideas and behaviors that I primarily write today, to the constraint of culture in our quest for higher life, especially as this persistency occurs in or around us and constrains our individual lives.  That said, what I will say applies at least in part to other, more short-lived or cyclical patterns of thought and action, which together are a part of and help to perpetuate culture and can vastly reduce our potential for chosen attention and action when we succumb to them.

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In his provocative book, Stumbling On Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes about the limitations and opportunities we each face in knowing, as opposed to and distinct from creating, the lives we want for ourselves and others for the future.  In his book, Gilbert summarizes key research findings about universal psychological constraints in our pursuit of an accurate understanding our happiness, constraints within each of us that inhibit our ability to optimize our future plans.  These internal constraints include specific innate and evolved neurological structures within our brains, which we have inherited from nature, and specific psychological structures of thinking and feeling within our minds, which we often derive from our environment, social relationships, and ongoing life experiences.

It is in regards to this second set of constraints, to the structures or patterns of thinking and feeling we take from the world around us, that Gilbert discusses the phenomenon of deep persistency or acculturation I have introduced.  As suggested earlier, often unconscious and relatively unchanging patterns in our emotions, thoughts and actions – affective, cognitive, and behavioral persistence – taken from our culture and environment can create powerful constraints on our perception and freedom and power of choice, constraints that psychologists, social scientists, and evolutionary theorists of our time are now coming to understand and better appreciate for their complexity and importance. 

In one passage, Gilbert writes, “Ideas can flourish if they preserve the social systems that allow them to be transmitted.”  This short sentence elegantly summarizes important and even remarkable new thinking about the way in which our ideas and habitual behavior can become persistently and subtly embedded in our social environment and our own lives, to the point where we do not notice and attend to them, even when they are inimical to our personal or collective benefit, and even when they are patently untrue and self-deceptive.

Simply put, if ideas work to reinforce existing social structures, they can be favored and spread across people, even if they bring relatively high costs and negative side effects in an objective sense or when compared with other ideas.  Such ideas and their resulting behaviors need only promote a threshold level of functionality for society, within a sufficient number of individual lives, to endure.  Or they need only sufficiently crowd out other ideas, by possessing a requisite attractiveness or other self-promoting qualities, to replicate and persist across a people, as people replicate and persist.  The ideas and behaviors of any culture are thus likely to have only partial utility to its people, even as they remain fixed in the minds of most adults, and promote life choices that cause the same ideas to find their way into most children and grandchildren. 

Another way of looking at this phenomena is to say that persistent ideas can survive by being prolific, in a biological or organic way and thus with at least two uses of this word.  First, ideas must encourage or cannot inhibit the production and care of children and grandchildren as part of their content, so that they can both reliably spread and then be maintained across a people over time.  Second, in some inverse relation to the first characteristic, ideas must crowd out other ideas in the human mind, in their inherent competition for our attention.  We can reason why persistent ideas must inhibit alternative ideas and open thinking to some degree, since ones that do (and that spread sufficiently on their own or with other ideas) can be expected to be favored by selection forces, and are more likely to both inhabit and then reinforce a culture, especially in the absence of external pressures.  The key point here is that persistent ideas can exist for themselves and need merely suffice in the lives of people, or satisfice to recall Herbert Simon’s description of intelligent method.  Ideas and behavior need only be situationally functional relative to alternatives, and need never be optimal or pursue optimality in a more objective sense of this word, to remain in our midst.  In actual or self-created isolation, a culture can thus naturally gravitate to its own center, one that may be quite undesirable objectively, and remain there for an extended time.

There’s more, even leaving aside how persistency might lead and probably has led to natural selection and genetic changes that shape and develop our innate human capacity for persistent feelings, thoughts, and actions.  Strictly within the realm of culture, once an initial network of complementary ideas have been selected and become persistent in a community of people, these ideas can begin an evolution of their own, driven solely by social forces within the community, as long as they remain sufficiently functional in the general environment and to the people who carry them.  With isolation or only limited or inhibited outside influences, initial ideas can be built upon, altered and added to, or replaced or reduced in importance through the same mechanism of cognitive and sexual selection that led them to become persistent in the first place.  In a culture, any change or natural drift in conditions – perhaps by aided intergenerational rivalry or simply from individuals seeking esteemed social niches – can cause either existing or new ideas to become more prolific than others, and thus replace the formerly dominant positions of other ideas (just as we see in a more limited way in successions of fads).  As we can observe in the world and our history, elaborate and ornate cultures, as well as quite ethnocentric and defensive cultures, are readily and reliably created through unmanaged selection forces, just as wild nature creates ornate and greatly elaborated species over time, especially in relative isolation.

I have written on other occasions about self-reinforcing, compounding, and sub-optimal thinking and feeling, and their potential to both reduce our health and reinforce these conditions around us.  As an example, in an article entitled Health At The Holidays, I discussed how unhealthy and even startling expectations and social practices can make their way into and find firm footing at the holidays, despite having visibly corrosive effects on our general health and well-being, simply by have a self-perpetuating quality and influencing our future attitudes and behavior.  I argued this potential for unconscious and detrimental persistency compelled us to become more attentive and responsible during traditional holidays and, ultimately, to create new and more optimal forms of holiday celebrations and rituals, ones that are more consciously and expressly health-promoting.

Today, I want to encourage expanded consideration of persistent ideas and life patterns that are entrenched in our everyday contemporary life, especially when they negatively affect our lives and communities.  I also want to underscore our need and ability to understand the reasons for this persistence, so we may take action to counter persistency and create more optimal conditions for ourselves and others.  To advance our health and quality of life, and that of the communities and nations we live in, we must each recognize how and why persistency can occur, and learn to see when and where it does occur, particularly in popular ideas and habits that are harmful and limiting to us, and even those that are life threatening.  From there, strategies to reveal persistency to others and circumvent undesirable habitual patterns can come as a next step.

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To better understand and achieve new awareness of our vulnerability to deep and harmful persistence, it is essential to appreciate the rich web of ideas and life practices that surround us all, whether we live in a modern city or a thatched hut at the edge of civilization.  In truth, none of us is ever a blank slate or perfect window on the world, even though we may be apt to fall into this naive and egocentric mode of perception.  Regardless of our circumstances, if we are to cultivate ourselves and come more aware in and of the world, we must each redevelop our intuition so that we are attentive to the many constraints and limitations that come with our human brain, mind, and culture.  Only in this way can we reliably discover and overcome the inevitable and unending patterns of undesirable persistency that work to shade and color our perceptions and choices.

I might underscore this imperative by having us spend a moment thinking of cults, whether religious, philosophical, or situational.  All cults share similar characteristics, even as they are quite diverse in content and expression, and size and scope.  Cults almost always involve enforced physical or perceptual isolation of their members, a strong bias against and even overt hostility to surrounding people and their patterns of life, the promise of greater happiness or purity through life within the cult, an ideology that promotes reproduction or the enlisting of new members, a cooperative ethos that catalyzes favorable economic activity, a cult hero or object, and a caste of interpreters or enforcers of social order.  With these pre-conditions for proliferation of a cult, elaborate, self-perpetuating, and evolving patterns and thinking and behavior can develop, which are generally viewed from the outside very differently than from within the cult.  Importantly, when people are removed from cults of all sorts, it can be psychologically difficult and deconstruct their identity, even as it may be difficult physically as well and why removal from outside is often needed.  Ex-cult members even routinely report not fully realizing they were living within a cult and can later look at the cult with an outside and more objective perspective.  Both facts suggest that cult members are typically not neurologically impaired, that the social order within a cult can be an invisible force to its members, and that this potential for invisibility is a powerful and likely biologically based feature of our nature (since cult members appear normal neurologically), even suggesting active selection for a cult-mindedness among humans generally.

This brief look at cults, which typically live as small eddies within a larger host culture, might lead us to question how different a community or society is from a cult, other than in scale.  In truth, many of the attributes of a cult find their analogues within larger cultures and societies, and really in any human community.  All enduring social groups naturally require maintenance of order and rules of conduct, provisioning of their members, and expansion or at least maintenance of their membership.  All social groups thus take on some of the characteristics and use many of the techniques of a cult, admittedly in a looser way and with greater interaction with the outside environment, though such differences are far from absolute.  In truth, the outside view of any nation or culture is always different than the view from within it, as expatriates soon learn (and can use to their advantage), whether they remain abroad or return to live in their native community.  As mentioned before, cultures are also likely naturally inclined to be self-referential and inimical to new ideas and outside influences, and can be seen to operate in just this way to some degree.

Once we begin to think of our own community from this perspective, and to examine any of its features or practices, we quickly see many ideas and routine ways of perceiving we were not aware of and had not examined before.  We soon learn to appreciate the vast extent of ideas and patterns we have not consciously chosen that are always present in us and can exert a strong influence on us, and the many forms they can take.  These ideas and practices include our inherited traditions, our customs and individual mannerisms, our unexamined assumptions and beliefs about the way life is and how it can and must be structured, the things that hold our attention and occupy our time throughout the day, and even our common sense and the expectations we unconsciously set for ourselves and one another.  A way to think about this impact of our environment and culture is with the metaphor of speech.  We each speak, and live, with both a particular language and a regional accent and individual affect that reflects our distinct origins, life experiences, and innate biology.  So it is with the force of culture and our nature generally.

Sometimes, of course, we find truly beneficial ideas and needed universal practices in our environment, proven and therefore persistent over time for good cause, for their ability to further society and not just themselves.  Examples of this include our inclination to come to the aid of others, to cooperate reciprocally, and to treat some thoughts and actions as immoral and taboo.  Some inevitable persistence is therefore important and beneficial to any society of people, and has evolved to a secure place in both simple and complex society because of this, and thus even may be biologically based.  Essential persistence has been selected over time, by nature and society and across many situations, because it is critical to the advancement of life, and human life is made better or even possible because of them.  Our tender and nurturing feelings toward children, as another example, would most certainly fall into this category (as it does for many other mammalian species dependent on communal networks for survival).

In other cases, however, we can find persistent ideas and practices that are less inevitable, and make far less sense when we look at them carefully, or no sense at all.  As we explore the neurological, conceptual, and social phenomena in and around us, in every culture and community, we gradually can discover a great number of ideas and behaviors that are perhaps initially curious and then prove senseless under extended scrutiny.  We find that these ideas and behaviors are in fact merely persistent, situationally functional to some degree and self-reinforcing, but far from optimal in a broader or universal sense.  Such feeling, thinking, and acting perpetuates in our minds or communities because of qualities inherent to the ideas or behavior patterns themselves, rather than because they are highly beneficial or universally necessary to people.  This persistence may well do far more harm than good, in our individual lives and whole communities, and only has achieved certain threshold characteristics in our particular social or cultural setting to continue in our midst.

As I mentioned before, unhealthy and arbitrary ideas and social practices in our midst include many of our traditional rituals and their modern mutations, but are hardly confined there.  We can see examples of persistent, flu-like ideas and habits everyday and everywhere, ideas and social patterns that simply self-perpetuate and do us no good.  Obvious examples of this are the numerous customs that occur throughout the course of our day, in every traditional and contemporary culture, especially ones that are patently unhealthy.  These include the manner in which we commonly eat, work, interact, and socialize, as well as our rites and practices in special settings.  The next time you feel awkward by not wishing to raise a glass of alcohol in a toast, or by not wanting to eat unhealthy traditional foods at a social gathering, you will be reminded of just how ubiquitous and deeply imbedded these self-reinforcing customs are (and importantly, how arbitrary they often are in content).  You will perhaps also begin see the reproductive consequences of forgoing these social customs, since unless we are creative and attentive to others who share our awareness or preferences, we risk our lowering our social status and reproductive potential if we do not follow these customs.

A more subtle and controlling persistency is contained in the framework of ideas and feelings that underlies contemporary society itself, which supports the way life is structured generally and guides what is prioritized by our cultures.  This includes what thinking and acting is encouraged or discouraged as we move through the course of our days and lives, what we do and do not do in the face of our environmental imperatives, and especially how child-rearing and home life is encouraged. If you reflect on how the majority of people spend their time, even right now as you read this – enmeshed in the patterns and obligations of traditional cultures, or running atop the treadmill of modern consumerist and careerist life – you can see clearly arbitrary content, content that works to both constrain and define us, preclude alternative ideas and choices, and shape and stabilize us in our environment, notably at a particular level of health and well-being, if we allow our cultural content to do this.  This insight gives new meaning to the popular refrain, “go with the flow.”  In truth, greater health and higher life often, if not always, run contrary to the general flow (the result of blind selection forces) of any time and place in important ways.

As an example of these subtle and powerful evolved forces in our lives, let me discuss human shelter for a moment (though I might have chosen cuisine or clothing or any of the artifacts of human society).  Constructing shelter is universally functional for people in almost all localities and circumstances, and certainly is endemic to fixed human life.  But in truth, most human construction today has little to do with the simple provision of shelter.  In all developed societies, elaborate systems of architecture have in fact grown out of earlier building practices aimed more directly at creating basic shelter (though even these practices, as they exist above the creation of simple huts, are not pure sheltering either.  All architectural systems evolve to communicate rank and status, of both the designer and owner of the structure, notably by appealing to and expressing a particular taste and aesthetic held in regard by others of a time’  Life other social practice, architecture thus generally reflects and reinforces a specific class and style of human life.  This communication and reinforcement is of course always socially and/or sexually functional and driven by these human imperatives, which is what makes any architecture both persistent and naturally evolving (since status requires varying alliance with and contrast to earlier building styles).  Thus, so much of architectural content is arbitrary, situational, and only tangentially focused on shelter – let alone focused on fostering optimal human health and well-being in our built environment.  Many alternative architectures are always possible in any local, but we routinely see a narrowing of choices and then a gradual and familiar evolution of styles across all cultures, communities, and social groups, aimed at social currency primarily rather than optimal human sheltering.  Architecture is thus a clear case of persistent, socially selected ideas that respond to and reinforce local conditions of culture.  It is thinking and behavior that is incrementally functionally or rational in a highly bounded way, but often quite irrational or senseless when made the custom or used to promote the general well-being of a society.

As I suggested, there are of course many other evolved and self-evolving ideas and practices that similarly work to shape our personal environment and limit our life perspective.  The example of architectural systems is important in part as a demonstration of an arbitrary and persistent human system, but also in part because it demonstrates that persistent systems can be seen for what they are.  By this, I mean that many of our behavioral and conceptual patterns can be examined for their relative functionality and efficiency, for their universal optimality given a natural environment, and in particular, for the elements they contain that objectively increase or reduce our health and well-being.  To underscore this idea in our example, we might measure hours of work or energy and material expended per person to meet basic needs for shelter, or the relative life satisfaction and longevity of a population living in a built environment, or alternative systems and zoning rules that might produce a preferable final result (i.e. healthier babies and adults).  This idea hardly requires invasive social engineering or a particular ideological bent, simply the practical examination of self-defeating behaviors and the institution of universal rules to encourage more optimal use of resources in the promotion of healthy and fulfilled individual life (notably discouragement of excessive display of status, an idea compellingly advocated by the economist Robert Frank).

Whenever our cognitive and social patterns contain obvious arbitrary content that leads both individuals and whole peoples to live life less optimally and below their full potential – when it fosters thinking and conduct that is perhaps smart for one person but senseless as a pattern for everyone – change is possible and may be highly desirable, even if care must be taken in the process of guiding new choices.  We must be cautious to create alternatives that are objectively preferable and not simply a new opportunity for senseless and self-defeating competition, simply for a new expression of age-old persistency.  This admittedly can be a difficult progression, but I will argue that it is our future and a natural progression of human life, since the alternative is life lived below our attention and in ways that are both illogical and unfulfilling. 

Our long human history, after all, has been a broad trend from instinctual to conditioned to more conscious and examined life, however imperfectly and haphazard this trend has been, and there is no reason why this development should not continue.  The work of the philosopher John Rawles will perhaps prove very helpful in this task as the social policy level, who asks us to design society prospectively, as a place that we must live in but not knowing in advance our eventual position in it.  As individuals, we of course must ask the opposite challenge: given the society and social position we know, how can we best uncover and advance our most important life aims within our lives?

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To conclude and bring home our discussion of the place and power of persistency in our lives and social environment, consider the way people of all sorts live today around the world.  Of our twenty four-hours each day, perhaps sixteen are biologically mandated.  This is time spent responding directly to our basic needs for sleep, food, hygiene, shelter, and requisite social interactions.  The other third of our time is thus generally not mandated, but is time that is often quite structured and seemingly full. 

As I suggested at the beginning, and as you can observe in and for yourself, our unmandated time is life that very often feels quite mandated to people.  We often feel we have little control over what may be a full third of our time, time in truth where nature demands nothing from us, especially if we do not have a large family to support.  This non-mandated time, which can be recast as free and thus either implicitly or explicitly chosen time, is often structured in ways we can be at a loss to explain, except to rationalize or moralize it as corresponding to our personal preferences and social commitments.  And we may be apt to both defend and despair of these preferences and commitments.  But, as we have asked before in our discussion, why?

If you consider any of your own “non-mandated” habits or pastimes, and I would encourage you to do just this as our discussion comes to a close, you may begin to see the subtle selection forces at work within your own life, forces that lead to persistence, shaping us as people and showing how we are at least partial products of our communities.  Many of our personal habits and behavior may be as genuinely inexplicable as I have suggested, but they can be equally hard to deconstruct and overcome.  It often seems as if there is great momentum to our preferences and activities, from both within and outside us, and alternatives feel and may actually be difficult and inconvenient, at least in the short run.

To underscore this point, and as a final example of the ubiquitous persistence that touches us all, let’s consider our manner of dress and what we are wearing right now, which can be seen as our personal architecture of sorts.  Rather than asking you to look at whether you are wearing stripes or solids, instead I would like you to consider how both you and others would react to your adopting a completely different and decidedly unconventional form of dressing (or a conventional one if you and your peers tend to the unconventional), and what the practical consequences would be for you of such a change.  In your case, would the change make you feel more or less comfortable and apt to socialize with others, and would the people around you be apt to embrace or ostracize you for the change?  Would you have more or fewer potential social companions and, importantly for our discussion, sexual partners?  Likely, you would gradually gravitate to a new social network, or one might gravitate to you (and perhaps not gradually).

With this simple example, since fashion is largely arbitrary and referential in content, perhaps you can begin to more closely see and feel the forces of persistency I have described, at work on us all.  Even such arbitrary but obvious changes as our attire are difficult to sustain because the structure of our culture or subculture reinforces itself in and through us all, and makes many changes difficult.  In this way, environmental forces can subtly and forcibly, and often enjoyably, work to pattern and socialize us in ways we do not naturally perceive.  They can make us stay rooted within our circumstances, and we may naturally fail to see our circumstances as circumstances.  Culture can make us feel more rather than less discomfort when our circumstances and expectations are impinged upon, narrow us into generally accepted ways of living and valuation, and ultimately lead us to have and nurture children with people sharing, accepting, and promoting the elements of our culture and circumstances (or to not have children or to otherwise live apart from our culture).

If any society, or really any individual from any species, is thus inevitably situationally focused, self-referential, and self-reinforcing to some degree, if we are always subject to evolving and satisfying selection forces, and if we are always seen differently from outside our perceptual construct than from inside it, life then always is only partly responsive to the greater environment and our full potential in it at any time – for optimal life within, let alone beyond, the society or species of a time and place.  This may seem obvious once stated and now that we have explored the mechanisms that make this so, but it is an idea that few of us have begun to use systematically to make more out of their own circumstances, or to live more optimally in a universal sense, or to inform our social policies.

Does the fact of persistence within all life situations imply that we must get out of our social castes and host cultures, and even away from our species, in order to see our lives and life opportunities more clearly?  I think so.  It is common, as in my earlier reference to expatriates and in my own frequent discussions of people hiking in wild nature, for individuals who remove themselves (or are removed) from a wide variety of forms of habituated living, whether temporarily or permanently, to report fresh perspective on their lives and the world.  This fact, to me, is important and prescriptive for us all.  It implies the need for movement, and for new experiences and even random interactions, as a regular and integral part of all healthy, optimizing, and growing human life.  It also suggests the importance of science and the objective inquiry into human life, to break through natural and cultural persistency and allow us to make more optimal choices in our individual and collective lives.

People in new circumstances, or living from perspectives altered by new information, so often report seeing innovative possibilities and opportunities for positive change in their lives they were unable to see before.  Much like our example of people unaware they are dwelling in a cult, this changed outlook suggests that fairly strong socialization and habituation forces are active in all our lives, and deserve far more consideration than we typically give.  For me, a change in our circumstances, especially when directed at improving our health and well-being, but perhaps even for change’s sake, is the first step and a needed ongoing practice to begin to free ourselves from persistent, disabling, and limiting ideas – and the enabling social structures that work with them to shape and constrain us as people. 

Change is something we all can make happen, even if we are constrained by the incentives of our social structure and must temper our change with considerations of our mid-term health and well-being.  And even if we do not know what to change specifically, and even if we must be quite creative in assessing our options and paths to new life opportunities.  In truth, the mere act and fact of consciously chosen change, and the new perspectives and opportunities such change can afford, offers the prospect of fresh and expanding cycles of growth in our lives.  The choice to chose works to awaken, reveal, and then weaken persistent ideas in us.  It allows us to begin to overwrite the habitual behaviors that envelop and define us in more narrow ways than our possible, allowing us to make more optimal choices within our circumstances and perhaps even to structure our lives in more universal and conscious ways. 

In the end, change requires a commitment only to change, and to learn from change and to change again from what we learn.  This iterative process can begin humbly and need not be a radical movement away from our society (and likely should never be).  It can and should start in small ways to reduce the risks of unintended consequences and upsetting important relationships in our lives today, but compounding change and learning can proceed reliably and increase in speed and scale over time, as we iteratively clarify our options and understand their trade-offs (the costs and benefits that come with all change).  Change and learning can even culminate in individual and communal life made principally of conscious and intelligent choices, a life of continual growth and progressive well-being where self-challenging is a norm, and where our obligations to community are met and even satisfied in new ways.

We each have the ability to chose and make life created and shaped by conscious choices, rather than inherited from tradition or conforming to the social inertia contained in the culture of any particular time and place.  We each can escape persistence, can help and be helped by others in this, and learn to live in freer and larger ways – as people and as a people.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

I have written before about our civilized preoccupation with wealth, including its natural origins, even amidst the relative absence of material wealth in our original human state, the underlying social forces promoting the pursuit of wealth before in and our time, and wealth’s potential deleterious effects on our health and well-being – and thus the need for wealth’s thoughtful regulation.

From time to time, I receive notes from visitors to HumanaNatura and others questioning these ideas, or accepting them but asking for more information and especially proof of the inverse relationship between wealth and well-being.  The many undesirable effects of unequal wealth and unchecked materialism on our individual and community well-being have of course been understood intuitively for generations, but this intuition had not been confirmed and informed by hard science, and thereby exposed to rigorous examination and made the material for informed and consensus-based action, until recently.  Also, since extreme wealth and the control of government were often synonymous before the rise of modern industrial democracies, hard science before our time might have been ill-timed, and unable to promote individual health and social advancement in a way that it can now (even if this process may take time and upset many entrenched interests and ideas about the proper bounds of government).

Fortunately, we need no longer live in uncertainty or rely on our intuition on questions of wealth and well-being any longer.  Extensive scientific research has been done on wealth effects over the last three decades or more, by a diverse group of psychologists and social scientists, and many follow-on studies continue to probe this topic at an increasing pace.  Wealth and well-being may seem a perennial issue, in the senses of being both historical and resistant to our understanding, but in truth much greater clarity on their connection and dynamics is now at hand – perhaps to the chagrin of the long wealthy and their conservative defenders.  This development in our understanding of wealth and its optimal uses is especially timely now, as the opportunities for extreme wealth – enabled by the same scientific progress that is bringing new clarity about the nature of wealth – seem ever accelerating in our global post-industrial society.

The research I refer to is now widely published and available to anyone interested in studies of income, consumption, and economic inequality effects on well-being, but this body of work can be overwhelming to sift through and evaluate, since it is quite large and still growing.  Fortunately, an excellent summary of some of the most important findings in wealth and well-being research has been assembled in a monograph, entitled Beyond Money: Toward An Economy of Well-Being, by Edward Diener and Martin Seligman.

If you are interested in, or unconvinced about, scientific research investigating the generally negative relationship between wealth and well-being, I would encourage you to review Diener and Seligman’s very accessible and well-documented monograph, which is available free online via a search of their monograph’s title.  For now, I will simply summarize some of the key wealth and well-being research findings they have compiled (with some comments of my own in parenthesis):

1.     Money has been used in the past, by both societies and researchers, as a surrogate for well-being, since it was easy to measure, believed to be a positive correlate to well-being, and only limited tools for measuring well-being more directly were available.  Modern psychologists and social scientists have called this assumed correlation of wealth and well-being into question, primarily by developing reliable tools for measuring and indexing individual and community well-being and measuring wealth’s correlations with them.

2.      Research into human well-being includes measures of pleasant emotions, life satisfaction, unpleasant emotions, and optimism.  Increasingly, this research has moved from simple cross-sectional questionnaires to longitudinal studies that frequently use experience-sampling techniques (via portable devices that survey the participant’s life experiences in real time, rather than relying on memory)

3.      Individual well-being is defined by researchers to include pleasure, engagement, meaning, and life satisfaction.  Pleasure is measured by degree of reported positive emotions, engagement by the intensity of life involvement and absence of boredom, meaning by feelings of connectedness, and life satisfaction by a general assessment of self-satisfaction. Other specific aspects of well-being are also frequently assessed in this research, including work engagement, stress, depression, and trust in neighbors.

4.      Economic indicators initially track with well-being as people arise from poverty, but then have only limited correlation as wealth increases.  Across nations, increasing annual income up to about $10,000 (2002 US dollars) correlates strongly with increased well-being.  After this amount, there is limited correlation, and no correlation at all when the data is controlled for health, quality of government, and human rights.  Huge income increases in wealthy nations, in other words, have produced virtually no increases in well-being.

5.      As evidence of this, researchers measured the steep rise in economic output in the developed world over the last fifty years of the twentieth century and parallel trends in well-being.  The finding: this economic expansion was not associated with increases in life satisfaction, but was strongly correlated with increases in depression, alienation, and distrust.  Since World War II, there has been a dramatic divergence between income and satisfaction in the United States and other developed nations.  In the same period, depression rates have increased ten-fold, adult and childhood anxiety has risen markedly, and social connectedness and trust have declined.

6.      A key idea in this research is that once communities achieve sufficient wealth to ensure their physical security, health, social relationships, enjoyable work, and opportunities for personal growth, additional income does not increase reported well-being.  In fact, increasing wealth may even reduce well-being, by undermining social relationships and work arrangements that prove essential to life satisfaction.

7.      Non-economic factors prove to be much stronger predictors of well-being than wealth and income.  These factors include social cohesion, democratic governance, justice, and work satisfaction.

8.      One noteworthy study measured life satisfaction across groups with widely different income levels.  The study concluded that Forbes magazine’s “richest Americans” had no greater life satisfaction than the Inuit people of northern Greenland or the Massai, a traditional herding people without electricity or running water and living in dung huts.  The hyper-rich Americans were in fact only slightly more satisfied than college students surveyed from 47 nations, the Illinois Amish, and Calcutta slum dwellers (all of whom are poor but likely have strong social connections).  The Forbes listees, however, were much more satisfied with their lives than the California homeless and Calcutta street dwellers surveyed (very poor people lacking social support networks).

9.      Supportive, positive relationships prove absolutely necessary for our well-being.  Well-being, in turn, is necessary to create and foster these positive relationships, suggesting a self-reinforcing and catalyzing cycle of human emotional and social health.  Economic growth, on the other hand, appears to interfere with this natural human cycle of individual and social health, stressing and undermining social relationships and individual well-being. (The result of increasing wealth is thus often a declining and equally catalyzing cycle of lower social cohesion and reduced individual sociability and promotion of social relationships – in other words, a cycle consistent with the atomization of people and dissolution of communities we now see occurring around the globe amidst rising incomes.)

10.  Well-being, regardless of levels of wealth, has significant advantages.  People with high levels of well-being appear to enjoy better social relationships, a high incidence and more stable and rewarding patterns of partnering, and greater health and longevity, all of which in turn foster and reinforce well-being.

11.  Higher well-being, ironically, is associated with increased productivity and engagement at work (setting the stage for a sustainable economy based on intrinsically-rewarding, highly productive work, instead of one based on extrinsic rewards and the lure of greater wealth – and contained within it, the seeds of its own undoing, via reduced well-being and declining engagement and productivity).

12.  Public policy focused on economic growth is now likely to do far more harm than good in the developed world, and even the developing world, once a basic standard of living is made possible through industrialization.  Well-intentioned politicians and public policy advocates would be wise to shift attention to other, more direct drivers of well-being: promoting social cohesion, reducing stress, increasing life satisfaction and meaning, enhancing marital and leisure satisfaction, and increasing work engagement.

13.  In microeconomics, the standard assumption is that more freedom of choice means a higher quality of life.  Because increasing income correlates to greater number of choices, it is (incorrectly) assumed to be a surrogate for increasing life quality.  (Newer research suggests that increased choice is not necessarily associated with increased life quality and that excessive choice may even undermine human well-being.  Since the conditions that foster human well-being are now better known and quite actionable in many cases, well-being can and should be promoted directly, instead of being pursed through the often ineffectual promotion of expanding wealth and choice.)

14.  The industrial revolution led to an explosion of goods and services in the developed world, but also led to increasing material aspirations, setting up a self-defeating and negating pattern of life, with greater aspirations largely canceling any well-being effects from economic growth (and promoting an overall pattern of declining well-being from economic growth’s undermining of social cohesion).

15.  Because goods and services are widely available and our basic human needs are essentially fully met for most in modern societies, people and social policy advocates can and should refocus their attention on non-economic elements of the good life, seeking enjoyment, engagement, and fulfillment in their work and social relationships.

16.  People rank happiness and life satisfaction as more important than money (but because of our evolved social context and its inherent incentives at the individual level, we often spend an inordinate amount of time pursuing income, at the expense of happiness and satisfaction, influencing others and reinforcing this dynamic in our society, and creating barriers to more compelling and wellness-focused life).

17.  Studies in the United States show that people living in wealthier areas are less happy than those living in lower income areas.  This effect is believed to be caused by the higher materialism, amount of privacy and social isolation, and competitiveness in wealthier areas.

18.  In one study, the same amount of income, adjusted for inflation, produced more happiness in 1973 than in 1995 (perhaps either due to rising aspirations or suggesting habituation effects, where ever-increasing material inputs are required to produce the same amount of happiness over time).

19.  While income gains do not help well-being above a threshold level, income losses and unemployment have been shown to reduce well-being, even in countries with strong social safety nets and welfare programs.  This fact, combined with strong correlations of unemployment and reduced well-being in wealthier nations, suggests the negative well-being effect is not from lower income levels, but from reduced self-respect and greater unmet expectations.

20.  While excessive choice can undermine well-being, democracy is very strongly correlated with well-being, as are equality of human rights and political stability.

21.  High social capital – social trust and rich interpersonal networks – is an excellent predictor of well-being, but is declining in many wealthy nations

22.  Differences in income, especially in poorer nations, are correlated with differences in well-being, as are differences in pay with job satisfaction (however, the differences are a net negative across people and not mutually offsetting, suggesting more even distributions of income will maximize overall social well-being).

23.  Longitudinal research of people over time has demonstrated that wealth is not only marginally correlated with well-being, but that there is also no causal relationship of wealth to well-being.  These empirical studies show that increased wealth does not lead to increased well-being, and may even undermine it.  Studies suggest that people with stable incomes have higher levels of well-being than those with rising incomes.

24.  These same longitudinal studies show clear causation of well-being to higher income, not the reverse.  Because of this, a majority if not the totality of income-wellness correlations are accounted for by well-being impacts on income, rather than income impacts on well-being, further casting doubt on the case for increasing income as a means of promoting well-being.

25.  Research demonstrates that materialism reduces well-being, principally by undermining social relationships and increasing the gap between income and material want.  Unhappiness, in turn, has been shown to drive people to focus on extrinsic goals like wealth (once again suggesting circular relationships between social cohesion and well-being, and wealth and unhappiness).

26.  Importantly, as developed nations have become wealthier, mental health levels have either remained flat or dropped sharply, while indicators of depression and demoralization have increased, especially among adolescents (suggesting that wealth has at best no impact on mental health and perhaps a large negative effect).

27.  Perhaps the most important finding overall, cutting across this wide body of research, is that the quality of our social relationships is crucial to well-being.  Multiple studies underscore that we need supportive, positive relationships and social belonging to remain well, while finding that economic prosperity, beyond a base amount, has a generally negative effect on our social environment and thus our well-being.  The research suggests that social relationships work to increase well-being not only by providing nurturing and support, but also by creating opportunities for us to nurture and support others in turn.  A consistent and related finding is that social isolation correlates strongly with low levels of well-being.

Diener and Seligman conclude their monograph by encapsulating this wealth and well-being research into a six-point model for promoting individual and community well-being: 1) advance conditions of stable democracy where basic material needs can be met, 2) ensure supportive friends and family, 3) create rewarding work that provides an adequate income, 4) promote healthy lifestyles and treat mental illness proactively, 5) maintain clear and important life goals based in one’s values, and 6) encourage a life philosophy or spirituality that provides guidance, purpose, and meaning to one’s life.

As we can see from this summary of recent wealth and well-being research, especially as this body of findings grows and proves consistent, the implications for people today is quite significant, and even foundational to a new emerging science of human well-being.  It suggests that many of us may need to reconsider inherited preconceptions and the current thinking of our times – as individuals, family and community members, and advocates of optimal public policies – about our natural human needs and needed social aims, our contemporary technological society and its paramount priorities, and our existing social structures and acceptance of social group entropy. 

This re-evaluation will no doubt touch on many areas, but perhaps most importantly and urgently needs to begin with gaining fresh perspective on our often central and unexamined preoccupation with wealth, our common intuitive assumption that wealth is a reliable general path to human well-being, and our enormous and historically-rooted human infrastructure dedicated to expanding wealth (our devotion to the care and nurturing of the wealthy state, rather than a healthy one, which may be our true intent or underlying need).  While wealth, and especially unequal wealth, are sources of status and esteem for the individuals possessing them today, this transfiguration of natural state – when we were materially equal and achieved status and reproductive advantage through natural fitness – comes with high costs, engendering social structures and expectations that reduce the health and well-being of all people, the wealthy included.

As Diener and Seligman summarize, studies of the lived experience of people today reveal radically different perspectives on wealthy life, depending on whether one or one’s community is wealthy or poor.  Poor people are apt to romanticize about the benefits and advantages of wealth, as are wealthy people about even greater wealth, but the actual experience of each of these levels of wealth is considerably at odds with such expectations.  Beyond benefits achieved by a basic level of income and sufficient wealth to ensure security and law and order, increasing wealth does little to advance our well-being (from the perspective of the possessor of the wealth) and may even reduce wellness and life satisfaction, especially by fostering unnatural competitiveness and undermining important social relationships essential for us to feel and be well.

In our emerging post-modern age, with ever more rapidly evolving industrial technology, we are now approaching a new dilemma in the search for greater well-being and progressive human life: the prospect of near limitless wealth.  This outcome is a realistic scenario, even in the near term of the next few generations of people, barring world war or calamity.  Such an outcome would of course represent a complete reversal of our original natural conditions, when humans lived on the land, possessed little, and relied on kin and clan for security, sustenance, and enlivenment – and were generally happy despite the many hardships of this state.  Given the emerging science of our well-being, and its recasting of wealth as an often negative force in our lives, the implications of the trend toward unlimited wealth are profound and demand our attention now, in the least simply because our own conditions now more than vaguely resemble this potential future.  From the point of view of original human life and natural well-being, we are already fantastically wealthy, and seemingly ever more discontent with our condition, and we live in denial if we fail to attend to this mismatch between old expectations and our new reality. 

Since increasing and unexamined social wealth can be reliably trusted to undermine social bonds, and thereby our individual and collective health and well-being (and our security and lawful life as well), new perspectives on wealth and models for social organization are needed, even now.  In a world where many already have wealth far in excess of the expectations of our ancestors, where many others will soon achieve this level of affluence, and where modern wealth is already undermining modern well-being, it is essential for us to consider both the opportunities and dangers that the trends of technological progress and unmanaged global affluence create for us. 

To continue in our current lopsided way – acting from imprecise intuitions and accepting the material rewards of scientific progress but not its lessons, fulfilling the goals and aspirations of our past and not those that are truly ours and consciously chosen today, and allowing behaviors that may be wise for one but undermining for us all when they are universal conditions – heralds a misshaped and less optimal human future, as our present is already, both of which can be changed and made more optimal by action beginning today.

If secure, cohesive, and democratic communities of moderate and relatively equal affluence – centered on creative work and progressive human development – are possible in advanced technological society and most likely to maximize human health and well-being, and to be both more productive economically and sustainable ecologically, the implications for people today are as clear as they are revolutionary. 

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

Imagine for a moment – nothing around us holds us back any longer. 

We are suddenly free of physical constraints and have a new independence to act as we please, tempered only in that we must allow others their independence.  We can find food and shelter with only modest effort, enjoy the company of others or solitude in proportion to our wishes, and have any human knowledge we might need or want to possess.  We can travel as we would like, live where and however the laws of physics will allow, and enter deeply into nature or walk the streets of any city or town in safety.  We can busy or rest ourselves, think and feel as we want, and spend much of our waking time however we please.

Do you wonder what such new freedom would be like?  If you could have this type of unrestrained and unbounded life, do you know how you would live?  Can you begin to imagine what you might change in your life and what you would do differently with your days?  Would you move or stay where you are?  And how would your relationships with others be affected?

In truth, if we can become perhaps just slightly more attentive to our outer and inner landscape, to the world around us and to the thoughts and feelings that we live amidst in our surroundings, many of our lives might be much like this already, and our personal choices and futures very different from today.  Our external world is already profoundly changed, after all, even from only a few decades ago.  We are surrounded with new technologies and opportunities, and new security and freedom to pursue what we most value and desire.  And yet, there is a persistency in the way many of us live.  We often still think and feel in familiar ways and thus may be held back in important aspects of our lives.  Our actions often more than vaguely resemble those of our parents and grandparents, despite external change and new lives lying in wait around and inside us.

In our new human environment of advanced knowledge and technology, as an example, we are at a point where there should no longer be material want, and yet material want remains widespread and is even heightened amidst our new affluence.  In the developed world at least, most of us are able already to live and work creatively and joyfully if we want, our biological needs readily assured in the modern world.  But creative and joyful life and work are still not yet the rule. Seemingly, we use or approach our new knowledge and technology to increase human want and longing, rather than to satisfy it, and to keep us from the most essential and emotionally compelling parts of ourselves.  In this inability to seize our new potential, we even often conceive of our contemporary social environment as limiting and threatening, instead of one of unprecedented human freedom, security, and choice.

From this perspective, perhaps you will agree that new ways of thinking about our lives and life choices are not just possible now, they are needed too, if we are to find new health and vitality in our lives, and use rather than be used by our modern world.  As our external environment has changed, in important and even startling ways that we may take for granted or not yet fully appreciate, our inner landscape can and should change too, if only so that we actively understand and seek to optimize our lives and potential as people – and not live passively, unimaginatively, and in lower conditions of health amidst the opportunities life now (and always) presents for new choice.  With changes in how we think and feel, we may well be able to begin to perceive and act in our modern world in fundamentally new and more vibrant ways. 

Today, I would like to encourage you to consider new and more liberated personal choices of all kinds in your life, ones that might lead to very different forms of life for you and others.  By this, I mean life that is freer and more freely chosen, more open and moving, and better aligned with the opportunities that come with an advanced and advancing society like our own. As my title suggests, I even mean to suggest the possibility that our lives might become more fluid and less fixed in location and outlook than we are used to.  I mean a life more of movement through and richer experiences in the world, and even in new types of human communities than we are accustomed.  Seemingly, this potential for free and mobile life is of a distant future, but may be a more natural and desirable form of life that is already possible today.

*          *          *

I raise the prospect of new nomadism both as a tangible portrait and potent symbol of more fluid life, however much we might ultimately choose to move in our lives physically, and because nomadism is a form of choice that is now increasingly available to us and worth considering on its merits.  Modern life has become far more mobile than in past centuries already, and promises even more indifference to our location as we move to an information-based economy and automated industrial production (allowing us to access the world from either one location or many), so we must consider the opportunity of re-emergent nomadism in our time seriously.  And we can also consider the distinction between healthy and unhealthy mobility, as a topic on its own, and learn about human life and health more generally, better informing choices of all sorts, regardless of our personal patterns of physical movement or however much the world around us becomes mobilized.

Whatever you might think about my suggestions that our lives should become more fluid and less fixed, and that life today may changing in ways that might make it more nomadic, you will have to agree that nomadism is an ancient way of human living.  It is a form of human life much older than the streets and buildings, the landmarks and many icons, that populate and define much of our settled world and even our own identities today.  The nomadic life goes all the way back to our human origins, and is one that has withstood droughts and famines, and even ages of ice and the rise of settled human life. 

Historically, nomadism is life lived more directly on and from the earth, more directly in wild nature, and less of and often avoiding or only moving through our cities and towns.  Nomadism often has been human life more lightly and flexibly resourced than in settled life, with an obvious inherent adaptiveness and ability to quickly move people relative to changing opportunities and more desirable conditions.  Nomadism even underlies the adaptiveness and many of the most desirable aspects of fixed living, where we move resources rather than people to opportunities and use a nomadism of goods to make fixed life more secure and prosperous (and create a nomadic class of transporters – who alternatively and instructively long for both home and open skies).  For these reasons, nomadism is a human approach that is potentially much more naturally and sustainably lived than typical settled life, even if it brings costs or requires inventiveness along with these benefits.  In the least, nomadism is an approach that has a great deal of time on its side, one worthy of our consideration as the world becomes physically freer and a ancient counterpoint to the life and thinking of our times.

Despite having five million years or more of history, the idea of traditional or now modern nomadism may seem curious to you, or impractical and foolish, or perhaps even dangerous.  Settled life and our gradual advance to true civilization has brought with it many obvious advantages, including a new level of security and freedom from natural hardships (with violence in the developed world now reduced a hundred-fold from pre-modern times) and the opportunity for more cultivated and refined life.  Civilization and modern scientific methods have increased human understanding by perhaps an even greater magnitude, to the point where we struggle to grasp what we know, and our new social institutions help us better cooperate and navigate the many capricious aspects of unregulated human life.  In a world of increasing nomadism, you may wonder how our streets and buildings, and our landmarks and icons, would be tended and kept secure.  You might wonder how modern human life as it exists today and its many benefits and advancements would continue, and continue to advance. 

One answer might be with the aid of machines, especially with communication and information technology to ensure transparency, security, and resourcing amidst more mobile patterns of life, an option that becomes increasingly plausible with each passing year, even if still considerably amorphous in precise form and method of operation.  But even with the evolution of automation and new technology, lawful and orderly human life has certain requirements and many opportunities for disorder, and will require human involvement in ways that will continue and that we cannot foreseeably abdicate, so some aspects of modern life as it is today would have to remain as they are or be consciously adapted or improved in the face of more widespread nomadism and more mobile and less settled life.  Our social order today would have to change and evolve with consciously mobile life, as it is likely to anyway, even without resurgent nomadism – or incessant mobility, a pejorative that may but need not characterize the general trend of greater movement in the world, as I will explain.

Perhaps then, the idea of a deliberate or conscious move to modern nomadism is more likely a potential catalyst and driver of change, rather than a clear and present danger to our social order, or to social order generally, one that requires structure and institutions, even amidst its prospects of freer and more improvised life, and thus a form of life thus has a discernible character and foreseeable limits.  We know the structure of life today well and rely on it, but also know that it was unimagined in earlier times.  We can see that our form of order is mortal and will age, and that other forms of order are possible and will inevitably evolve (always with the potential of a return to relative disorder).  Our present-day world is one we rely on and therefore may cherish, but only few would say completely or uncritically.  Most understand and can see that our society can be improved in important and realistic ways. 

Because of this, I would like you to consider the idea that more nomadic and mobile life might be very desirable, affording people more open lives and new experiences and for the changes it might usher in, since it would require structure and our continued commitment to civilized life, and perhaps in new and more subtle ways.  Modern nomadic or more location flexible living, in the context of enabling structure and control, might well bring more efficient, beneficial, and even satisfying modes contemporary of life, and be a step into the future and progress, offering new cosmopolitanism and not a regression to the past.  If society will and should evolve, ideally it will be in a way make it more sustainable and environmentally-friendly, and more supportive of the health and well-being of all its members.  These goals suggest a lighter or more subtle human footprint on the earth, one that modern nomadic living might help to provide.

*          *          *

When we first reflect on the idea of nomadic life, whether our thoughts are positive or negative, and whether nomadism is seen as life without a fixed center or moving around one, much about us, as people dwelling in modern and fixed or semi-fixed civilization, is revealed.  While some of us may initially think romantically and favorably about nomadic people, we are often apt to concretely envision nomadism as a step back in time, and see it as a meaner and more precarious life.  Our initial thinking may form a picture of dust and dirt, of people living with little, of impoverished and less secure conditions, and the hardship and rigors of subsistence living.  We may turn to thoughts of our having to give things up, of physical discomfort and pain, and even of social isolation.  Again, this is telling, and more than you might at first realize.  Both our positive and negative ideas about nomadic life, after all, are often quite biased and reasoned from our time, both as historical facts and as a portrait of how nomadism might be in the future, revealing unexamined prejudices and limiting beliefs we may carry within us – and might well want to work to be free of, making our presence in the world lighter and more open, and thus more nomadic in at least some sense of this word.

As I mentioned before, there is increasingly little reason for any of us to live in poverty and hardship or without the rule of law in our time, to subsist or have material hardship or systemic violence in our lives of any kind.  I will suggest this idea is true today regardless of whether we move or remain in one place, as long as the social institutions that foster economic activity and law and order are maintained and extend to our transportation networks and the places we live or move through.  Negative ideas about nomadism and visions of nomadic life as poor and lawless might therefore be out-of-date, even if they were once accurate.   In truth, nomadic people historically did have less materially than people in settled life, but likely were no more insecure than people in other forms of life before the rise of the modern state (forms of life which often added insecurity through life involving increased and unequal possession and power).  But we must also consider the idea that nomadic people in history may have been quite satisfied with their lives, just as nomads today often are.  Studies of traditional, present-day nomadic people reveal very high levels of life satisfaction, often even much higher than people dwelling in our most affluent cities and modern conditions, if with levels of security many of us would find unacceptable.  Our ideas and assumptions about nomadism may therefore be very different than the life experiences of actual nomadic people of the past and present, and especially the future.

If natural and traditional nomads had and have less of some things, their life is often one with more of other things that we frequently lack and long for today.  To begin a list, and knowing that nomadism can take many forms, free time would be at or near the top.  Often, nomadic people have far more free time than we typically do today, even considering periods of movement as only semi-free time, since far less attention and effort is devoted to creating and maintaining fixed property (an opportunity but hardly a reality today in fixed life).  Because nomads often more work much less and have more time than we do, they often have more opportunity for social contact, and far more rewarding contact, with friends and loved ones (nomads may need this social contact to enable their form of life, at least in its traditional forms).  The nomadic life is thus often a more gregarious one than ours, especially at its best, and thus rightly the object of contemporary nostalgia.  The traditional nomad’s life of course also involves greater travel and a greater diversity of experiences, generally much more so than in traditional settled life (and perhaps even modern settled life).  It is therefore in many ways a more natural human life of moving on the land, with many benefits for our physical health and emotional well-being.  It is also worth considering that traditional nomadic people are of necessity skilled at and able to quickly change their surroundings and re-create orderly life when needed.  In our modern context, it is thereby a life that is perhaps more apt to encourage us to change and re-create ourselves, a dynamic many of us want for ourselves today, and thus an approach to make us far happier with and fulfilled in ourselves in modern times. 

These potential advantages of nomadic life may help you to move past negative and unexamined first impressions of nomadism.  But perhaps not, so let me clarify my idea in asking us to consider more nomadic life, today and for the future, rather than as a historical phenomenon only.  Most importantly, I do not mean the intentional return to life of an earlier era.  Going back is a topic I have written about, and against, elsewhere. Regression is unlikely ever a successful life strategy for people, for a good many reasons.  Instead of the past, my idea is instead to think about our present and future more deeply, differently and perhaps more innovatively. By this, I mean reconsidering our current relationship with the world and others around us today, our patterns of movement and mobility and commitment and freedom today, and the benefits and limitations that come with these things and how we might change them if we were free to (as we are to an increasing degree, in fact if not yet in spirit). 

In my proposal to consider modern nomadism, I mean to have us ask whether new mobility or different forms of mobility, enabled by our knowledge and technology, might make more sense and create better life for all of us, now and for the future.  Since our global industrial society is becoming more mobile already, perhaps the idea of modern nomadism is not so implausible and its prospect even should raise concerns given current social trends and potential for mobility to take more positive and negative forms.  As I suggested before, there is an important distinction waiting to be made between the modern forms of increased mobility we are familiar with and our potential for more natural, health-conscious, and self and community-affirming forms of mobile life.  This distinction is quite important, pointing to the need for change in the way we think about mobility and even fixed modern life today, and to new opportunities for more expansive life amidst our increasing mobility and modernity.

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In my work as a health advocate, I have gradually learned that to be at our best – to be optimally healthy, vibrant, and well – we need two, seemingly contradictory structures in our lives that relate directly to our consideration of nomadism: community and mobility.  Once we pass the preliminaries of maintaining a natural diet and ensuring adequate natural exercise, we inevitably must turn to broader life challenges in our quest for greater health and well-being.  I have called this pursuit for new health in our life the task of natural living.  Natural living, in fact, forms most of the life and focus of a natural health practitioner.  In a very basic way, natural living can be seen as the creative synthesis and inter-weaving of the central elements of community and mobility within one’s life and natural health practice. 

Our need for community is our natural individual requirement for and offer of security and support:  strong, self- and health-promoting people around us to enrich our lives and help us be at our best, through reciprocity and our helping them to be at their best.  Our need for mobility, seemingly contradictory to the demands of community, is part of our natural and universal human need for change, growth, and novelty throughout the course of our lives, as even a short time without mobility or progressive life reveals to us.  When we are true to ourselves and our natural requirements for health, we seek both community and mobility, in varying measures and forms, depending on our circumstances and time of life.  When we are optimally healthy, as humans, we have both of these things in abundance in our lives – the ability to move and grow and to be with others positively and intimately, in a way that forms a harmony greater than their sum.  Community and mobility are primal sources of human health, strength, well-being, fulfillment, and renewal.  Together, they are central dimensions of natural life, our human nature and needed life experience in all times, and the basis of much of our spirituality, values, and aspirations.

I spoke before of community and mobility as seeming to be contradictory.  In civilized society, it can appear that they are.  After all, traditional civilization and community have often demanded a great amount of consistency, regularity, fixedness, and immobility from people of all social classes.  This may less true now, after industrialization and the rise of modern life, but the demand for rootedness has been a driving force in society for many centuries before our time.  In earlier times, in fact, we often were compelled by a number of forces to stay in one place for great lengths of time, to defend those places and adapt to them (and them to us), to live as our parents lived and according to strict cultural ideals, to be limited and unchanging as people, and to demand this of others for our survival.  Much of this was required for our survival and thus the rudiments of our health, but of course was often limiting and pernicious to our well-being (though far more so when this thinking carries forward into our time in an unexamined way).

People of these earlier times often had limited interaction with and knowledge of nomads and wandering people, and from our literature seem to generally have held more negative outlooks about nomadic people and primarily envisioned the precariousness and threats of mobile life, with some amount of romanticism, just as we do today.  Also like us, our settled ancestors were usually primarily focused on their own society and the vagaries of life within them as they were given.  Almost all looked upon fixed civilization as necessary and its demands for rootedness inevitable.  Writers from earlier times often viewed civilization as inherently oppressive, limiting human freedom and mobility, but often for a greater good (though in more recent centuries with a growing sense of limitation and lost opportunity).  These ideas about civilization, as being a negative state but necessary and better than the alternatives, of course continue into our present and are not wholly untrue.  But they often lead to an ironic or tragic sense of life, one that we may not fully realize or observe carefully, and to the de-energizing and passive idea that we are constrained and without fundamental control of our lives, even as we suddenly now have new freedoms and opportunities only imagined in earlier times.

It is important to put these earlier ideas and our modern sensibility and inhibitions in context.  Both continue despite at least two centuries of rapidly advancing society and social institutions, profound technological progress, great expansions in human understanding, and startling changes in the way we live, or perhaps can live.  Our resignation to settled and traditional life also comes despite an increased understanding of – distinct from but related to our increasing romance for – the often rich lives and life experiences of nomadic and less settled people of various kinds in history and today.  Old beliefs and ideas die hard, and many may be genetically or culturally selected, requiring the force of new awareness to understand and permit new free choice. 

We may fantasize about nomadism and new mobility in our lives, but still see community and mobility as antagonistic and impossible together, since this was the case in many earlier fixed forms of life, and it may still be the case without an attentive approach to our uprootedness.  We can readily look to contemporary mobility and see its destruction or erosion of traditional community, or at least its incompatibility with our ideas of how life was before our time.  In this focus on the destructive aspects of mobility, we may overlook new, more subtle, perhaps still unrecognizable forms of community in our midst, community that may even be superior in many ways to those of the past.

When we consider the idea of a tradeoff or contradiction between community and mobility, between rootedness and freedom and committed and more fluid life, it is important to realize (at least as a counterpoint to our thinking) that this tradeoff usually did not exist for people in wild nature.  In nature, after all, until the last ten thousand years (~0.2% of human life) people lived exclusively in mobile or semi-mobile communities, regularly moving with band and clan to optimize resources.  Natural human life even demanded communal mobility, since a fixed and more solitary life was not sustainable for us until both the evolution of domesticable plants and animals and then the later rise of lawful life.  If our life was necessarily communal or cooperative, and if our communities were necessarily mobile, natural selection encouraged these things through the gift of joy and fulfillment in the belonging and movement of natural life – strong emotions that are still with us and that undergird us today.  Life in nature may have been harder, shorter, and even far more limited in scope than in our time, but it was often deeply satisfying human life, in a way that modern life is often not.  Natural life was not always nasty and even more rarely alone, as studies of aboriginal, pastoralist, and nomadic communities have shown (communities distinct from settled, pre-state agricultural communities).

Our natural human life of both belonging and moving may seem impossible today, given our general belief in the inevitability and historically constraining nature of civilization, and our current experience of the general corrosive effects of mobility on existing community, but I would encourage you to think more critically and creatively about these constraints in our time and emergent new age.  I would like you to consider that a life of both natural community and movement may again possible now, in new and quite compelling forms.  Physical and economic barriers to mobility still do exist of course, and may always exist to some degree of necessity as we have discussed, but perhaps to a much lesser extent than in the past and than we factor into our choices today.  It may be possible and even desirable for you to pursue and create a more nomadic life today, a life of both more movement and deeper community, more than you perhaps realize and potentially with transformative consequences for you and others.

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In thinking through our modern potential for new forms of mobility, we might take an extreme position and argue that community is no longer necessary at all – except as needed to support our social infrastructure – and that we can and would be better off free and independent in the world, informally coming together with others and moving apart when and as we wanted. 

Though a distinct possibility in our time and near in some respects to my own ideas of how a new nomadism might shape itself, this idea of mobility risks misunderstanding our natural need for community and the natural requirements that underlie the compelling company of others.  Supportive community motivates and demands from us a continued investment in and attention to our relationships, and simply does not permit more simplified and episodic relations of convenience (you can experiment with and validate this in your own life and investments of time and emotion).  The mistake of assuming that an independent individual life of transient relationships can be healthy and fulfilling is a common one, however.  It is an idea, in fact, that is implicit in many modern forms of mobile life today, where our need for human community and family is at least partially overlooked, regarded ambivalently or secondarily to our material or physical aims, or assumed able to be met by a loose network of co-workers and service providers (in the extreme, including sexual and reproductive service providers).  The totality of such thinking, or lack of thinking, underlies and even fuels the growing and globalizing pattern of itinerant work and life, and engenders the often corrosive and less than healthy mobile life of both unskilled migrant workers and corporate professionals today. 

This modern approach to mobility, intuitively and scientifically, runs against the foundations of our health and the strong case that exists for nurturing community to ensure healthy, intimate, and nurtured human life.  Data-intensive studies affirm the continued value to us of close, lasting friendships and supportive communities (both once required for survival in nature), showing that community and support can maintain our health and well-being at much lower levels of consumption and the important correlation of shorter lifespans and higher rates of health problems with single and isolated life.  Modern mobility, so often but not always, has created life of increasing movement within an obvious disregard to our need to belong – impoverishing communities, families, and individual lives, even as this form of life often raises the material prosperity of each.

In the place of traditional communities, mobility and loose relationships based on shared work and entertainment have often inserted themselves, but failing to fully fill the void they create, let alone promoting the goal healthier and more fulfilled life.  To me, this seems inevitable in all relationships dedicated to extrinsic and relativistic goals of higher income and consumption, which are in truth means to other things only and often competitively motivated, and which overlook or are misaligned with our more intrinsic, absolute, and more foundational needs as people.  Modern work communities, in particular, often accentuate natural antagonistic, hierarchical, and zero-sum thinking, rather our equally natural and usually far more rewarding cooperative and nurturing behaviors.  Not surprisingly, traditional work communities are thus inherently more transitory, stressful, and unfulfilling social networks, and now increasingly subject to rapid decomposition – which may be a positive development and an opportunity for more natural and satisfying formats for shared work.

While we often do need to re-assert or re-create community in our lives today, the case for human mobility, if in modified and more creative forms, is strong too, though this area is less well-researched and understood than community effects.  Studies suggest that at least thirty minutes of movement each day is essential to our psychological well-being.  Less travel than this is correlated with increases in reported feelings of stress and measurable circulating stress hormones in our bodies, reducing our ability to repair tissue and fight disease.  But we can infer a much higher level of mobility is needed than this.  If we consider our imperative of an hour or more of relatively challenging daily mobility is needed to ensure our physical fitness, and even greater periodic mobility to help promote new life experience, perspective, and our personal growth, the case for mobility well beyond traditional civilized levels seems secure – as long as our mobility can be made secure, and even as our need for healthy mobility remains a seeming counterpoint and corrosive to our requirements for communal life.

Evolutionary science also suggests that both our needs for mobility and community are likely fundamental human and even mammalian adaptations, deeply hard-wired into us, adaptations that we overlook at our peril and with enormous consequences for the quality of our lives.  These basic human needs, and the prospect of healthier life in the new context of affluent global civilization, challenge us to rethink our ways of living and frames of reference regarding mobility and community, both incrementally and perhaps more radically, if we are to create new choices for more optimal lives and health for ourselves.  I say this, even if the idea of such new and more nomadic ways of living amidst conditions of freedom and prosperity seem uncertain and poetical at first, and even if the scientific case is less far than clear what types and amounts of mobility and community best ensure our optimal health and well-being.

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I have just moved, and it is not the first time – I enjoy a reputation among my friends and family as someone who has moved quite frequently, one that is deserved even as it may be misunderstood and not completely in keeping with my own ideas about optimal mobility.  In truth, I am not far from where I had been living, just a few kilometers across the northern Appalachian forest where I lately live.  My move was from a traditional cottage by a lake to a smaller but more modern and iconic house in the hills above a somewhat larger lake, a reservoir in fact that serves one of the world’s largest cities. 

This move was not a momentous one, I admit, but it was a move nonetheless, offering a real-time and quite personal case study in nomadism (and inspiring this writing).  As with other moves I have made before, the new place I am in right now is brimming with fresh sights and sensations, and inspiring new ideas, in a way that I know my old place can too but no longer was for me.  Around me are unexpected vantages and compelling new folds and unexplored turns in the land.  There are new natural paths and places where wildlife converge, and new faces and human places to visit and experience for the first time.  In truth, there is even a fresh and remade sky for me overhead, just as there is fresh sunlight and remade earth at my feet.  The total effect of this most recent move, as many of my other moves have been, is an enticement of my senses and spirit.  Moving has again renewed me.  I am more alive once more, alive in a larger way and as never before.

However modest in distance, the effects of this move are palpable and heartfelt for me, and a lesson in mobility and its importance to us more generally.  In these few days following my move, I am awake and active earlier in the morning, despite the declining autumn light and weather.  I am more engaged and inspired in my life, in all my life, even the less appealing and inspiring parts of it.  I make better use of my time, beginning new projects and finishing old ones, while letting go of old preoccupations and attitudes and perceiving the world with a new freshness.  I am eating more optimally, exercising more stridently, and easily and committedly in both cases.  More importantly, I can see ideas in my life that had been invisible to me only a few days before.  I realize now that I had grown comfortable, too comfortable these past few months, in my old setting and with growing habits and patterned living, despite the charm and tranquility of my old house.  I suspected then and know now that I simply was no longer attending to life in the way that I can be and am again now – far more consciously and creatively.  My move has even compelled me to consider more carefully and write and think about nomadism, its unappreciated potential for human renewal and more progressive life in our more secure and prosperous times. 

As you likely can tell, the case for new mobility and nomadism in modern times is strong for me right now.  So strong, in fact, that I would like to encourage you to join in my experiment in mobility and to explore the nomad within you too, as soon and as freely as you can, and knowing we do not yet have hard science on our side.  Your exploration of new mobility can begin simply enough, perhaps by extending your daily travels to new places, or by using new routes to get to old places, but in any case I would encourage you to begin your own non-clinical trials now and as attentively and creatively as you can.  You may well find that the benefits of added mobility almost immediately far exceed the seeming costs and inconveniences we are apt to focus on when we contemplate change and think of new movement from more sedentary stations of life.  I suspect you will find that new mobility allows you to become more alive in the world and alive in the world in new ways, just as I have been reminded and re-energized by my recent move. 

If you do join in this experiment in mobility, you may awaken with new eyes on the world like me, and perhaps ones with a clearer connection to the natural values and aspirations deep within you.  Even in changing only how and where we travel in our daily life, or other routines of life that can dull us and let us live less consciously, we can begin to see how new mobility can provide important insights and perspectives, and experiment in our lives without radically altering or disrupting our relationships with others.  You may well come to agree that a nomad lies within you too, or at least a creative spirit that lapses into and lives in regular and mundane ways only inadvertently.  Perhaps you will then feel compelled to further explore and find new ways to bring this deeper part of you out and into your life.  By this, I do not mean abandoning all that that we cherish, and especially I do not mean that we destroy supportive community in our lives, but simply that we explore and test the edges of our life against the deeper values we discover during conscious change, which likely will always include our ancient affinity for compelling life with others. 

If the presence within you of a natural or at least a modern nomad proves to be the case for you, if you really do notice an appreciable and positive change in your life through conscious new movement and the breaking of routines, then you might decide to more definitively explore nomadism, to see what deeper movements and more fluid acts of living might hold for you.  As only one of many ideas, you and your family might rent a house in another place temporarily, or live or swap houses with a friend or family member (a topic I will return to).  Such exploration can be in an area near enough to your work and friends so your life is not substantially disrupted, allowing you to experience life after a move and giving you insights into what further nomadism might bring to your life and demand of you, especially if you are to move naturally and amidst family and community. 

Through such explorations and experiences, you might become committed to still deeper experiments in nomadic and natural life, as I have, moving periodically in your area, or perhaps positioning yourself to be able to migrate with the seasons.  In this exploration, you begin movement for movement’s sake, or for life’s and fulfillment’s sake, which may seem odd when you first consider it.  But if you live with the idea of regular movement for a while, and then explore new opportunities for mobility and less routine living in your life, movement and change for itself may seem less and less odd and impractical, and even quite important, over time.  Exploring movement may help you discover the important benefits mobility offers in creating a more open and natural life, and helping you to experience and appreciate life in deeper ways.

Of course, in all potential experiments in mobility, we also need to experiment with ensuring community in our lives too, which is why I encourage initial experiments within the reach of and ideally even involving with your existing social network.  When I began my own experiments in deliberate nomadism about ten years ago, it was after several less than deliberate and health-conscious relocations in my professional work, including some careless acts of mobility that were not family or community-promoting at all.  The results were perhaps inevitable – a decline in my sense of well-being and in the breadth and richness of community and social relationships in my life.  My own sense of declining wellness in fact led me to renew my long interest in natural health practices, and eventually compelled me to better balance my mobility with my need for supportive community and family.  In my case, I had come to understand and value the positive aspects of mobility and did not give up on regular movement, but I also put new emphasis on maintaining and enriching community amidst my regularly mobile life.  In striking this new balance, consciously aimed at increasing health and well-being in my life, somewhere in the process I became a post-modern nomad, even if I did not realize this at first or was able to structure my life optimally for this alternative approach to life for some time.

I have maintained a quite mobile and healthy life for over ten years now, increasingly in ways that preserve my extended community and friendships, while allowing me and others to experience the joy and new outlooks that a change in surroundings and scenery can provide to us.  This effort is of course aided by the Internet and email, but mostly I have found that achieving community amidst mobility is enabled keeping a home, even if it changes periodically, and by keeping an always open door, extra beds and closet space, and a commitment to invite and in turn visit with friends and family in an extended way.  Extended visiting has quite a bit of history and is an extraordinary means to deepen and renew family relationships and friendships, and is easily done, despite how you may first react – requiring only care and kindness, reciprocity, and personal fluidity. All of which we may seek or need in our lives.  I can tell you that each of my health-conscious moves and my now frequent house-sharing have been a positive experience for me, transforming and expanding my relationships and feelings of community.  Both so often provide the feelings of renewal and re-engagement that I feel now, after my most recent move. 

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As you might imagine, some of my more traditional friends think my nomadism is a curiosity and struggle to understand it, but I counter gently that they should try the approach and offer them the same ideas and encouragement I have offered you (and an open door and place to live for a time).  Some have taken up this challenge, and have discovered similar feelings of renewal and new vibrancy in their lives, and have created deeper friendships through sharing living spaces, simply from gradual experiments in moving for moving’s sake.  Of course, since increasing mobility is the norm for many people in my life, the choice is often more rightly framed as one between traditional and often health-compromising forms of modern travel and economic migration, and more health conscious and community-building nomadism. 

With my growing experience and comfort with at least one modern variation on natural mobility, the greater curiosity for me are the many people around me who passively accept or stridently defend settled life, and who avoid and abhor movement and even simple changes in their often highly routinized lives.  Their position seems increasingly unnatural and inflexible to me, excessively conservative and unhealthy, and contrary to the opportunities of our time and the experience of mobile people of other times.  After all, consider the nature of highly settled life today, whether in an urban or rural setting.  We are apt to think of settled life first nostalgically and even reverently.  But we may then gradually reconsider our view and see how settled life can also be oppressive, staid, and conformist.  Settled life is, in fact, often far less vibrant and energetic than the life we can have through movement, as artists, the wealthy, and other self-possessed people have long known.  Mobile life is one that has fewer routines and limitations, but does require more attention and improvisation, and is thus often richer in itself and even as it often offers a much richer range of experiences. 

One important objection to mobility, and implicitly to nomadism in all its forms, that I hear frequently and strongly is in the case of the movement of children.  In these discussions, people are apt to repeat arguments that children must be kept with their friends and especially in the same schools, year after year, to promote their health and development.  I believe this position, however well-intentioned, is incorrect and contrary to the true nature of healthy children, but it does get at the important issue of our innate needs for community and fulfilling social relationships we have considered.  We do all need this type of community, children included, and all proposals for healthy life must encourage healthy family life.

The case for childhood mobility is similar to that of adult mobility, except perhaps in one important area – its potential to impact both our ability to form healthy peer relationships and the quality of our peer relationships during important periods of our development.  We know that moves change peer groups, requiring children to rebuild their social networks and find their place in them, which takes time and energy.  One might well argue that frequent moves can negatively destabilize a child’s status and self-esteem and development, or alternatively, that it could positively encourage a child to become adept at developing new relationships and to develop a self-image that is more robust and independent of changing social groups. 

Movement can allow a child to find higher quality peer groups, or escape poor quality peers, which have been shown to be quite important to self-development (statistically and controversially more important than parenting quality).  Given modern mobility to our time, many of us may have moved frequently as children, or know others who did.  We may remember or have been the new kid, seemingly quite typecast as an outsider and misfit, especially after moves made during adolescence, but likely having little bearing on the quality of adulthood (though perhaps making for a less happy childhood).  Similarly, modern school redistricting has often repeatedly reshuffled children seemingly without lasting harm, just as entry into college inevitably does, and mercifully and very positively for some children who have had highly fixed or disadvantaged lives. 

These observations suggest that peer relationships can be interrupted and resumed, and remade if needed, even as this area is likely rightly one for special attention.  They also suggest methods for balancing community and mobility for children:  organizing movement during times when school is not is session (often many weeks of the year), around a fixed center or between centers so that relationships are maintained, and ideally always in the direction of high-quality peer relationships.

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If we should be mobile regularly in order to renew and be truer to ourselves, and also bring or encounter supportive community in our movements, how can we make such healthy nomadism a reality in our modern lives today?  There are likely many ways to do this, some visible in our times already, but all suggesting the need for at least slightly more creative approaches to contemporary life and new openness to life options we are willing to consider for ourselves and our families.  As I highlighted at the beginning of our discussion, we are fortunate to be alive in modern times, and amidst modern knowledge and technology, which together make tenable the idea and practice of new forms of nomadism and new freedom from fixed life.

With community defined as a network of reciprocally supportive and nurturing people, or even as intimate and health-promoting life in society, rather than the more traditional conception of community as a generally self-reliant group of people holding a fixed place or location, existing options for collective mobility, and for collective life and work amidst movement, immediately come into view.  Some of these forms seem quite compelling and deserve our attention and exploration, just as other forms appear lacking in important ways and unlikely to become broader models for contemporary people seeking healthy mobility (though they are still instructive to us in their omissions). 

Perhaps the simplest and first of the insufficiently robust examples of modern mobile community include groups of many forms based on shared interests, such as hobby and pastime groups, especially ones that involve regular collective mobility and encourage social interaction and discovery within their domain.  One can think of regularly mobile communities of like-minded sports fans, collectors, and travel and recreational enthusiasts, some gathering people from and moving them across large areas, but very often and often obviously lacking sufficient attention to the health of their members.  

A slightly higher order of mobile community involves networks of people having common values and aspirations, and who often engage in active and regular reciprocation, for example sharing in a life covering a preferred geography or involving a specific lifestyle.  For many North Americas, the thought of “snowbirds” will come to mind, often quite gregarious and interdependent retirees who spend winters in the Sunbelt and return to in the northern United States or Canada in the summer months, sometimes moving between locations throughout the year.  In North America, as elsewhere, we are also familiar with roving bands of explorers and empty-nesters, whether on motorcycles or in cars or mobile homes, crisscrossing the continent in search of adventure and new horizons, and often forming new relationships and mobile community in the process.  There are also new year-round and working communities formed in areas of the world that are considered highly desirable – numerous resort, wilderness, and historical areas now largely repopulated by relatively mobile transplants and expatriates.

From the standpoint of increased health and well-being, these modern forms of mobile community are a mixed phenomenon.  They do afford people a degree of mobile community and perhaps access to and more time in wild nature and health-friendly climates.  But often, this type of mobility can involve unhealthy pastimes and lifestyle choices, isolation from instead of immersion in nature, and relationships that are more situational than supportive in character (with only modest levels of mutual investment and social intimacy).  I could begin a long list, but the excesses and limitations of modern mobile materialism are well-known and easily observed. 

When I write about and advocate exploration of our potential for new nomadism, it is in the context of exploring opportunities for greater health and well-being, and more creative and consciously-chosen life.  It is mobility aimed at a freer and more open and fulfilling existence for us, at greater intimacy with both nature and others, and at breaking the grip of fear and material dependency that holds so many people in the tight grip of traditional life and traditional outlooks on life, despite our changed times.  As such, I believe we must look beyond these and other familiar patterns of modern mobility to find new opportunities for healthier and more optimal life in the world around us.

Two other forms of mobile or potentially mobile community seem much closer to this goal.  The first and more perceptibly robust one is our potential to participate in and expand the new flexible work opportunities of our times.  This includes contract work, job sharing, and online work, all potentially providing us with income, greater time and location flexibility, and new reciprocating social relationships.  This form of mobile community can begin through contracting organizations, temporary work agencies, or online professional networking and consulting or project work, and has the prospect to create both cooperative economic opportunities and true supportive community for modern people. One can even imagine networks of this sort adopting shared principles and standards of conduct, just as in traditional fixed communities, and fostering not just exchanges of work, but promoting cooperation in living, education, childcare arrangements, and health promotion too.

A more health-oriented and potentially enduring form of or basis for modern mobile community involves groups of people sharing a common goal or interest related to their well-being and personal development.  Such goal-prompted communities might begin as physical or virtual cohorts of people pursuing education and skill development, or similar health and well-being goals such as forms of exercise and weight loss, walking and hiking experiences, and other quality of life changes.  From any of these beginnings, these cooperative and mutualist but seemingly bounded efforts can evolve to foster more open-ended relationships.  They might well create or help to populate more complex distributed community networks, perhaps growing to become decentralized across large geographic areas and supporting at least some of the needs of their members amidst mobility. 

In the world now, we see signs that such value or interest based networking is well underway, using the Internet to link people who share common goals and life preferences, people who often share a natural closeness and maintain supporting relationships across a geographic distance.  Common in the evolution of these relationship networks already is the reciprocal sharing living spaces and professional networking.  In truth, such lifestyle networks, and the work networks mentioned before, may well be sides of the same phenomenon and coalesce in our time to form new distributed community networks of shared work and values, in place of or alongside traditional communities of shared location and infrastructure.

Since enduring mobile communities in the past have usually provided for the material and social needs of their members, a critical consideration for modern nomadic living is, in fact, how economic and social activity amidst regular or periodic movement can occur, and even be enriched and strengthened by mobility.  As we have discussed, cooperative work arrangements have the potential to both create new community and enhance member mobility within their existing extended communities, especially as work becomes more information-based and virtual.  Members of modern work groups often have the opportunity of coordinated co-locating and or complementary settlement, targeting specific towns and residential areas for their homes, or certain businesses and organizations as agreed community workplaces, just as immigrant and traditional itinerant populations often do today.  Such arrangements offer the potential for cooperative job and work-sharing, rich and evolving community, increased mobility, and more flexible lifestyles than many people have today. 

Finally, it is important to note that existing social relationships can readily form new communities as well, simply by beginning to organized travel together or by moving along their often naturally distributed structure, using personal introductions and requiring reciprocity.  This form of community amidst mobility has considerable history and is often used by people today, allowing people to spend parts of the year in different locals, create new and deepen existing reciprocating relationships, and move more freely across the land amidst supporting society.  This process was made much easier before our time for older people by retirement income programs and now, by the new trend of digital, networked, and project-based work assignments for people of all ages.  

In all cases, regular and shared work, life, and movement can create intense bonds between people, affording new forms of enriching and mobile community, while allowing far more free time and flexibility than traditional lifestyles.  In these ways, mobile life and work, linked to goals of health and well-being and not only economic necessity, holds the potential to create, and not just destroy, community today.  My own experience of house-sharing, and life and work amidst mobility, is likely an important and widely available means to open up new mobility, and to not just maintain but even deepen supportive community in our lives, especially in comparison with more familiar and individualistic forms of modern mobility.

*          *          *

Let me end this discussion of our potential for new and healthy nomadism, or at least for better balanced community and mobility amidst modernity, and this last idea of developing new communities that can grow and evolve through mobility (rather be eroded by or exist in spite of mobility).  If you are using the natural health techniques I advocate, and still feel less vibrant and less alive than you think is possible, you are likely right in your intuitions.  It may be time to explore and experiment with added mobility in your life, changing at least your daily routines as a start, and then perhaps your locale itself and of necessity, the ways you define, organize, and cultivate community in your life.

My experience, like that of many others, is that change and mobility in our lives almost always expand and enrich us as people.  New places bring us new outlooks, people, and opportunities into our lives.  And they let us look at old places and faces with new eyes.  Movement stirs us to change, and then to stir and move again.  In the least, movement increases our confidence and skill in change and adaptation, and therefore is worth cultivating for its own sake. 

To be fully healthy and alive today, I believe we must consider and become more open to the nomad within us.  This way of living is older, lighter, freer, and more natural than is typical today.  It is a way of life that can be much more connected to the earth, and potentially to others too.  Ultimately, nomadism has been and can again be a rich human life in supportive communities, a life of growth and connection and richer experiences, a natural way in and of the land, a way that is forever new and timeless.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

May I ask if you have found your Zion yet?

I ask this personal question, and use this familiar word, to talk about a place in your life – a place we all need and need to know precisely where it lies. 

I’ll explain in a moment why I use the word, Zion, to name this place.  I could have used another.  For now, let me say that I don’t intend it as a reference to Judaism or ancient Palestine, or even to other common uses of the word, derived from the original: homeland, heaven, utopia. 

When I ask about Zion, I mean to be worldly and pragmatic, and to be thinking of our health.  I mean to ask about your Zion, and to challenge you to be able to know and name this place in your life.  I want you to reach this place – a natural place where you can be at your best.  A place you can return to again and again to renew yourself and to return again to yourself.  Or perhaps go to and never again leave. 

I need to make certain you are aware just how universal our need is for our personal Zion, whether we are woman or man, adult or child.  It is a truth and desire in all of our lives and hearts, whether we know it or not, or can name this feeling and the place it seeks, or not.  Most of us are smaller and more fleeting as people without our Zion.  We are needier when we do not acknowledge and respond to this deep common need of ours for our Zion, for our natural and spiritual refuge, for that place which is ours even in our sharing of it.  Perhaps I do mean homeland, after all, but a personal homeland and one that brings new health and learning to you each time you go to it.

I have just returned from my Zion, my spiritual refuge and personal homeland, my place of peace and power.  The experience awakened and reinvigorated me in a way I had hoped for and, as always, in ways I still did not expect.  It reminded me of a time, earlier in my life, when I found this wellspring place after tribulations in the desert of my own, and when I was renewed by its majesty and waters running over me.  Fresh from my most recent experience of my Zion and still remembering my original time there quite vividly, I would encourage you to do as I have done:  to visit or find your Zion as soon as you can.  

My latest return to Zion came about accidentally through the course of my work.  Unexpectedly, I had to be in the western United States, in the City of Las Vegas specifically, perhaps the most unhealthy and unnatural human settlement on our planet today, though there are many close contenders.  The key redeeming feature of this city, for me, is that it is very near the western flank of the Colorado Plateau and therefore some of the best hiking on our planet.

In truth, my own Zion literally is Zion.  It is a wilderness area, so-named by American settlers, a two-hour drive from Las Vegas, near where the Arizona, Nevada, and Utah state borders meet.  If you have been to this Zion, or to some of the other wild areas nearby, including the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, you know this is a special part of our world.  Should you go there, expect towering rock spires, winding canyons millions of years in the making, an undulating river-artist at each canyon floor, and unforgettable sheets of orange stone, striated in layers of time long before ours.

I have been to my Zion many times now, in hot weather and cold. I go to it whenever I can, and one day may go there and simply stay.  My experience of this unique and uniquely personal place – linked to a time when I was younger and searching – has deepened each time I have returned.  It is still fresh and revealing in each new visit, a young and old place, light and weighty, even after many visits.  Perhaps you have a place like this in your life, a higher, rarer, and perhaps distant place that calls you and restores and enlarges you, curiously strengthening and humbling us at the same time.  Perhaps you already know and have named this place as your Zion, by whatever word you use.

My Zion is of course more than a scene of geological upheaval and remarkable vistas, more than mountain water moving inexorably through stone to the floor of the Mojave Desert.  It is a spiritual place, too, for me and for many other people today, as it has been for people for millennia, since before Zion was Zion in the new world or the old one.  My Zion is a place where I can mend and restore myself, and even return to and rediscover myself, as it is for others and as it has been for millennia.  As with my most recent visit, I go to Zion each time with expectations of renewal, but never know quite what my experience will entail, what my Zion will see that I need and reveal to me.

Over the years, I have met others who feel this way and know this truth about my Zion.  We share our experiences of this unique natural place, with its high mesas and plunging canyons, and are immediately brethren, promising and genuinely hoping to meet there one day.  My Zion is a personal homeland and touchstone for many wild and intrepid spirits, few of whom can call it their original birthplace.  Each of us has our experiences of this Zion and can never fully communicate them, but in this common limitation of thought and speech we share much.  We share the space of our Zion and inexhaustibly so, so much room does it have for individual memories and revelations that they will never touch and never be diminished in purity or intensity.

I should point out that my Zion is always a place where I return to reality and never escape from it.  It is there where I am reminded of what the world and nature really are, and what we as people are at our core.  I rediscover that I am both a constant and ever changing self, unmoving and yet pulled in many different ways.  I am fixed and malleable, like the sculpted ancient rock of my Zion, like its so many paths and shapes.  I thus learn and re-learn from Zion to exercise care with myself, with the choices I make each day and with how I spend my days each year.  I watch what water I let pass over and through me, and what places I allow myself to pass over and through, as the days turn into years and as the years pass by and slowly sculpt me.

My Zion reminds me each time I visit that we are all rocks of spirit and river-artists of this rock, shapers of our lives and selves and shaped in turn.  We all create what we become, even in the face of great obstacles and despite our smallness, as Zion’s modest but irresistible waters work against stone that only seems immovable.  My Zion reminds me that we must be present and immortal in our lives, as rock is present and as water is immortal, that we will inevitably shape and shade ourselves in the long flow of our lives, in the long acts of art and creation that are our lives.

During my recent return to Zion, two days of hiking and perfect weather melted away what had been two very busy first months of the year, and two years of busy months before that.  I was more exhausted and worn than I realized.  More importantly, I was more immersed in my work than I had been aware, far more so than is ever wise, and living more apart from nature, from the real world, than I knew.

In my first extended hike in several months, my Zion returned me to a deeper side of myself, my physical and outdoor self, an earthier and more grounded person than my working self and even my health advocate self, which are both indoors more than I would like.  Outdoors in Zion, under clear desert skies and amidst the physical demands of hiking, I returned to a part of me that is calmer and more relaxed, steadier and yet more spontaneous, and somehow more farsighted and insightful in this spontaneity. 

This time, my Zion offered new perspective on natural living and what it means to live naturally and healthfully, topics I think a lot about and thought I knew already.  I realized during an afternoon ascent that the prospect of natural living was a real and tangible fact in each of our lives, and never simply an idea.  Natural living is the physical finding, returning to, and dwelling in the place that is our Zion, in body or in spirit, even if we must seek and find new Zions over our lives.  Natural living equally is the finding and dwelling in the deeper, more natural and tangible self that our Zion reveals to us – the deeper, fuller person we are all and always capable of becoming, wherever we are in the journey of our lives.  Along a rock wall in Zion, I saw that natural living is also always a path, a real path in our lives, to the side of whatever is the current course of our lives.  It is a spur leading to still higher ground, reappearing strangely again and again, patiently waiting for us to take this new path.

In this lesson from my latest visit to my Zion, I was reminded that natural living is a practice of paths and choosing, and a lifetime of turning and returning to ourselves.  It is a practice that offers learning and insight as long as it is practiced, but it requires preparation and the courage to move to new and higher leading paths as they appear in our lives. Natural living is a name for the task of iteratively but definitively becoming ourselves and just ourselves, of shaping and being shaped.  Natural living challenges us to be ever more deliberate and improvising in order to reach ourselves, as we grow and must ascend ever higher to ourselves. 

You can and should set out for your Zion today, and you can and should begin or deepen your practice of natural living at the same time.  Both our Zion and our more natural life wait for us in each moment of our lives, calling us to set out for them, calling us to be more directly alive in our lives.  They wait patiently for us in each choice we make.  They live as a possibility that seeks reality – they are how might will spend the rest of our day, the rest of our year, or the rest of our lives.  If we chose to unleash ourselves in this way, we find it is always completely personal, completely about us and who we are and can be, and yet this movement and prospect of more movement is universal and common to us all.  Always, in our unleashing, in and on our way to Zion, there is community and kindred spirits.

In my most recent time in Zion, my own roles and outlook were greatly simplified and made earthier, and closer to the heart.  For a time, I was again only a hiker, traveling through and inspired by the higher surroundings of my Zion, occasionally helping less experienced hikers with directions and encouragement in some of the more challenging trails, in the challenges of finding their Zion. 

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

Although we might not want to admit it, even to ourselves, whenever we make a new and healthier choice in our lives, it is often with a bit of a struggle at first. 

This can be true whether we are long accustomed to sedentary living or well on our way to creating healthy and remarkable lives.  Each new step we take toward added health can feel a little uphill at the beginning, and by this I mean like a certain amount of work and not just awkward in its newness.  Do you ever wonder why this is and what you can do to more easily overcome this feeling?

Once we achieve new levels of health, of course, it is often fairly easy to maintain our gains and new life patterns – to sustain our new choices.  I’ve observed that, after about a month of persistence with a healthier behavior, enough time to experience and validate its benefits, and perhaps to make room for it in our lives, the new behavior generally becomes assimilated and our overall behavior pattern steadies in a new equilibrium.

I should add that this second observation also appears to apply irrespective of where we are on the path of improving health.  Our health or personal gains, whatever they may be, almost always feel as if they are higher ground we have gained and now do not want to descend from. These two facts about our health seem related and important, and worth considering together.  Why should the identical health practices, after the initial struggle they so often give us, feel so stable and even comfortable once achieved?

In the case of experienced natural health practitioners, they enjoy the rewards of past health efforts and thus are often quite receptive to new changes and challenges.  But they also know all too well this asymmetry in our experience, first when beginning and then after achieving new levels of health and personal growth.  They know our recurring “dark before dawn” pattern from past successes and can use this memory to press on to higher states of health with more confidence and short-term motivation.  This greater personal commitment to growth and skill at change create more energetic and compounding positive cycles in their lives, and even new life.  In a sense, natural health practitioners use their health to become healthier.

Still, even this use of past success and memory of the need to “press on” implies work, an act of exerting force or expending energy against a resistance.  This resistance is one I would encourage you to look for and observe carefully in yourself.  It is an often ever-present and sometimes quite unhealthy tendency in us – the impulse or desire to do less, to busy ourselves with what is near and familiar to us, to be as we already are.  Because of these dynamics of resistance and overcoming, the practice of health enhancement is revealing about human choices, and our facing of options and change, more generally.  It is an opportunity for learning that has many applications, including and beyond the advancement of our health and well-being.

Health enhancement, and what we might call other personal investment decisions, are often not “downhill” in feeling, as if we are being helped along or pulled by gravity.  They often feel uphill, as if we are working or fighting or giving up something.  And we are – our time at least, and in real time.  But, as I will explain, there are ways to create a much greater sense of ease when we make healthy change, also in real time and our present and less healthy lives, feelings of effortlessness and being pulled along by a force, even as we really do move upward in our health and to higher levels of vitality in our lives.

At the same time, we should not forget that behavior which reduces our health, or seeks immediate comfort in our surroundings and familiar things, choices which disinvest in our health and future, quite often do feel downhill and quite easy. This downhill feeling of ease can be pleasurable and comforting, even as it works against us and our progression in our health and life.  Excessive comfort and momentary living can thereby lure the unaware or unwary into stagnating or declining life, and often with an ever increasing speed that really does imply the tug of a gravity of sorts.  Techniques to pull back from these feelings and recast them as unwelcomed and uncomfortable are quite critical too, for ourselves or others in our care, and will be included in our discussion

The Science of Our Decisions

Many classical twentieth century economists and decision scientists liked to think and speak of people as rational beings and our decisions and choices, unless obviously influenced or constrained, as the products of rational choice.  Given a set of facts, this approach proposes that people optimize their conditions and pursue their goals and interests as directly as they can, making calculated decisions and reasonable choices among their options.  Our information and foresight may be imperfect, but our choices and intentions are generally not, assuming we make no error of calculation.  In this classical approach, our thinking is viewed as fairly reliable, in the sense of being rational given what we know, and our reason is viewed as our dominant characteristic.

Viewing people in this way, whether ourselves or others, may sound odd in my summary, as if we are all mathematicians or machines of a sort, but this view is actually quite common, especially in our modern times where we are generally hurried and are also frequently taught to rely on rationalistic thinking.  It is shorthand and easy simplification we all may use, and often unconsciously, one that makes busy life easier to approach and not just formal decision models easier to construct. In truth, even though we often attribute this rationalistic operating model to others, simplifying them to calculating entities who weigh and choose among options, implicitly giving others clarity of thought and aim, we are also often quite hesitant to apply this description to ourselves, living in and amidst the reality of our own human experience and cognition (thinking, feeling, and uncertainty).

Our own introspection reveals that, while a rationalistic approach may be useful in getting through the day and building scientific models, the idea of rational choice is really never born out in the reality of our lives, which we know as we probe the lived reality of ourselves and other people.  We thus do ourselves and others a disservice by approaching the real world in this unreal way.  Often, we miss important facts in our interactions with others and make far less of these interactions than we might.  

In lived reality, all of us struggle to understand our aims and options, and often make impulsive and inexact calculations, or quite emotionally-charged or seemingly calculation-free choices.  And we act in this way much of the time, even in domains of life that have lifelong and life-altering consequences.  A prime example of this, from the realm of classical economics and decision science, is the consumption versus investment decisions we make each day with our income, though I might just as easily use relationship and career decision-making as examples too.

As you may know, sophisticated (i.e. hyper-rational) computer models, which can account for both investment and personal risks, generally choose much higher investment rates than ordinary people, even well-educated ordinary people, when programmed to seek maximum wealth through minimal work over our expected lifespan.  It is true that some of us make investment choices that are close those of to computers, revealing that fairly pristine rational choices are possible by people, especially in selected contexts or with advanced preparation.  But a great weight of evidence suggests that such rationality is usually the exception in forward-looking decisions and many others forms of choice. 

In our human lives, we are first unthinking entities, operating unconsciously and automatically, though this does not mean that intelligence and calculations are not imbedded in our natural unconscious processes.  Secondly, we are emotional entities, experiencing life, and generating feelings and patterns of understanding of greater or lesser scope from our subconscious, again often with imbedded intelligence but with varying precision.  We then, thirdly, attend to these feelings semi-consciously, paying attention to some feelings more than others and making intuitive or impulsive judgments regarding many of our feelings (again with varying intelligence and precision).  Only then are we, fourth, more conscious, self-conscious, and reasoning entities, calculating number and likely result for example, or systematically evaluating options in some other way.  In the many demands of waking life, we generally limit the use of conscious reasoning, and may use it principally and only periodically to assist us amidst our primary world of semi-conscious, spontaneous, and emotionally filtered aims and issues. 

To illustrate this description of our natural human cognition, take the simple example of crossing a street, leaving aside for now our motivation for this crossing.  As we approach the curb, scientific research has confirmed that our brains are already activated for the crossing, taking in cues and information from the environment before we reach the street.  These processes occur entirely or primarily below our consciousness.  Our first conscious process may be a general emotional feeling about the relative ease or danger of the crossing, perhaps a summoning of memory, which either may then lead to a formal categorization of the challenge with language (easy, dangerous, etc.). We then will almost always process again, by making a quick and often unthinking scan of the street and feel better, the same, or worse about our prospects, based on this second round of only semi-conscious information gathering. 

However, before we begin crossing the street, or very early in our crossing if the way is initially judged clear, we usually make a fourth and much more attentive and rational assessment of street conditions.  This assessment is often patient and can be quite protracted if there is an approaching vehicle and we must assess the time until its arrival at our location, or if there is some other danger or pressing consideration.  Only then, do we finally cross the street. But this act becomes increasingly unconscious and automatic as we cross the roadway.  Our attention turns elsewhere, to other emotional issues or subconscious aims, which is why we are often surprised and pulled back to our surroundings (or more rightly our surrounding pulled back to us) by sudden changes in road conditions before we reach the opposite curb.  This example portrays the nature of our daily experience and natural cognition, though we must recognize that many actions and decisions remain at the unconscious or emotional stages only, never invoking rational calculation.  Such is the subjective human environment from which all our decisions and choices are made, and from where all our downhill and uphill feelings of ease and bother occur, ones that so often influence our choices and lives.

The many limitations that rational-choice decision models have in describing people (and even groups and organizations of people) are now well known, even if these limitations are not always well-accounted for by contemporary economists and scientists in their work, let alone by ordinary people in their busy daily lives and varied relations with others.  To return to our earlier discussion of investment decisions, in truth, our rationality shares our brains with other processes and imperatives that make competing demands on our attention and affections.  We may well enjoy our work or fear retirement, as easy examples of emotional investment considerations, suggesting programming of an entirely different sort than the ones frequently used economists and policy-makers, and scientists and non-scientists alike. 

This laxness and reliance on outdated models, on the part of trained scientists and professionals especially, nicely and indelicately reinforces the idea of pervasive non-rational limitations in human choice, even the choices of seemingly exacting professionals and quite intelligent people.  Such scientists and professionals might and often do argue that their approach is conscious and rational, that their models work closely enough and the extra effort of investigating and addressing emotion and other dimensions of cognition, and then of building more complex and unfamiliar models, is not worth the investment and trouble.  But an increasing body of research suggests this is not so, that traditional rational decision-making models fail to adequately or efficiently describe, predict, and permit positive influence in many instances of real world human behavior and choice.  The intractability of these scientists, in a sense, reveals how personal history, context, and emotion so often deeply influence our choices and behaviors – how they may make change feel sharply uphill and perhaps illogically so, as more work and less or less certain benefit than change actually is.

In our daily lives, we often spend much of our time in conscious or semi-conscious struggles to achieve the emotional outcomes and subjective experiences we want.  We may know, perhaps intuitively, that more rational choices would help us achieve these outcomes and experiences, but cannot always act and decide rationally and as we might like to.  This is particularly true when our desired outcomes are emotionally charged, or when they take time and involve investments of time, as healthy choices and plans for our future well-being so often do.  Recognition of the many nuances, and rational and non-rational elements, in human decisions and human experience generally has a long history and occur throughout much of pre-modern literature and philosophy. 

Our modern, scientific return to the full richness of cognition and choice occurred beginning in the mid-twentieth century, in a fusing of psychology, biology, and other scientific fields that today together are called cognitive science, the formal study of human, animal, and now artificial intelligence.  Many have helped to shape this emerging discipline over the last fifty years or more.  One of the key early contributors in the field was the Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon, who built his ideas on the work of other psychologists, investigating intelligence and choice before him.

Studying organizational behavior and individual decision-making in the 1940s, Simon put forth the idea of “bounded rationality” as a way of better explaining and understanding intelligence and choice than the classical rationalistic thinking of many scientists in his time.  He initially meant this explanation or description with respects to humans specifically, but later realized it applied to intelligence more generally – and then went on to construct the first artificial intelligence programs in the 1950s.  Simon observed that our human rationality (and rationality generally) played a role in decision-making, but that it was always a subordinate or limited one.  Decisions, he observed, are always made and first put in a context. Choices are always set in what he called boundary conditions, conditions which are usually more important than and can easily overshadow calculation and acts of deciding in their influence on choice and behavior.  In other words, our own personal decisions are always within a frame, analogous to the frame of a picture, whether this frame is of our making or taken as given, and whether the frame is a conscious or unconscious one. 

Simon viewed the fact of boundary conditions as essential to understanding intelligence and decision-making, and later coined the term “satisficing” to describe the process and basic nature of choice.  Though often viewed as a pejorative and a bad habit to be avoided, Simon meant satisficing (satisfy + sufficing) to be descriptive, and inevitable.  He understood that the process of choice must always occur within consciously or unconsciously-imposed boundary conditions, which may be more or less arbitrary and optimal in their influence, but which are always present and physically necessary in one form or another.  Our decisions are and can never be never perfectly rational.  They are always made within frames and boundaries, whether these are physical, situational, emotional, or physiological.  Boundaries must be present whenever we decide – since the mere act of deciding stops analysis of options and consideration of additional alternatives.  In principle, it would take an infinite amount of time to consider all options, and none of us has that much time to spare, in both simple and complex choices and behaviors of all sorts.

Simon’s ground-breaking ideas have been greatly expanded and developed over the years, and cognitive scientists now see a rich set of factors that work to create boundaries around and frame our rationality and influence our aims and decisions.  Many of these factors are created through natural, cultural, and cognitive selection forces working on our species and selves.  This sometimes happens in very efficient and useful ways, but not always, as we will discuss.  The common boundary conditions which work to influence and explain much of our decision-making and choices include the workings and predispositions of our biological and neural systems, our psychological and developmental processes, our environmental and external reference points, and the relative appeal of thoughts and feelings to our bounded attention.  Thus, both our general human nature and cultural and individual conditioning form important frames around all of our feeling, reasoning, and choosing. 

Our personal boundary conditions also include time itself, and our physical inability to fully consider every available option in a finite amount of time.  We must always satisfice, and often do so within decision frames and boundary conditions we scarcely see or whose influence we do not appreciate.  While some of these frames really are imperceptible, other unconscious frames can be comprehended, either by subjective reflection or objective science.  Many of our most life-influencing personal frames, in fact, can be made conscious and revealed to us, and thereby at least partially controlled by us too.  This is an important point.  While we are bounded in our reasoning and choices, we all also have the potential for new awareness and more conscious choice too, underscoring the importance of learning and inquiry in our lives, throughout our lives.  The insight that we can examine and break important, life-limiting frames of perception forms the foundation of much of contemporary psychology and the new practice of personal mastery – the conscious improvement of our choices, health, and life generally.

If you are interested in making healthier and more optimal choices, or helping others to do this, modern cognitive science and psychology offer important insights to assist you.  For example, they can help us better understand why healthy new behaviors can be real work to adopt, but why these same behaviors are often relatively easy to maintain once adopted.  Contemporary psychology also offers tools and approaches to guard against and break negatively spiraling patterns of personal choice, and to make the process of choosing health, and other positive improvements in our lives, both easier and more reliable.

Healthy Choices In Nature

Before we discuss specific techniques for helping us and others make healthier choices, it is worthwhile to understand the natural mechanisms we are working to either utilize or overcome when we seek to become healthier or make more optimal personal choices of all kinds. 

As I mentioned, the pursuit of health often does feel as if we are fighting something within us, that we are fighting against resistance within us, instead of flowing with gravity or some other compelling and path-clearing force.  In a sense, this is true.  Pursuing natural health today, in the unnatural environment of our modern world, involves fighting or working around elements of our basic nature as humans, including key cognitive boundaries and biases that, ironically, nature placed within us to make us healthy. 

In our time, we also face complex and unprecedented cultural and individual forces that can compete with or work against our natural impulses toward well-being.  Our health today requires us to be more rational and discriminating with the emotions and impulses we attend and respond to, but this task is not easy and requires new learning and self-awareness.  Learning and awareness are of course both natural human capacities, but today are needed in new and exceptional degrees if we are to ensure our natural health and optimal development – amidst the powerful frames that are our own nature and our complex and potentially overwhelming modern environment.

To understand why and how this is the case, let us consider people living in nature, say 50,000 years ago, late in the long period after our descent from trees but still well before our very recent ascent into skyscrapers.  People of this time looked much like us today and had essentially identical brains to us, although in most other ways their lives were quite different than ours.  In this earlier natural setting of people, which extended back at least five million years, you may know that we lived and migrated on the land in small, tight-knit nomadic bands of perhaps 50-150 people.  We hunted and gathered, and interacted with the natural environment and other similarly-sized bands of people in our migrations.  We of this time made their living directly on the land, using important but still quite limited technology (fire, stones, spears, etc.), and had few possessions and no domesticated plants or animals.  We essentially took and subsisted on what nature provided us, or what we could provide for ourselves from the land and sea.  Humans of 50,000 years ago were also clever, communicative people, dominating other animals (including hunting very large animals at this point in our evolution) even as the general environment dominated us.  Based on studies of modern day hunter-gatherer people, our life was quite likely both hard and joyous, with the many ardors of life directly in nature offset with communal closeness, spontaneity and gregariousness in daily life, and a deep love and reverence for the world around us, hard and impersonal as it was at times. 

As important as the specific facts of this earlier natural life of humans, it is as important to understand that we were, and in many ways still are, evolved to live in exactly this way – and to be happy and content, able and efficient, living in just this way, since there were not any other immediate options for us.  Contrary to romantic ideals that arose after civilized and urbanized life, nature and natural selection imposed significant and far-reaching external limitations on the way we lived, and on the way we could live, as human animals hunting and gathering in the wild.  Most of the daily decisions we make and take for granted today, and often struggle with, were made for us then by nature, by our natural circumstances and the formidable external constraints of life in wild nature. We could live with our tribe or another perhaps, we could hunt in the morning or afternoon, we might fulfill one or another obligation to others around us – but live, hunt, and fulfill we did.  There was no other human life for us, no life outside of tribe and its needs and demands, no life outside of its requirements for health and survival, and our own.  How different our life is today, 50,000 years and roughly one percent of our human evolutionary history later.

Because of these many natural limitations, humans of 50,000 years ago had a much more physically demanding and constrained existence than humans do today.  They had much less personal power against the coercive and frequently potent forces of nature, and much less need and opportunity for life-cultivating choice and change.  Those decisions we did make in nature were often very basic: where and what to hunt or forage, with whom to mate, who to help or avoid, when to fight, and when to run.  We did not have the option of straying far from our tribe – let alone sampling life in many tribes or walking the earth in rustic isolation, in a way that we often can today – simply because of our individual impotence against large beasts of prey and the demands of nature generally.  Importantly, for our discussion, we made few decisions involving long periods of time or extended calculations.  Most of our life and choosing was of and near the moment, based on familiar patterns and involving similar considerations.  It was quite unlike our lives and many of our most important life choices today.

Understanding human evolutionary development and our natural human context is essential to appreciating our personal decision-making and health-related choices today.  Our human intelligence and cognitive processes were shaped by the natural environment, and a specific and fairly consistent evolutionary niche, for roughly five million years (and for many millions of years more as pre-humans and even pre-primates).  Intentionally and inadvertently, nature has endowed all of us with a distinct human nature and specific human capabilities, limitations, and biases – that were all functional or at least benign to our survival in nature, but that are often less than optimal and even suspect today.  Our natural cognition can produce resistance and barriers to our natural health and continued development, amidst our new human life in complex civilization. 

In particular, we were naturally shaped by our environment and niche to have a time horizon that is fairly short, especially when compared with what might be an objectively ideal time horizon in complex society, with its many options and personal investment decisions that affect our future.  We were also evolved to rely on natural personal and social emotions to produce our aims and inform many of decisions, since extended or sophisticated calculations were not required of us to survive, as they are today, while emotional and social harmony was.  Emotional alignment and the imperative of our feelings was an enormous dimension of our earlier life and cognition in nature, as it still is in our lives today and even as we try to overcome, cultivate, and control our natural emotions and impulses for more optimal life in advanced society.

Our physical and social environment has of course changed dramatically from 50,000 years ago – and even from 10,000, 1,000, and 100 years ago – but many aspects of our human psyche have not.  As society and technology have become more complex, and perhaps until our technology becomes self-creating and self-responding to our choices, we are now enormously pressured to be more rational and calculating in our lives than we were in nature, to be busy in and simplify our much more complex social environment, and to suppress and control the powerful natural emotions that underlie our reasoning and rationality.  Unfortunately, these natural emotions are an essential and inseparable part of us, and attending and truth to them is required for human life, health, and well-being in any full sense of these words. 

Our emotions, in fact, are the source of all of our contentment and joy, even today amidst so many material pleasures and distractions.  They are what make our life worth living and meaningful, or not.  Living without a close relationship and alliance to our natural emotions, in our modern aims and choices, usually makes life insipid and banal.  People can feel and live amidst an existential void, life without emotionally-engaging purpose and joy.  Misalignment with our emotions can also lead to reactive and unhealthy impulsiveness, to cynicism and antisocial behavior, and to life without awareness of our natural well-being, all engendering dangerous, downward spirals of choice and behavior.  As modern people, we may be able to complete vast calculations and have new insights into the physical world with our rationality, but without the natural human emotions of wonder, pride, and accomplishment, it is all to naught.  Without our human emotions, a coolness and inhumanness even envelopes us, and we and others are much poorer as people.  We can make ourselves and our world more efficient with our calculations, but can find few causes of action without our natural emotions, little motivation, little that makes sense of our life.

We thus cannot live without our natural emotions, even as we must be careful not to be ruled solely or indiscriminately by them, as I suggested before.  Optimal and healthy life involves a maturation and new awareness of our emotions, and a balancing and integration of them with our reason.  By this, I mean a more patient watching of our emotions and impulses, a cultivation of those emotions and aspects of ourselves we most value, and the use of our reason to fulfill these more consciously-selected values.  How we select emotions for cultivation and use reason in this way is of course deeply revealing about the self, since such choices of emotions involve our emotions and the process is thus seemingly circular.  Some of us never break this cycle, and may live amidst and respond incessantly to the full spectrum of our natural emotions and impulses, as they operate in modern times and amidst modern cultural influences. 

In truth, our self can move within us, from a place of high emotionality all the way to one of cool dispassionateness (and aimlessness), and to a more optimal and higher place between and even strangely apart from both our emotional and rational functions (and from our linguistic function too – a topic for another time).  As we mature and become more self-aware, many of us are able to choose and better attend to specific emotions of our choosing, emotions more valued by the reflective self and often ones that are more universal and selfless in nature, leading to what is rightly called the cultivated life.  This process of personal learning and maturation requires discrimination and choice among our emotions, which is a partly rational process of examination and partly an emotional process of attending to our emotions themselves – attending to and cultivating our conscience. 

People among us who develop personal mastery in this way often downplay the older and more animal emotions of fear and greed that are within us.  They live with and become better acquainted with the social emotions of pride and shame, including their optimal limits.  And they nurture our higher emotions, feelings that are more principled and self-transcendent goods in our lives and the world: empathy, kindness, and fair-mindedness.  We thus become less selfish as people as we mature and become more self-aware and conscientious, and yet are still a self and are always specifically ourselves.  This state of personal mastery has been valued for centuries as the hallmark and highest reaches of our humanity in civilization, as wisdom – as a selective, integrated, and self-conscious mix and refinement of our natural emotions and reasoning.  The result is personalities that are always highly individualized and often slightly piquant, once again revealing our nature as people.

Regardless of our level of cultivation, and the refinement and integration of our reason and emotion, we are all still bounded as beings and human beings.  Like vehicles stuck in too low a gear on an open road – gears we need to shift out of in our quest for health – all of us are constrained to varying degrees in our quest for growth and a better future life.  We are naturally constrained by our often too short time-horizon and other cognitive limitations that focus our attention one our surroundings and on emotionally-charged aspects of our lives, deliberately forged or accidentally acquired in our long ancient past in wild nature.  We need to live for and enjoy our days for emotional health, but if we only live for our days, in the now long and open-ended life that is our new environment, our future days may be far more limited, and less healthy and cultivated, than they might be.

We can see the effects of our natural time-horizon, uncultivated natural emotion and self-awareness, and limited integration of our reason – of our less than optimal original nature – operating in the complex and strongly acculturating civilization around us.  If you still question whether our nature, natural emotions, and cultural and individual influences place strong boundaries on our rationality and self-awareness, everyday and in each moment of our lives, simply pick up a newspaper or click on a news channel.  There you will see our naturally, culturally, and experientially bounded rationality and awareness, and our seemingly unbounded and often quite unrefined natural emotions, actively framed and at work: families struggling financially despite generations of work, men and women who have made or are unable to undo poor relationship choices, indifference to school and career opportunities, drug use, violent crime, corporate crime, senseless fear and gratuitous euphoria, pointless competition and rivalry, and so many life-limiting fixations and pre-occupations.  Any list of our less than optimal contemporary behaviors can be a long and varied one, and forms a partial map of our natural psyche at work in our unnatural new human environment, replete with its all-too-familiar and deeply creased contours and boundaries.

Fortunately, we all do have the ability to work around, or at least with, our human nature to make more optimal choices and decisions in our lives.  As I suggested, and as we will discuss, this process of healthier and more optimal choice involves finding ways to increase our self-awareness and understanding of the key life-limiting personal frames around us.  We each have the ability to see the hierarchy of emotions within us, achieve greater attentiveness to the feelings that give context and motivate to our thinking and behavior.  We then can replace unconscious and semi-conscious framing and scripting with more conscious and self-chosen approaches and frames, with more cultivated and emotions and integrated reasoning.  In this way, paths that lead to truly higher future ground, for us and others, can be recast to feel downhill, accelerating, and self-clearing, even easy, welcoming, and natural.  Our movements uphill can be reframed to be helped by the force of our emotions, seemingly the force and pull of gravity, but in reality an upwards push of new and informed perspective working on our natural human psyche.

All this is indeed work, always and especially at first when our health is weaker and our confidence is lower, and when we do not have memory of past health gains as an ally.  But this is also always work worthy of us and essential to our growth and personal mastery, and to health and higher life today.  In a very basic sense, our modern predicament is a struggle against ourselves in lower conditions of health and awareness, against our earlier and received individual nature and nurture.  It is our natural impulse and imperative to grow and live in nature, recast to seek health and growth in our own lives – in new and larger ways, in more open and chosen ways, and in and into the world around us. 

In truth, our natural impulse is to master the world, which in the maturing person, living in the fact of complex civilization, turns to include oneself and is transfigured to focus first on the mastery of ourselves.

Choosing Health Today

So far, we have explored some of the science and workings of our human psyche, and exposed two key modern-day idiosyncrasies of our natural human cognition and decision-making, when operating in complex civilization: 1) our naturally short time horizon, and 2) the strong and often inexact influence of our natural human emotions.  We have also discussed the naturally dependent character of our reason and awareness generally, how society today often unrealistically and inhumanely encourages or expects domination of our emotions, and how a third and more compelling path is possible – cultivating and integrating our emotions, awareness, and reasoning in a higher and far healthier form of human life.

Perhaps some of your own choices, especially regarding health enhancement and other types of personal investment, have become more transparent in our discussion.  Perhaps they have given new form to the modern dilemma we all face of naturally needing emotional awareness and fulfillment and of having to make way for increasing demands for clear reasoning too.  Perhaps you can also see ahead to how health and other decisions might be made more easily and optimally, with less effort and struggle, by being made more self-consciously and with the conscious and informed framing of our thinking and choices.

Like other decisions that lead to future consequences, our health choices usually involve balancing real and obvious costs, and the prospect of change today, against potential benefits in an uncertain tomorrow, and the option of inaction.  This may sound like a return to rationalistic thinking, but we must remember that our reasoning plays its part here and no more.  Our rational side is bounded, as Simon insightfully pointed out, first by our own circumstances and the context of our choosing, and then by our natural need and willingness to limit information before and as we decide.  Still, we do calculate and consider outcomes before we decide, usually though a combination of intuitions and reasoning, and even may implicitly (if sub-optimally in our modern context) weight costs and benefits in many of the emotions we experience.  Thus, our decision-making is often still much like it once was in wild nature, even as we now face choices that are far more numerous and complex.

As important and seemingly dominant as our reasoning is in both understanding our thinking and making better choices, we must remember that all our calculations are limited and heavily enmeshed in, and guided and framed by, our emotions and subconscious processes.  These boundaries include feelings and values that we often unconsciously and even arbitrarily place on our determinations of present costs and future benefits.  They include how we define and perceive the future, and our attitudes toward the future and toward our own future.  Our reason is also greatly and ultimately limited by our own identity – by our self, by how we are and see ourselves today, and by what we are willing and unwilling to immediately and eventually do within the bounds of our only slowly changing self and sense of self.  Here again, the importance of self-awareness and learning surface as our imperatives of health and personal mastery.

In our reasoning and attempts at reasonable choices, both our human nature, shaped by evolutionary forces, and our individual nature, shaped by our culture, upbringing, and ongoing experiences, cast their imprint on our calculations, even many decisions that seem obvious and cogent.  Equally true, however, is that we all can always look to and then learn from the specific boundaries and frames of thought and feeling that underlie our decisions.  We can step back and examine the context and perceptions expressed by the options we are considering and favoring.  And, we can look to the values and assumptions implicit in our own identity and sense of what is possible for us.  In short, we can choose to examine our choosing.  In this way, our own awareness is expanded, our biases made more evident, and the possibility of new and improved choices greatly increased – choices that result in what we really want, what we want as we and our biases and limitations are revealed to us, what we want as we grow and with new awareness of how we might grow.

To make clearer this process of exploring and learning from our thoughts and choices, and thereby raising our self-awareness and empowering improved choices, let’s consider a simple, time-oriented and health-related example of a choice we might literally make today.  Consider the decision to walk for an hour a day, perhaps in all but the worst weather.  Our rationality can accurately tally the key negative costs:  7 hours per week, 365 hours per year, certain equipment costs, possible low and higher-value activities they will be displaced, etc.  However, how we consider the flow of positive benefits, and how we subjectively and individually value and attend to them are much more complex and emotionally-charged.  For example, our long-term benefits may be viewed as uncertain and ambiguous as we consider this new walking regimen, and such ambiguity and uncertainty regarding benefits may dampen our emotions, and make us much less motivated and the choice more difficult. 

Perhaps our risk of heart disease and diabetes will be reduced in half from this change in our behavior, but can we be sure in our individual case?  It is true that we might obtain reliable statistics on the many benefits of daily walking, but few of us do this in reality, unless prodded to or made easy for us.  In the end, many of us also do not feel average and are apt to discount whatever statistical data is put before us.  Our emotional state is, in fact, far more important than any information we might encounter.  Two different people are even quite apt to perceive identical objective data differently, one positively and the other ambivalently or negatively, depending on their underling (and perhaps only semi-conscious) feelings regarding the decision.

If information or rational persuasion is to influence our decision to walk each day, it must be presented or we must perceive it in a compelling and motivating way.  Costs and benefits must start, not in the realm of calculation, but in our emotions and values – enlisting and engaging them, making the choice compelling and even-fear engendering.  Observing our natural brain in action in ourselves, we can see that information regarding benefits is best made visual and visceral, and any uncertainty regarding future benefits is best reduced, made more tangible, and brought into the present or near term if possible.  If the choice to walk or adopt some other healthy behavior is a sound one, then this process is not manipulative, it is merely a process of consciously recasting the choice in ways that are more motivating.  Ideally, we will do this for ourselves, through self-awareness and personal mastery.

As we observe the process of our choosing or trying to choose healthy behaviors over other competing behaviors, we can see and learn from our choices as they occur.  We learn that we really do often rely on short-term considerations, on feelings and intuitions, on our observations and advice of others, and especially on how we perceive a choice, whenever we make a decision to advance our health, as in our example to begin a one hour daily walking program.  Our decision may be influenced by statistics and calculations, and public health information we are exposed to or seek out.  But as likely, our choices are primarily driven by general and evolving feelings that we should change and adopt new behaviors, or by specific the appeal of benefits we want to enjoy or costs we want to avoid in the short run (for example, to get in shape or avoid negative perceptions of ourselves).  Equally, we see that we may be driven to change our behavior and daily patterns by feelings of the type of person we are or want to be. 

In truth, long-term benefits and statistics often only help us build or awaken initial emotional engagement, and later rationalize our healthy decisions, but are often not the principal reason nor are they ever the full basis of our choices.  Because of this, even when faced with strong data and arguments, we so often do not make optimal decisions.  Or we may hedge against other emotional commitments in our health decisions, through smaller initial commitments, and then probe our direct experience and impacts on our feelings and identity from these changes, as much as impacts on our health.  In our walking example, we might commit initially to a 30-minute program, and only on days when the weather is especially good, and to later consider if we should do more.  Our future consideration will then involve not just the effects on our body weight, stamina, and health prospects, but equally our feelings about the experience of walking, its immediate disruption in our lives and the consequences, and even how we strongly we identify with walkers and non-walkers when we walk.

Once new healthy behaviors are adopted, of course, this same semi-conscious, partly rational and mostly emotional human calculus explains why our established behaviors are apt to endure and promote still new healthy behaviors in our lives.  To return to our example of a 60-minute daily walking program, once we are achieving significant real-time benefits from this level of walking (via tangible gains in fitness and stamina, and perhaps an enjoyment of the aesthetic experiences that come with walking), the short-term benefits of stopping our walking (one hour more free time each) are often much more amorphous and thus much less compelling than the now known, already achieved, and emotionally engaging benefits of continuing our walks.  Our walking may even have become a new part of our identity and persona, perhaps formed a new outlet in our social life, and be increasingly inseparable from ourselves. 

We may be thus unwilling to give up our new and healthier pattern for competing demands on our time and attention – much in the way we stay with a well-known product brand – through the same emotional considerations that made our new behavior and choice so hard initially, and even for a time as more rational and beneficial options are presented to us.  Our natural barriers to change and investment now work in our favor, holding us at a new, now familiar, and healthier level.  At the same time, we have the added benefit of a new memory of healthy choice, experienced the process of change and a positive result, and can use this memory to help motivate additional changes.  This is true even if we may initially forget much of the experience of struggle and are again confronted with the immediacy of uphill feelings amidst the prospect of new changes, until such feelings are well remembered and become all-too-familiar.

The key lesson from this example and description of a typical contemporary health enhancement choice is that our own decision-making can be observed – preferably live and amidst choice, but in hindsight too – and our observations then used to make improved choices, and the undoing of old ones.  The idea of “bounded choice” is more complex than simply thinking of decisions as cost-benefit accounting, but this idea far better portrays experience and the role of reason in our decisions.  It opens us up to better understand the influence of perception and identity, and especially the fact of competing emotions and values within us, whenever we choose.  Bounded choice also explains why, and helps us observe and understand, that healthy behaviors can feel uphill when we first adopt them, tend to fluctuate with pressing demands in our lives or changes in the environment, but then so often persist once choices established and new context is created, even as new and perhaps more beneficial options present themselves. 

Our choices for greater health are always in context.  Any new behaviors must always crowd out old and familiar ones (even if it is lethargy), requiring force or energy of some kind and creating at least episodic disequilibrium in our lives and cognition.  And all our health decisions and options are framed emotionally and compete for our attention and motivation.  As we see this in ourselves, we can bring new awareness and force to our decision-making, examine and explore our often conflicting emotions, seek clarifying information where it is needed, and ultimately make more self-conscious and optimal choices.  Our opportunities for healthier choice also often involve mining past and current decisions to make and motivate better future ones, and this fact underscores why self-awareness, personal mastery, and health optimization are so deeply linked.

The example of daily walking underscores our potential and the need to better and more consciously frame heath choices to make them more appealing, to us and others, to make these choices easier and less uphill even as they are ascents.  To foster healthy personal investments of all sorts, we must first find ways to lower short-term costs and recast benefits into the near-term, making the choices more tangible and emotionally compelling, even as we seek to increase and lengthen consideration of future benefits.  We must also look to activate still deeper and more principled emotions – by framing healthy choices as integral to our current and desired identity, recasting health as a choice or series of choices we really want and need to make as people, even that we are eager to make. In these ways, we can build awareness of both our health and ourselves, iteratively clarifying and cultivating our emotional aims and the rational steps we must take to fulfill our evolving aims.

Specific techniques for fostering healthier and more self-conscious choices will be the focus of the next and final section of this exploration of human decision-making.  Before taking up these approaches, I want to address any lingering concerns you may have regarding our ability to reframe health choices, reliably and credibly, in more compelling and catalyzing ways.  You may well believe that healthy behaviors usually take considerable time or effort to produce their results, and that they generally do not have a “quick hit” profile waiting to be uncovered and used to motivate change. 

It would be wrong to pretend that some health activities are not like this, that some choices take great effort before benefits come, or really can only be seen primarily in future and rational terms (immunization being perhaps an example of this later case).  My experience, however, is that we can consciously and creatively reframe many or even most of our health choices to make them far more compelling to ourselves and others.  A remarkable and instructive example of this comes to us directly from my work with longtime natural health practitioners.

Successful natural health practitioners often live very different lives than average people today – in the foods they eat, in the regularity and intensity of their exercise, in their relationships with others, in the striking places and ways in which they may live, and frequently in particular how they think about their health.  We might be initially tempted to label them highly rational and forward-looking, which they may be in part.  More generally, however, one finds in extended discussions with these longtime practitioners that their healthy behavior and choices are very often viewed in far more immediate and personal terms than one might first expect, especially when compared with people just beginning to pursue a consciously healthy lifestyle. 

These experienced practitioners typically speak of their healthy behaviors as aligned with their personal values, with their expectations for themselves in daily life, and thus with their ongoing identity and sense of self.  Importantly, they very often both begin and end discussions of their choices and lifestyle with expressions of strong emotions about the quality of the daily life they enjoy, and link these daily benefits directly to their health practices.  For seasoned practitioners, the appeal and daily experience of their health choices is thus highly focused on and often completely reframed by values, identity, and short-term benefits.  References to the future (longevity and morbidity considerations, etc.) often come only as an afterthought.  In this sense, for the experienced natural health practitioner, health is almost universally no longer perceived or framed primarily as an investment for the future, or even as work or an effort, but as part of a continuing, pleasurable, and compelling form of daily life.  Natural health is creatively reframed – made natural for our natural mind – and the approach serves as an important lesson for all people seeking healthier and higher life.

If we can tap into and sustain this emotion and sense of immediate benefit, and drawn new identity from and re-create daily life through our health activities, even as we think of healthy behaviors as good long-term investments, we are far more likely to continue and even accelerate in our steps toward improved health.  This increased likelihood comes from re-framing this progression as engaging, valuable, motivating, and downward feeling, even as it is upward moving and requiring time and energy.  This is the common practice and experience of successful long-term natural health practitioners, who move health into the present and integrate it with their identity and daily life. 

They of course continue to face new challenges and choices for added heath, personal development, and changes, but with the memory and benefits of past health-directed choices, and a strong awareness of the natural emotional landscape we must all traverse to some degree with each new choice.  Many practitioners recall of their early efforts and struggles at healthier life with amusement and offer personal anecdotes, and importantly, often speak of a transitional phase in their practice, after which their health and development choices became easier and more natural – which you now know means that their choices where successfully and permanently reframed in their emotions and cognition.

This last point underscores the importance, as we work toward healthier life, of attending to and using the work and struggle we do experience when establishing new and healthier patterns as learning and self-awareness building opportunities.  Such learning from our thoughts and actions can make our health steps more far more conscious and immediately more confident, and is very useful to us in the long-term, eventually making choice and change much easier as we have discussed, even as our choices and steps become much larger. 

In truth, extraordinary breakthroughs in our health and life are always possible, if we can find compelling new perspectives on them.  With consciously healthier and more open personal frames, we harness and sustain the force of self-cultivation and internal motivation, better integrate our emotions and reason, learn to observe and reduce our impulsiveness, and use past memory of successful change to propel us into a future of welcomed and perhaps continuous change.  In this process, we chose a third way – not natural in a backward-looking sense, nor artificial and inhumane as is the tendency of our time and settled life before our time, but natural in a new, evolved, and more advanced and compelling approach to human life.

Tools For Healthier Choices

From our extended discussion of choice, perhaps it will not be too surprising when I say that choosing natural health and well-being, in the unnatural and often unhealthy environment of modern society, is often possible only through decidedly modern and less than traditionally natural approaches.  The tools I will describe come from modern personal development psychology, and can help us become more aware of and actively reframe our perspective on potential health choices.  They can help us consciously examine and then alter our often unconscious basic nature, received nurture, and force of our ongoing experiences – to see and change our underlying and often unseen frames and personal narratives.  These tools can help us better manage our time to create space for change, and to re-weight our time horizon and find benefits of change in real time.  And they can help clarify and motivate us toward what we really want, especially what we want as we become more aware of ourselves and grow as people.

It is worth pointing out that many of these things often happen to some degree through experience and maturation, recognizing that these last two things are not always perfectly correlated.  The process of gaining life experience includes becoming more aware and discriminating – by living with past decisions and better understanding their force, and the tangible reality of time – and naturally teaches us to extend our time horizon.  Experience, of its own nature, helps us better understand ourselves and see our frames.  It reveals our emotions and their hierarchy, through life in times of tranquility and stress, and naturally improves our intelligence and decision-making.  If you casually compare the time horizon, self-consciousness, and self-management skills of the small children, teenagers, young adults, and middle-aged and older adults you know, for example, I suspect you will see a clear positive progression (no doubt with some exceptions).

But why wait for wisdom of age, when we can have a better life beginning today?  Why not cultivate our health and improve our quality of life, now?  At any age, we all must now contend with millions of years of natural selection and the more recent forces of cultural selection and life in complex society, all often much stronger influences than we realize, even in elderhood.  We all begin our days with a human nature that is out of its natural element, that so often wants to live day-to-day and week-to-week, and even moment-to-moment when we experience intense emotions and stress.  Our cultural patterns of nurture may someday help us with personal mastery, but today are still crude, self-serving, misinformed, and frequently far from optimal.  A third path is both needed and possible, and leads us to consider new tools for improved self-awareness and self-management, to help us begin and continue ahead in this new path. 

What follows are selected tools to consider, for yourself and in work helping others to improve their choices toward greater health.  Included are short descriptions of how and why each tool works, though by now you should be able to understand their general impacts on our cognition (and all important natural emotions and time-horizon):

·         Information – gathering information about our health and other potential personal investments is a basic way of expanding our perspective and the boundary conditions that frame our decisions.  Since we may often make important decisions on uninformed emotion and direct observation, cultivating the habit of looking more broadly before we leap is important to improve our success in life generally.  Information both educates us and, if presented compellingly, builds emotional interest in change.  Some information can even begin to change our identity and values – most of us have read a life-changing or mind-altering book at some point, for example.  Sources of health information include periodicals, books, websites, and even classes, but do be cautious about all sources of information as there is a great deal of misinformation in circulation, whether regarding our health or other areas.

·         Goal Setting – in addition to information gathering, setting goals is one of the most effective tools for expanding our time horizon, clarifying and making explicit our deeper emotional aims and values, exploring alternative identities, and helping us make more optimal, healthier, and heartfelt decisions over time.  Goal setting can be as simple as resolutions or, preferably, can be more sophisticated processes of setting short-, mid- and long-term objectives for our health and other key areas of our life.  Goals are best when set and reviewed periodically, allowing for learning, refinement, and emotional re-engagement.  Goals should also always be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound.  Ideally, we should have such compelling and consciously-chosen goals in each of the important dimensions of our life.

·         Time Analysis – related to the process of conscious goal setting is time analysis and time management, a technique popularized by Steven Covey and his seven habits.  Time analysis can illuminate unconscious frames and personal biases, forces us to clarify what we most value.  Time analysis is of course just what its name implies: recording or mapping how we spend our time, often in 15-minute increments, over one or more days.  Time analysis often provides unexpected insights into the high and low value ways we spend or invest our time against what we intent.  This process can liberate time in our lives for new choices, and foster much more optimal time allocation and decision-making when practiced seriously.  Like goal setting, time analysis is best done periodically, to examine and clarify what we want emotionally, and to see how well or rationally we are pursuing our wants and living in alignment with our values.

·         Thirty-Day Tests – an effective tool for people at all stages of health development is the use of thirty-day tests.  Thirty-day tests involve either selecting a health reducing behavior and living without it for thirty days, or selecting and living with a new health enhancing behavior for the same amount of time.  Thirty-day tests allow for a bit of cost containment, hedging, and exploration, since we are making or framing the commitment as a test or trial, instead of a more emotionally-complex lifelong commitment.  With small investments or commitments of our time, we get rapid feedback and learning, and often build emotional engagement and make changes stick when we might otherwise not attempt them.  When put together into a series of challenges, tests help us stair step and can produce remarkable shifts in our health and life in a short time.  Thirty-day tests are great for both people who feel overwhelmed by their need for large and long-term changes, and for those of us who need fine-tuning of a generally healthy lifestyle or who want to explore new choices amidst healthy life.

·         Reward Programs – another practical tool for raising our self-awareness, engaging our emotions, and creating increased short-term benefits to counter the immediate costs of change and new choices is to create a reward program.  Ideally, these would be healthy rewards – spa treatments, outings, trips, home improvements, and classes are examples – made after achieving a specific health goal (and perhaps financed by an eliminated behavior that is costly both to our health and wallet).  Rewards are best when they lead to new self-awareness and internal motivation, since on their own they involve only extrinsic motivation.  They thus may not directly shape our identity, emotions, and values in the new ways we want.  Ultimately, healthy life can and should become its own reward, as our discussion of experienced practitioners highlighted, but short-term incentives can help to focus our energy and get us over early humps in our steps to become healthier and more self-aware.

·         External Constraints – a very important, if more significant tool to foster improved decisions and an implicitly longer time horizon is environmental change.  As we have discussed, in nature our health was maintained by important external constraints in our physical environment, food supply, and range of life options, and this lesson should not be forgotten.  By our nature, we are highly influenced and bounded by cultural influences and our immediate environment, often more than we realize.  If you are having trouble making healthier choices, it may be worth altering the environment and physical context you are in for increased health.  This may be as simple as emptying your kitchen of unhealthy foods or it may involve a more fundamental restructuring of your surroundings to foster healthier patterns.  We need to make health both easier and more engaging, in real time and over time, and sometime this involves changing the place and space we are in.

·         Progressivity – a final tool we will consider is the idea or strategy of progressivity in your approach to health and other forms of personal investment.  Experienced natural health practitioners usually talk about their past progress as a series of small, self-reinforcing steps toward health and personal mastery, with learning and setbacks along the way, rather than as a dramatic leap made seamlessly or at once.  Building our health over time, and realizing successes and positive feedback along the way, is a critical approach to foster much better long-term decision and to permanently reframe health more positively in your life.  Progressivity helps us manage the short-term costs and disequilibrium, the emotional competition, that healthier new choices and behaviors always involve – even with their future benefits and unforeseen immediate benefits, and even as we know in some part of our emotions that they are the right thing to do.

Balancing Today & Tomorrow

Understanding the science of decisions and our experience in making choices can open new perspectives on ourselves and our health, including the choices we are making (or failing to make) to advance our well-being and growth today.  In particular, through new awareness and self-awareness, we can better appreciate why health practices can be difficult to begin but easier to maintain, the rich interplay of emotion and calculation within us when confronting choice, and our natural bias to enjoy and preserve life in the present.  We even can discover for ourselves a new way to consciously reframe or adjust our perspective for better and healthier decisions and life over time.

People who achieve new levels of health, at all stages of health enhancement, routinely report a higher impact from and great satisfaction with the changes they have made than they initially thought likely.  It is with this viewpoint in mind that our health decisions should and generally must be made (for all but the most rational of us).  Progressive health programs that encourage gradual, but steady and self-reinforcing health steps, as well as regular emotional re-engagement and awareness building, are most apt to circumvent or enlist our often myopic human nature, and produce lasting and even remarkable health enhancement.  Like small investments allowed to compound over time, the results and impacts of incremental and iterative health programs can add up, while being welcomed and a source of satisfaction in daily life, producing dramatic and transformative health improvements, and often far faster than our calculations had estimated.

In addition to progressivity, regular goal-setting and reward programs can also help to foster better-managed time horizons and deeper emotional commitment, and greater self-awareness, leading to easier and healthier decisions.  Time analysis is another important tool to increase our self-awareness and see key opportunities for compelling and “low-cost” changes in how we spend our time.  Finally, it is important not to overlook the importance of our personal environment – both the physical opportunities and limitations it provides and the emotions and feelings it engenders – and to actively and consciously shape the settings and places  we live in and that influence all our daily thoughts, feelings, and choices. 

Together, new health and improved choices are possible, cultivating the “third way” I spoke of and leading to new life, for you and the people you care for and influence.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

Having just finished No Contest: The Case Against Competition, by Alfie Kohn, fully twenty years after its first publication, I feel like a person arriving late to a gathering, only to find the event has not yet begun. 

Kohn’s book and urgent theme may not be new, but I would recommend as strongly as I can this provocative, original, and gentle but radical critique of our still increasingly competitive society (that seems increasingly unable to see its alternatives).  Kohn’s many poignant observations, insights, and conclusions are as timely today as when first written and seem perennially compelling.  All have most certainly withstood, and may even have been strengthened, by the proverbial test of time.

However you may feel today about the merits of competition and the alternative of cooperation, you will agree that the implications of your feelings are considerable, for you and, in the aggregate, for us all.  Your feelings about competition are fundamental to the way you will live your life each day, to the world you will wake up to and work to create (and accept), and to how you will think about and treat those of us who are near you, throughout the course of your life.

Across twenty-five online reviews of No Contest I surveyed, spanning a decade, the book garners a solid four out of five star rating, but this average belies a strongly divergent pattern of individual reviews that I think is important and telling.  There are mostly four- and five-star ratings and words of praise and encouragement for what is an excellent and thorough book, but consistently about twenty percent of people who review the work rank it poor and offer comments that are, well, often quite dismissive.  This latter set of reviews seem, in some cases, to lack poignancy and originality, an infraction Kohn cannot be accused of, and some are quite aggressive and even hostile.  I suspect that if No Contest was more widely read in our time, and more frequently reviewed, the percentage of detractors would be far higher.

I bring up this persistent pattern of negative reactions to No Contest, not to belittle its detractors, but because it underscores a central hypothesis of Kohn’s work: that competition, and the competitive structures and mindsets it fosters, works to alter us.  Empirically, they bias us to be reactive and aggressive, closed to new ideas and inimical to alternatives, and resistive to and even obstinate about changes to the rules of the games we play (even to the games we are made to play).  Kohn challenges us to imagine a new game, called cooperation.  Does this game sound strange, uncertain, and threatening to you?  Many people seem to think so and to think, perhaps idealistically themselves, that it is an idealistic proposition.

In his remarkable book, Kohn catalogues extensive research into the ways competition makes us less sensitive, less productive, less creative, and even less intelligent.  He documents findings that suggest competition narrows our personal focus and thereby makes us less able or likely to see our frames of reference for what they are – constructed frames we refer to – frames that are enabling and necessary, but also that are ultimately limiting and expandable, and as such, ultimately indefensible.  Life in competitive structures, life in competitive worldviews, even may make us less engaged in life itself, as it almost certainly and near universally makes us less engaged in others and their lives.

I came to discover No Contest on the recommendation of a friend, after a brief but lasting conversation on the practical virtues of cooperation, and after some months of thinking about competition and its role in and impact on our health and social environment.  As a friend, though we may not have yet met, I will recommend this important and thought-provoking book to you as well, and invite you into my original, still echoing conversation about the alternative of cooperation. 

As I make this recommendation to you, it is with a conviction that Kohn’s No Contest will at least give you an interesting perspective on contemporary life, that it may provoke and irritate you, and that it may, as other reviewers have noted, cause you to wake up and live differently each day.  I certainly feel this third way.  I feel that Kohn has nurtured, expanded, better grounded in science an earlier notion of mine:  cooperation, not competition as has been held for centuries, is the natural and most beneficial state of human beings.

As a book, No Contest is nearly flawless technically, especially given its generally uncharted or at least unassimilated subject, the then young age of its author, and even after twenty years of opportunities for alternatives and even as it is a disagreeable work to many people. I found the book well planned and elegantly written, finely passionate, carefully reasoned, worth having for the bibliography alone, and of course potentially mind-altering in its assembled evidence and conclusions.  The book was not what I expected, and it will likely not be what you expect now, with divergent views and reviews apt to continue for as long as the book is read. 

A divergence of views of this sort seems inevitable and should be perpetually welcomed as an opportunity to illustrate and give force Kohn’s thesis, as I have done.  No Contest counters the vast and driving weight of our modern intuition and sensibility that competition is good, and the now abundant extrinsic benefits of advanced technology and global commerce, attributed to competition but perhaps only superficially true.  And even as Kohn has, firmly on his side, the increasing intrinsic poverty and despair of people across the world, as the lives and traditional communities are globalized.  This last set of facts seems, to me, to be an important and stunningly overlooked piece of evidence, amidst all the familiar pronouncements on virtue of competition. 

Some earlier reviewers have criticized No Contest for not offering enough practical guidance, but I am happy to be left to think about and act on its many ideas and conclusions for myself and with others.  Still, we all live in a practical world and so do need to wonder a bit:  if cooperation is superior to competition in category after category of human affairs, if it consistently produces more creative and satisfied, and healthier and saner people, why is there simply not more of it around us?  Perhaps cooperation is more widespread than we realize, undergirding but frequently overshadowed by more obvious acts of competition that attract more attention.

As I said, I am willing to consider this question and the many others Kohn’s book engenders, and I hope you are too.  Computer modeling and game theory of the last two decades may offer new insights into the apparent patterns of competition and cooperation around us today, but as yet not a path to the new and more beneficial states of ubiquitous cooperation posed as possible, more sustainable, and more desirable by Kohn. (I would welcome being updated on advances in game theory and systems modeling).

The organizational psychologists Chris Argyris and Donald Schon wrote, beginning in the 1970s and well before Kohn’s book, about typical “Model I” and, far more effective, “Model II” group dynamics.  I always was comfortable with these tidy non-labels.  Having read No Contest, though, I am now inclined to think they could have named, and that we should rightly now name, these interactive styles for what they really may be: competitive and cooperative group dynamics.  I’ll leave you to consider this idea too, one of many that spill out, into heads and rooms, during a reading or discussion of No Contest.

To end somewhat near where I began, No Contest is an awakening for many people and an irritant and even an outrage for probably many more of us today, no doubt to all who are disciples and ideologues of economic liberalism and committed to the game and ethic of competition.  In me, No Contest stirred both a child and an old man, each wiser in the way children and elders can be wiser than us in mid-life, in their propensity for innocence to new ideas and in their indifference to so many external, accepted, and seemingly emphatic things in our lives.

I hope No Contest will be this for you, and still more. 

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…encourage modern natural life & health!