Life in the Rear-view Mirror

Urbanization

The postwar technology revolution has spawned the growth of cities and the move from rural to urban areas. This trend has taken place despite the fact that the human body was designed to be on the move, in wide open spaces. And, for most of humanity’s existence, people lived as hunter-gatherers moving around from place to place. It wasn’t until about 10,000 years ago that agriculture came into being, starting its own revolution.

People started to settle in fertile areas to grow their own food. With time, more and more people traded hunting and gathering for agriculture, but nomadic life never totally disappeared. Even today, in Mongolia, people live a semi-nomadic life. Each spring they move from sheltered valleys, where they spend the cold winters, to the steppes where new grazing awaits their animal herds.

The advent of agriculture allowed people to live in cities for the first time in history, generating growth in manufacturing, which led to specialization. Although most people farmed, some produced the goods that city living demanded. For example, the brick makers produced bricks to build houses; the woodworkers produced tables and chairs; the potters produced pottery for cooking, drinking, and storing oil or wine.

City living spurred manufacturing, and trade in goods flourished. Until the arrival of electricity, everything was produced from muscle power. People were thus active and physically fit. The introduction of electricity changed that. Not only did they become less fit, they also started a growing trend of consumption. Growing gross domestic product (GDP), which is always viewed as a thriving economy, is also synonymous with consumption. Unfortunately, we didn’t pay much attention to the latter until it started causing numerous problems.

The technology revolution spawned two trends. Farms became increasingly mechanized and more productive, thus requiring a smaller workforce. During the 20th century, it went from the vast majority to about 1-2% of the population, in the most developed countries.

The second trend was the growth of cities. More and more people found work in the industrial areas, and cities just kept growing. Nowadays, the majority of the population lives in cities, and because of the Chinese Phenomenon, which will be described in a subsequent chapter, works behind a desk in tall office towers: a major shift from early nomadic life.

Working in enclosed spaces for eight hours a day, or more, is detrimental to good health, as study after study has shown. Our bodies were made for moving, not for sitting. Although life expectancy is very high in developed countries, diseases that are a direct consequence of our sedentary lifestyle are on the rise. Sedentary living, both at work and home, is causing many cardiovascular health problems, but they are not the only ones.

The move from rural areas to the city is having two effects. Firstly, those that make the move go from low to high-stress living. Secondly, as the city’s population density rises so does the stress level. Buses become crowded, streets become congested, and everybody suffers more. Therefore, the relentless move to the city is causing an increase in stress-related problems. Stress is becoming the number one health issue in cities. All the modern technological advances should have made life easier and more tranquil, and in some ways it has, but they also helped to speed up the pace of life. Today, people are always in a hurry. Everyone rushes to get to work, to get to the store, to the doctor, or wherever else. Just as the speed of computers has grown exponentially in the last three decades, our internal clock is moving faster. It seems that everything has to move at the speed of the Internet.

It’s not that everything moves faster, as such is not the case: it’s our expectations that they should. The difference between reality and what we wish it to be causes stress to rise. Big-city life is full of stress that our bodies were not built to cope with. Stress is connected directly, or indirectly, to all our major health problems. Why do people continue to move to the cities and more stressful lives?

It has to be for a better life, or people wouldn’t trade the advantages of rural living for more stressful and less healthy lives. And those advantages are significant. Country living offers people fresh air, but it’s more than that. The slow pace of rural living gives people more time to prepare good, home-cooked meals, with fresh vegetables from the garden. While the move to the cities offers increased risk of allergies, chronic illnesses, and increased social stresses, by living in close proximity to one another. There is also a greater risk of anxiety disorders, mood disorders, and schizophrenia.

Of course, the wealthy can have their cake and eat it too. They can enjoy many of the advantages of country living in their large estate houses, inside the city, and with chauffeur-driven limousines to avoid the stress of city driving. But most of us can’t.

Nowadays, the majority of people live in cities. The availability of jobs and better medical care are probably the main reasons. Despite all the disadvantages of big-city-living, life expectancy has grown steadily during my lifetime. Canada has one of the highest life expectancies in the Western World, including the U.S. But life expectancy doesn’t say anything about quality of life.

A better indicator is the health-adjusted life expectancy – a measure of the number of years a person can expect to live in good health. On this scale, Canada is in eleventh place among OECD countries. The top ten are all Nordic countries. Italy, a Mediterranean country, is the only exception. While it’s not the wealthiest of European countries, I suppose that Italy’s climate makes a difference to quality of life. Canadians can expect to live 90% of their life in reasonably good health. For the remaining 10%, they have to rely on pill popping to keep them going. That’s not much to look forward to!

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