The Stress-Performance Curve for Civilization

It's past time to reevaluate the social contract. Unprecedented social ills, including record-breaking levels of mental illness and addiction, secondary to a widespread, pernicious breakdown in community have led to more people feeling adrift, empty, and angry than ever before. Is the fix about optimizing our individual interactions with social systems, or is the only possible cure systemic change?

You've probably seen the stress-performance curve before. The concept behind it is simple: That stress increases performance up to some point at which it starts to become toxic, beyond which additional stress further damages performance with increasing severity.

Lately, it's occurred to me that we're experiencing the breakdown segment of a similar curve describing the benefits of civilization.

Up to a certain point, the pros of civilization are hard to dispute. It allows us to stay in one place, with enough food to eat and the ability to protect ourselves from the elements (and other potentially dangerous external influences).

It allows specialization of labor, which increases efficiency, and enables support of the young, elderly, ill, and otherwise needy.

The thing is, with Western society in general and American society in particular, we passed that point of optimal "civilizedness" a long time ago.

The pressures of the modern capitalistic system that we're forced to function within - to work longer and longer hours in sedentary and stressful roles to maintain our access to healthcare and the roofs over our head, let alone something approximating a middle-class standard of living - are beginning to wear on us in telltale ways.

Mental illness, particularly in younger people, is skyrocketing. Deaths of despair, including from alcoholic cirrhosis and morbid obesity, are being seen in younger people for the first time in our country's history.

Addiction is now the number one cause of death for Americans under age 50; that fact alone should take your breath away.

We have become, in many ways, over-civilized. We have begun to show the neurotic behavior of monkeys and other apes when they are kept in captivity.

Everywhere the epidemic of loneliness lurks in the shadows. What we can see is its mirror image: Our endless chasing of short-term gratification through substances, unhealthy foods (or, the other side of the coin, obsessive / orthorexic healthfulness); our ceaseless competition with each other via social media and in real life for cheap gains in the prestige economy.

Community, though an elusive concept, is something that we all feel at the core of our being both when we have it and when it is missing. And right now, across the board, Americans agree that it is missing.

True spirituality is a vanishingly rare commodity, and yet every other influencer peddles some zombie husk of it via our social media feeds.

Meaning, real place and purpose in the world, is rarer and rarer.

***

As someone who studied biology and medicine, I have traditionally been skeptical of "ye golden days of olde" views of earlier times in history.

I frequently countered such views with thoughts about what life was like before modern hygiene, antibiotics, and other medical advancements extended our average lifespan by decades and removed the brutal detriments to our health posed by various acute and chronic diseases, communicable and otherwise.

However, mine was an overly simplistic dismissal of the "maybe we should go back to an earlier way of living" arguments.

For one thing, it equated healthspan with lifespan. Though we are living longer, now - although our life expectancy has finally begun to decrease - our mental and physical health seems to be at a nadir (difficult as it is to compare subjective states of being across historical periods).

The other problem with my old way of thinking is that it suggests that we have to "take the good with the bad" when it comes to civilization; that we can't optimize to get more of what we need with less of what hurts us.

It suggests that the social contract is nonnegotiable when it is, in fact, something that all of us individually and collectively revise through all of our actions, large and small, intentional and (mostly) unconscious, throughout our lives.

***

People have considered various formulations of the pertinent questions before.

As I've written about previously, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow - of the famous Hierarchy of Needs - spent some time among the Blackfoot (Siksika) of the American West in 1938 (article here), which led him to conclude that "80–90% of the Blackfoot tribe had a quality of self-esteem that was only found in 5–10% of his own population."

The Blackfoot had rich traditions centered upon coming of age, self-discovery, and self-renewal. They engaged in yearly rituals in which the wealthiest gave away their superfluous possessions, describing how they had accumulated them and what they hoped they would do for others.

The Blackfoot looked at justice restoratively and raised their children permissively and with great respect.

We, as humans, have done it better before. We've been more fulfilled, with less stress and more sense of balance and meaning.

Again, we know this - intuitively and historically.

Most of us agree that materialism, social competition, and image play oversized roles in modern, Western societies, but very few of us could explain in just a few policy points how to turn things around and revitalize our society with true community.

***

I read an interesting article in an evolutionary biology journal, which analyzed archaeological evidence of early humans to try to estimate how they allocated their time to various activities.

Amazingly, the authors of this study concluded that our "primitive" forebears would have spent 20 to 30 hours a week hunting, fishing, farming, building / repairing shelter, and tending to other basic needs; the rest of their time was free for cave painting, spirit quests, socializing, and wherever the wind took them!

The authors further noted that modern inventions meant to save time - like the vacuum and laundry machines - have really only translated into bigger domiciles that take more time to maintain and more possessions to keep up stored in them.

I saw how much the endless grind wore on my parents, and I am taken aback at how many of my fellow Millennials have just sort of rationalized away endless overtime for less pay, less time with kids and other family members, fewer vacations and other types of time off, and other huge quality-of-life losses.

The only people who benefit from us wearing ourselves this thin are the people at the very top of our society (until the wealth gap becomes severe enough that the social order begins to break down, at which point society as a whole is destabilized; it might be that we're already at the beginning of this stage in the U.S.).

As they squeeze us harder and harder, more of us will burn out, drop out, and drop dead.

We already incarcerate more people per capita in the United States than any other country in the world save for perhaps North Korea. The penalties for refusing to participate in the system are severe.

Again, just reading that fact about the American carceral state should make all of us stop and think. We're supposed to be the Land of the Free, and we lock up more of our own people than almost any other society.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

***

I don't believe that the solution lies in "optimizing" our individual interactions with our social systems. That can only reduce the burden of stress for those privileged few who are relatively well off anyway.

At least one in six Americans is currently taking psych medication. Almost every single adult I know has some clinically significant anxiety, depression, substance abuse, or other mental health issue.*

*It's interesting that we've come to see mental health problems as essential despite the lack of evidence that most mental health problems are rooted in "neurochemical imbalances" and the like (of course, Big Pharma leaned into the biochemical imbalance theory to convince doctors to overmedicate our entire population, so in that sense it's no surprise that we ended up here). Past psychologists and psychiatrists better understood the social component of mental illness. Freud, for example, distinguished between neurosis - relatively "minor" mental illness often caused by the pressures of civilization - and psychosis, which he realized was sometimes indicative of an essential problem. How many of us would really be mentally ill if we had the basic building blocks of physical and mental health available to us? How many "autistic" children would there really be if we weren't forcing kids into an artificially restrictive, overly stimulating, and sometimes harmful educational system that doesn't often accomplish most of what it is meant to achieve?

I'm reminded of Indian spiritualist Jiddu Krishnamurti's famous observation that "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

The sickness is to the bone at this point, and I believe that we can all feel it.

I could marshal dozens of lines of evidence in support of what I'm saying, from rates of mass violence to suicide rates in various demographics to levels of obesity and diabetes and so on - but at the end of the day, that would be tedious and unnecessary.

Our society is sick. It's part of why our politics is so pointlessly destructive; everyone wants to point the finger of blame, and few have concrete, achievable ideas about how to fix things (that don't involve the entrenched elites giving up some money and power).

I can name some changes that would significantly mitigate some of the social ills and stresses that I've mentioned. Criminal justice reform and nationalized healthcare - so that every American isn't one illness away from losing their home and going bankrupt - would be substantive starts.

Limitations on the ability of the wealthy to continue to rig the game in their favor - so that the hope that comes with upward mobility is no longer denied to the middle and lower classes - would help as well.

However, until the fires of community are stoked again, I'm not sure that such changes will be enough.

Maybe it will take a truly revolutionary political movement - or, sadly, some external threat in the form of war or disease or famine - to bring us truly together again.

So much of real community depends upon being honest and vulnerable and fundamentally on the same level; the competitive BS, the meaningless distinctions that we are taught to revere to separate us from each other, has to be discarded so that we can truly come together as equals again.

Perhaps the necessary changes can only ever happen locally. Maybe they will radiate outward from next-generation intentional communities, for example.

I don't know if I'll see the rebirth of community in my lifetime.

I'm even more worried about what will come to pass if I don't.