16/07/2024
This neurologist nails it.
It applies across all our industries in the western world.
That a healthy lifestyle in terms of holistic range of factors including dietary, connective community and good social, movement and moderate exercise (not extreme), less anxiety, love and mutual support is the real cure to most health problems above most surgery, medical interventions, or say, pills.
The whole western medical system, like so many of our structures, is naive and blind to the complexity but has the hubris to assert "god-like" faith in people to fix other people.
The most humbling of surgeons and doctors will tell you they don't barely do any of the work - the human body in fact does most of the work, if you let it - all they do is help it along, interventions can sometimes help but sometimes, like this neurologist says, they can even make things worse.
His patients who had a healthier lifestyle would be cured before they reached their scheduled operations. This is a general observation.
Our civilisation is going to the wall, because we've gotten too smart for our own good, a false sense of ego and confidence, to out-do nature, and now we are seeing the impacts of this hubris.
I've been at pains to constantly use a broken car as an analogy to illustrate how our society often gets things wrong, especially in scientific or technological endeavours.
Here is the image: we have a car, the front left wheel is broken/flat, it is driving very "shaky".
So, we start looking at all the things going wrong and fixing them one-by-one.
The radiator is leaking, so we think that may be the problem.. so we bring in a radiator expert, they fix or replace the radiator so it's brand new again.
The radiator expert comes in, says yes we can replace and fix the radiator and have it working perfectly again.
The engine isn't running so well, so we bring in an auto-mechanic to dismantle the engine, and in no time we have it working perfectly again.
The air conditioner stops working, so we replace it.
All the experts come in and fix and replace all the broken parts, but all the while, nobody has noticed the front left wheel is broken because everyone is an expert but only in a given area of knowledge, yet after the experts have been consulted and lots of money and time has been spent, nobody has noticed that the front left wheel isn't working, and it is shaking the car apart everytime it gets moving.
We need to stop and observe and understand the fundamental problem at its root. Not just replace the wheel, but see that the car is out of shape, which is why the wheel is broken. The fix was always the axle, not any of the other parts.
Fix the problem at its root, and everything else will sort out in due course.
One thing our whole society has forgotten is: people.
They are social beings that need love, support, compassion, understanding and the ability to show understanding. You don't need to throw them more money, subsidies, surgeries, quakery and pills to fix them. You return them to an humane environment and simply a healthy human lifestyle which is summed up above, like the neurologist says in this youtube video.
Our entire economy and society is falling off the cliff because people have become more disconnected than ever... Covid lockdowns, fear and misinformation, and social media has not helped... that people like me who've been flagging these issues for years and the need to head towards more sustainable and community based living, are just failing at it right now.
Very few of us have really been trying to help push against this tide and we are working in the face of way too much disarray, dysfunction, confusion and fear to the point that no one is listening and no one wants to listen and do something smart about it.
After much reflection, and after so much investment both personal and economic, like this neurologist, I've made the difficult but rational decision to step off and work towards finding a new life, a new culture, places that people still have hope and a feeling they have control of themselves, a sense of optimisim, and an excitement for living and exploring and finding ways at least for ourselves to live a contented, fulfilling and more natural lifestyle. It ain't found in the western world, I can assure everyone of that.
After travelling around a handful of other countries and nations, I have always discovered and believed that the solutions are to be found plentifully all around us, it's just that we are too egoistic to notice, and funny enough, you'll find many of these solutions in so-called third-world countries and our more indigenous cultures who are barely struggling to survive and preserve these more naturally human societies and their values before they too succumb to things like rampant westernism, consumerism, individualism etc.
Instead of fleeing off to Mars, we should be fixing our own issues down here on earth, because we have evolved over many thousands of years to live in this environment best, and maximised for it... before we so grossly change it so much it changes to something more uninhabitable.
For sure some people don't have access to say mobile phones, good dental services, electric cars, diamond rings... they may even live shorter lives... but they are living happier, more contented lives, in community, in villages, making less impact on the planet and its biosphere, surrounded by family/tribe/villages and people all around them, they smile from the heart, and they don't feel a great need to fly to Mars right now. In fact, that's the great majority of people on the planet right now.
And since embarking upon a path of using the tools of social change to inspire a more sustainable and community led world, it strangely feels like our world has gone backwards to the point it is no longer interested in evolving to better and more rational but different ideas, but feels it must cling jealously and desperately to the way things are/were, even though it no longer makes any sense to do so. No amount of investment in housing, crypto, superannuation and wealth is going to make you happy in your final days but in fact make one more miserable, disconnected and lonely. I've witnessed many older people die like this.
After investing all my family's fortunes in projects that could have actually helped people live more contented and sustainably, I've had to start from scratch again, working hard to have the funds to go seeking community in the most unlikely smaller circles of new friends who barely comprehend some of the major projects I've been privileged to have worked on previously in my professional life, and that's great... because I'm just being "me", someone wishing to help and be a friend and have a laugh along the way, without needing to be aggressive or try prove anything more than say to people "you're worth it".
I'll be travelling around the world finding the places that more embrace the ideals that I've come to realise are most important, which are the ones that have become the least important in our society. And I don't wish to hang around and watch this societal car accident in slow motion unfurl. In the limited years I have left, being middle aged now but still very young at heart, I wish to focus on me and my immediate friends/community around me (no family), invest more in them rather than populations who aren't listening or being sidetracked with misinformation and conspiracy theories, live every heartbeat like it's the last, make the most of every moment and live life to the fullest in other ways rather than be entangled in the culminating woes, insecurities and fears of the greater population.
I'm looking forward to my new heading, I'm already on it, and I hope a few more others, for your own sake, have similar awakenings and actually do something about it rather than whining about it and doing very little - because the more empowered and enlightened people around, the much easier a world this would be (for me) to live in :)
Here, I share my story about how I spent the last two decades of my life as a neurosurgeon who went through a mid-life crisis and got through to the other si...
