This article is in response to an article called “Silicon Valley Would Rather Cure Death than Make Life Worth Living”.
The article makes a good point that the way people communicate, travel and eat in the U.S. and world has changed. Some of the worlds billionaires are investing their wealth and resources into extending life and to obliterate human disease. This looks like a worthwhile ambition and something that would benefit humanity, but does living longer and healthier make a life worth living?
Mortality rates have been going down for the last 100 years and there has been a large increase in life reduction. At the same time major diseases and depression are drastically on the rise.
There is also something called “Deaths of Despair” where death rates had been rising dramatically since 1999 among middle-aged white Americans reversing decades of longer life expectancy. (1)
In fact, some people believe that the current heroin and opioid epidemic in the U.S. is related to Deaths of Despair. This makes sense as more and more people seem to be checking out of life as the chaos and stress of life overtakes them. (2)
Eliminating disease is an admirable ambition but it seems it’s the lack of education, environment and lifestyle that is really holding people back and causing them to lose interest in life.
According to economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton who discovered Deaths of Despair.
“A lack of steady, well-paying jobs for whites without college degrees has caused pain, distress and social dysfunction to build up over time. The mortality rate for that group, ages 45 to 54, increased by a half percent each year from 1999 to 2013.
But whites with college degrees haven’t suffered the same lack of economic opportunity and haven’t seen the same loss of life expectancy. The study was published Thursday in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.”
Data courtesy of the National Center for Health Statistics, CDC
Over the past 15 years, the total suicide rate has increased 24% from 10.5 to 13.0 per 100,000.
The suicide rate among males has remained approximately four times higher (20.7 per 100,000 in 2014) than among females (5.8 per 100,000 in 2014).
The suicide rates for adolescent boys and girls have been steadily rising since 2007, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (3)
The suicide rate for girls ages 15 to 19 doubled from 2007 to 2015, when it reached its highest point in 40 years, according to the CDC. The suicide rate for boys ages 15 to 19 increased by 30 percent over the same time period. The analysis looked at data from 1975 to 2015, the most recent year those statistics were available. (4)
According to the article, Silicon Valley’s goal to eliminate disease and increase mortality rates is focusing on the wrong things.
According to SUNY Polytechnic Institute historian Andrew Russell, an outspoken critic of the cult of innovation.
Emily Dreyfuss writes; “the focus on innovating away death sets a cultural tone that directs attention from answers that might actually help, like infrastructure or education.”
This is true because there are a lot of people trying to escape the misery of their lives.
“What would it mean to design against despair or isolation or loneliness?” asks Russell. “I have to think that just making another social media messaging platform doesn’t get us there.”
At the same time Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are giving away a $3 billion initiative to obliterate human disease, Facebook is becoming more and more of an unhealthy social habit. A lot of people on Facebook are spreading negative, unhealthy content that spreads gloom and doom. People are also comparing themselves to other people and their lives on the platform, which is causing depression.
A new study shows that the More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel. (5)
Studies have also shown for years that our intake of gloom and doom news is unhealthy causing negative psychological effects and depression. (6)
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink or think.
I don’t believe that Mark Zuckerberg or any social media giant created their social media platforms to be detrimental to human health and help create depression. It’s what people have done with social media and how they are using it that is causing it to become an unhealthy obsession.
Most people know that smoking, an unhealthy diet of processed and fast foods, eating lots of sugar and carbohydrates, lack of exercise, being addicted to social media or politics, gloom and doom news are unhealthy. All of this research is on the Internet and even the same gloom and doom news media sources are reporting on this. YouTube, the second largest search engine on the Internet is filled with experts on various diet movements and medical doctors talking about health and giving advice. Unfortunately, these videos are not even close to being the most popular content on YouTube.
At the same time we have generations of children growing up in poverty in families supported by the U.S. welfare system.
“As of July 7, 2017 42.6 million Americans were receiving SNAP benefits during the current fiscal year, down from 44.2 million in 2016. The 2017 figure is the lowest since 2010, when 40.3 million people were on food stamps. The number peaked in 2013, at 47.6 million.” (7)
If the U.S. Government would stop allowing people on Nutrition Assistance (Formerly the Food Stamp Program) to purchase fast food and processed foods and limit the program to whole foods and add incentives for people to purchase more organic produce and supplements, this would be a major beneficial change. The program is called Nutrition Assistance.
The DES could also create a website and teach people about nutrition and health and the benefits of eating less, eating the right foods, exercise and fasting. The same knowledge most people in Silicon Valley have. 90% of the people I talk to about fasting immediately associate fasting with starvation.
One of the biggest problems I’ve come across is that many people don’t seem to have the drive to educate themselves or don’t know how to educate themselves. They rely completely on the outdated U.S. school systems for their education and the medical and pharmaceutical industries to treat their dis-eases from their lack of knowledge on how to have a heathy body and mind.
It’s easy to eat whatever you want and as much as you want. It’s easy to immerse yourself in entertainment and to allow the chaos, drama and distractions in life to overcome you.
Life is not easy and it’s going to get even a lot more difficult in the near future. As millions of jobs and careers are replaced with technology, the problems mentioned above are only going to get worse not better.
Again, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink or think.
I believe that we are in a position that we have to use advanced emerging technologies to free ourselves from the extra stresses that our currently technology is adding to our lives and to be able to somehow filter massive amounts of information and data that the human mind was never meant to deal with.
Emily Dreyfuss article “Silicon Valley Would Rather Cure Death than Make Life Worth Living” brings up some valid points but if more people would take accountability for their own lives and health and not depend on the medical, pharmaceutical industry and Silicon Valley for their answers, everyone would be in much better shape to handle the challenges life presents to us now and in the future.
Article References
(1) The Forces Driving Middle-Aged White People’s ‘Deaths of Despair’
(2) Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century
(3) QuickStats: Suicide Rates*,† for Teens Aged 15–19 Years, by Sex — United States, 1975–2015
(4) Suicides in Teen Girls Hit 40-Year High
(5) A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel
(6) Psychological effects of bad news
Avoid News. Towards a Healthy News Diet By Rolf Dobelli
(7) The Number of People on Food Stamps is Falling – Here’s Why
