Forgetting the obvious.
News was revealed recently that stated that degeneration of the brain can begin as young as 45, rather than at the age of 60 as was previously thought. However, scientists agree that the risk of dementia can be reduced by healthy eating, not smoking and keeping blood pressure and cholesterol levels down. This is nothing new of course. In any article about super centenarians, the subjects (who have invariably hit the age of 109 plus) are asked to share the secret of maintaining their mental faculties at old age. They generally answer that they manage it by staying active and eating plain/healthy food. This is more radical than it might sound. Until recently we lived in a ‘doctor will solve everything’ age, where no matter what our maladies, we felt we could go to the doctor for a wonder drug and everything would be fine. Now the onus is on ourselves to keep active and to eat healthily, part of a new ‘do it yourself’ revolution, a movement away from the idea that a doctor or someone with a ‘professional’ status could always prescribe a little something to sort out the problems we have brought upon ourselves. Nearly everywhere you look in health news stories, you will find that the risks of suffering from the malady under discussion can be substantially reduced with healthy eating and exercise. It is all very much centred on the self, the power is within the individual.
This translates to other fields as well. Never has it been easier to make a name for yourself in, say, music, as you don’t have to go through the hallowed barriers of an often clique-ish record industry to produce a record any more, you can just record and mix one yourself, publicise it yourself and find vendors for it yourself. It is hard work, but possible. The same can be said for writing of course. The internet has made it possible for me to whiter away to you from the boundaries of relative obscurity, to reach people I have never met, and hopefully use this blog to get my work ‘out there.’ Despite the recession there is a new optimism amongst some circles, the idea that anyone can make something of themselves, the ‘do it yourself revolution’ where you can sort your health out, sort your career out, sort your life out, all by yourself.
If it is that easy, why aren’t more people doing it? Why don’t we live in a nation of innovative small businesses, and why aren’t we all toned, smiling, and smashing our way through brain teaser puzzles and foreign languages, even into our seventies? Why do we have such high levels of obesity, of unemployment? Perhaps the answer is a general lack of motivation and behind this the high number of struggling households and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Department of Work and Pensions, in 2009/10, 22 per cent of working-age adults (7.9 million) were in households in the UK with incomes below 60 per cent of the national average after housing costs. When struggling with money, the reality is that maintaining a healthy lifestyle and enforcing it in children is going to be a mountain of a task. The last thing to be considered in this ciruumstance is setting up a small business or changing eating habits. With so many in difficulty, motivation goes into continuing with every day life, rather than necessarily taking risks to improve it. Paradoxically in this time of recession it is both hardest to find the motivation to change for the better and more necessary to do so. What better way to solve unemployment than creating new jobs? But what more difficult a time to set up a business than in a recession, when money is tight anyway? So much for the ‘keeping active’ part of the anti brain degeneration mantra.
What about the healthy eating part? This is arguably even more important, particularly in light of the fact that the population is not only living longer, but also getting older. Perhaps it is the case that the problem of dementia and brain degeneration links to a deeper, more difficult problem in society, the link between bad diet and poverty. It would seem therefore, that it is not the rather obvious message of bad diet = bad health that needs to be promoted, but an attempt to reduce poverty and unemployment. Only then will the ‘do it yourself revolution’ flourish in all levels of society, and perhaps we will be able to hang on to our mental faculties a bit longer.
The Champagne Anarchist 