Comfort, Cleanliness, and Convenience, the Silent Killers

How our society is becoming increasingly fragile

Today our lives are drastically different than several thousand or even several hundred years ago. Most of these changes are for the better, however, our continued wealth and problem solving to create frictionless lives and make things easy may very well be the thing that kills us prematurely.

“The habits of our lives are like chains that are too loose to notice, until they are too tight to break.?“ Warren Buffet

I just watched the show “Super Pumped, the Battle for Uber.” Throughout the series, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick continually touts the beauty that is ‘frictionless transportation.’ No cash and no need to interact with drivers, a contactless experience.

Cash sucks

Cash is dirty, we all know that, and a simple web search on the topic will result in findings claiming that almost 90% of paper bills in circulation contain cocaine residue.?Additionally, research shows that cash can also carry bacteria, viruses, and even traces of fecal matter, yes, sh*t is real, there is poop on money.

Perhaps that exposure to a bit of dirt, bacteria, and microbes (and poop) was actually helping strengthen our immune systems all along. Sure once in a while, we’d get sick, and eventually, our body would overcome that illness, but we would be stronger afterwards. Nowadays we don’t train our immune system for resilience, we coddle and shelter it, and the minute it’s exposed to pathogens it crumbles under the pressure.

Is ‘contactless’ an ideal paradigm?

When we use this dirty cash, we need to interact with the driver, we give them money, they give us money, we talk, thank them, they thank us.?Sometimes our interactions make their day, and sometimes when we are having a bad day, they can turn our frowns upside down.

Now with Uber and frictionless payments, you can enter and exit a car without ever saying a word or even acknowledging the driver's existence. It is frictionless, contactless, and devoid of humanity. Next up is driverless cars, the ultimate in comfort, convenience, and cleanliness, leaving us without any need to interact with another human whatsoever. But what if those interactions with other humans are precisely what kept us healthy and helped us live longer?

Forgoing this interaction with drivers and cash, what do we do instead? Well if you’re anything like me you spend more time on your phone, scrolling on social media, or unconsciously letting your thumb bounce you from app to app unintentionally.?Our phones may pose a greater risk to our overall health than poop-covered money.

The Hygiene Hypothesis

In the 1980’s a British epidemiologist by the name of David Strachan came up with the ‘Hygiene Hypothesis’ that postulated that excessive hygiene may be leading to illness and autoimmune disorders. Dr. Strachan began his research by studying the rates of allergies between West German and East German children.?He found that children living in the dirtier, more polluted, and less wealthier cities of East Germany had lower rates of hay fever and asthma than their richer, cleaner neighbors to the West.

Before the days of indoor plumbing and ubiquitous hand sanitizers, we would be dirtier more often and for prolonged periods of time. Humans would spend more time rolling around in the mud and dirt and generally living more synergistically with nature.?Through this process of being or getting dirty, our skin the largest organ in our body would naturally absorb certain microbes and bacteria acting as natural supplements and inoculators against future illnesses.

Get down and dirty

Today we rarely get or stay dirty, and instead spend much of our days washing our hands excessively or over-using sanitizers to the point where our body is unable to naturally ward off simple pathogens. This disuse of our immune system’s natural ability to ward off disease has likely caused our immune systems to atrophy. We all know the cliche, ‘use it or lose it.’

Think about someone who lies in a hospital bed for a long period of time, their muscles atrophy through a lack of use and they require physical therapy to regain the full function of their body once again.

Modern-day living has caused our immune systems to atrophy and has retarded their ability to ward off and defend against invaders.?By systemically disengaging our body's natural ability to heal, the minute we encounter a virus or bacteria we get extremely ill.

When we have a fever, we immediately take a fever reducer to improve our comfort, but that fever is precisely how the body kills bacteria, through heat.?By reducing this fever to improve our comfort, we prolong our illness.

Is comfort really that comforting?

When we are too hot, we increase the AC, when we are too cold, we immediately put on something warm, but if we were to practice a bit of tolerance against this discomfort and learn to become comfortable in the face of discomfort, we would actually live longer. This exposure to discomfort through hot and cold is actually one of my tips to living longer in the article:

Today we no longer have to walk to the store to get food or supplies, we can call Uber eats, or PostMates and have someone do it for us. So rather than walking to the store in the cold and experiencing some discomfort and getting exercise, we Netflix and Chill bombarding our bodies with blue light, or we aimlessly browse social media leading to greater dissatisfaction with our own lives.

Hormesis, mithridatism and Paracelsus

‘All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison’. — Paracelsus

Hormesis is defined as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to moderate and intermittent stressors.?Think of exercise, where we tear our muscle fibers so that they can grow back bigger and stronger. This concept of hormetic stress is at the root of mithridatism.

After his father Mithridates V was killed by poisoning, King Mithridates VI, later to be known as Mithridates the Great, began to drink a cocktail of sub-lethal doses of poisons daily to build an immunity.?This process of building an immunity to poison through mild and intermittent exposure later came to be known as mithridatism.

Perhaps by figuratively practicing some forms of mithridatism ourselves, we would become stronger, healthier, and anti-fragile.

Don’t kill yourself

I am not encouraging you to go out and have strangers cough in your mouth, or intentionally expose yourself to dangerous toxins or pathogens, but rather to prepare yourself to live a long and healthy life by systematically choosing the harder options. Don’t be sadistic, but rather be realistic. As the Navy Seals say, ‘under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.’

If we would apply this principle of hormetic stress to our everyday lives, we could improve our mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. For instance, instead of driving, we could walk or bike, or take the stairs rather than the elevator. Rarely does life leave us unchanged, every day we are either growing or contracting, ebbing or flowing, the choice is yours.

Mark Twain said it best,

“if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you”

Originally published on Medium here: