You are concerned about your health. But you don’t feel empowered to do anything about it.
Health looks to be complicated; exercise, diet, cooking, and so forth. Other people can do it, it’s easy for them, and they are doing it now. You hope to be at their level one day, but, right now, you feel like you’re missing something foundational. You feel like you’re trying to build a skyscraper out of mud and sticks, like you have so far to go before you can even begin to think about your health and its complexities. You’re surrounded by health grad students and you’re just entering health Kindergarten.
Besides that is a gnawing feeling that maybe good health is intractable—that something about Western life is causing us to be less healthy and more obese, and we don’t currently know what. We may never know. Billions of dollars and millions of man-years will go into searching under the streetlamp for the causes of bad health, and 10,000 years pass before surviving humans finally adapt through natural selection.
The Pessimist
You are concerned about your health. But you don’t feel empowered to do anything about it.
Health looks to be complicated; exercise, diet, cooking, and so forth. Other people can do it, it’s easy for them, and they are doing it now. You hope to be at their level one day, but, right now, you feel like you’re missing something foundational. You feel like you’re trying to build a skyscraper out of mud and sticks, like you have so far to go before you can even begin to think about your health and its complexities. You’re surrounded by health grad students and you’re just entering health Kindergarten.
Besides that is a gnawing feeling that maybe good health is intractable—that something about Western life is causing us to be less healthy and more obese, and we don’t currently know what. We may never know. Billions of dollars and millions of man-years will go into searching under the streetlamp for the causes of bad health, and 10,000 years pass before surviving humans finally adapt through natural selection.
Somewhat related: epistemic learned helplessness.