What’s so bad?

We humans love a good bit of misery. We note when bad luck befalls us, chronicle our ailments and often consider ourselves to be having a harder-than-average time of it all. The news and media constantly bombard us with stories of injustice, crime, health scares and why we are basically the worst country imaginable in every conceivable respect, and one only needs to spend a few minutes on any internet forum or discussion centre to find a thousand new and innovative reasons as to why you, and everything you stand for, is totally horrible and stupid and deserves to die. And/or that any faith in humanity you have is entirely misplaced.

However, optimists across the globe have pointed out that if the human race was actually as evil, despicable or otherwise useless a barrel of skunks as it often appears, we probably wouldn’t actually be around; or, at the very least, there certainly is nice and good stuff in this world that we humans are responsible for. So why are we so fixated on the bad? Why our attraction to misfortune? Are we all secretly schadenfreude junkies?

Part of the reason is of course traceable back to the simple fact that we humans are decidedly imperfect creatures, and that there is an awful lot of bad stuff in this world; these scare stories have to come from somewhere, after all. Take the two things that I feel most strongly about; climate change and slavery. In the two centuries since the industrial revolution, we have inflicted some catastrophic damage on our planet in the frankly rather shallow pursuit of profit and material wealth that always seem so far away; not only has this left vast scars of human neglect on many parts of our earth, but the constant pumping of pollutants into our atmosphere has sorely depleted our precious, irredeemable natural resources and is currently in the process of royally screwing with our global climate; it may be centuries before the turmoil calms down, and that’s assuming we ever manage to get our act together at all. On the other front, there are currently more slaves in existence today than at any other point in history (27 million, or roughly the combined population of Australia and New Zealand), a horrifying tribute to the sheer ruthlessness and disrespect of their fellow man of some people. The going rate of a slave today is 500 times less than it was in the days before William Wilberforce ended the Atlantic slave trade, at just $90, and this website allows you to calculate approximately how many slaves worldwide work to maintain your lifestyle. I got 40. I felt kinda sick.

However, as previously said there is also a fairly large quantity of awesome stuff in this world, so why doesn’t this seem to go as well-documented and studied as what’s going wrong. We never hear, for example, that X government department was really efficiently run this year, or that our road system is, on average, one of the best and safest in the world; it’s only ever the horror stories that get out.

Maybe it’s that we actively take pleasure in such pain; that we really do crave schadenfreude, or at the very least that negative feeling has a large emotional connotation. We use such emotion constantly in other situations after all; many films exploit or explore the world of the dark and horrifying in order to get under our skin and elicit a powerful emotional response, and music is often ‘designed’ to do the same thing. The emotions of hatred, of horror,  of loss, even fear, all elicit some primal response within us, and can create reciprocating emotions of catharsis, the sense of realisation and acceptance combined with a sense of purification of the soul. This emotion was the most sought-after feature of classical Greek tragedy, and required great influxes of negative emotion for it to work (hence why most theatre displays incorporated comedic satyrs to break the sheer monotony of depression); maybe we seek this sense of destructive satisfaction in our everyday lives too, revelling in the horror of the world because it makes us, in an almost perverse way, feel better about the world. And hey; I like a good mope now and again as much as the next man.

But to me, this isn’t the real reason, if only because it overlooks the most simple explanation; that bad stuff is interesting because it stands out. Humans are, in a surprising number of ways, like magpies, and we always get drawn to everything outside the norm. If it’s new, it’s unusual, so we find it intriguing and want to hear about it. Nowadays, we live a very sheltered existence in which an awful lot of stuff goes right for us, and the majority of experiences of life and other people fall into the decidedly ‘meh, OK’ category. Rarely are you ecstatic about the friendliness of the staff in your local newsagents, as most such people tend to be not much more than a means to the end; they are efficient and not horrible about allowing you to purchase something, as it should be. This is so commonplace, purely by virtue of being good business practice, that this is considered the norm, and it’s not as if there’s much they can do to elevate the experience and make it particularly enjoyable for you- but it’s far easier for them to be surly and unhelpful, making you note not to visit that shop again. This applies in countless other ways of life; the strictness of our national driving test means that the majority of people on any given road are going to behave in a predictable, safe fashion, meaning the guy who almost kills you pulling out onto the motorway sticks in your mind as an example of how standards are falling everywhere and the roads are hideously unsafe.

To me, the real proof of this theory is that we are capable of focusing on the good things in life too; when they too are somewhat dramatic and unusual. During last summer’s Olympics, an event that is unlikely to occur in Britain again in my lifetime, the news recorded various athletes’ medal success and the general awesomeness of the event every evening and everyone seemed positively taken aback by how great the event was and how much everyone had got behind it; it was genuinely touching to see people enjoying themselves so much. But in our current society, always striving to improve itself, finding examples of things hitting well below par is far easier than finding stuff acting above and beyond the call of awesome.

Although admittedly being happy the whole time would be kinda tiring. And impractical

Advertisement

The Slightly Chubby Brigade

As the news will tell you at every single available opportunity, we are living through an obesity crisis. Across the western world (USA being the worst and Britain coming in second) our average national BMI is increasing and the number of obese and overweight people, and children especially, looks to be soaring across the board. Only the other day I saw a statistic that said nearly a third of children are now leaving primary school (ie one third of eleven year-olds) overweight, and such solemn numbers frequently make headlines.

This is a huge issue, encompassing several different issues and topics that I will attempt to consider over my next few posts (yeah, ‘nother multi-parter coming up), but for many of us it seems hideously exaggerated. I mean yes, we’ve all seen the kind of super-flabby people, the kind the news footage always cuts to when we hear some obesity health scare, the kind who are wider than they are tall and need a mobility scooter just to get around most of the time. We look at these pictures and we tut, and we might consider our own shape- but we’re basically fine, aren’t we. Sure, there’s a bit of a belly showing, but that’s normal- a good energy store and piece of insulation, in fact, and we would like to have a life beyond the weight-obsessed calorie counters that hardcore slimmers all seem to be. We don’t need to worry, do we?

Well, according to the numbers, actually we do. The average height of a Briton… actually, if you’re stumbling across this at home and you consider yourself normal, go and weigh yourself and, if you can, measure your height as well. Write those numbers down, and now continue reading. The average height of a Briton at the moment is 1.75m, or around 5’9″ in old money, and we might consider a normal weight for that height to be around 80 kilos, or 170 pounds. That might seem normal enough; a bit of a paunch, but able to get around and walk, and certainly no one would call you fat. Except perhaps your doctor, because according to the BMI chart I’ve got pulled up a 5 foot 9, 80 kilo human is deemed clinically overweight. Not by much, but you’d still weigh more than is healthy- in fact, one stat I heard a while ago puts the average Briton at this BMI. Try it with your measurements; BMI charts are freely available over the web.

This, to me, is one of the real underlying causes of ‘the obesity epidemic’- a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘overweight’ consists of. Whenever our hideously awful everyone-dead-from-McDonalds-overdose etc. etc. diet is brought up on the news, it is always annotated by pictures of hanging bellies and bouncing flab, the kind of bodies that make one almost physically sick to look at. But, whilst these people certainly exist, there are not enough of them for the obesity issue to be even worth mentioning in everyday society; whilst the proportion of morbidly obese people is significant, it’s not seriously worth thought for most of us.

No, the real cause for all the chilling statistics we hear on the news is all the people who don’t look to be overweight. The kind whose diet isn’t appalling (no 24/7 McDonaldses), who are quite capable of exercise when it suits them, and who might take a rough glance at the dietary information of the stuff they buy in the supermarket. But these people are nonetheless hovering on the overweight borderline, pulling up the national average, despite the fact that they don’t consider anything to be wrong; in fact, some women who are according to the evil numbers overweight, may consider it almost dutiful to not become obsessed over shedding every pound and to maintain their curves. Having a bit of excess weight is, after all, still better than being underweight and anorexic, and the body image pressures some young women are coming under are just as much of an issue as national obesity. Even for those who don’t have such opinions, many of the slightly overweight feel that they don’t have any weight issues and that there’s surely no significant health risk associated with a ‘bit of meat on your bones’ (it’s actually muscle, rather than fat, that technically forms meat, but ho hum); as such, they have absolutely no motivation to get their weight down, as they don’t think they need to.

I won’t waste much of my time on all the reasons for this statement, but unfortunately even this slight degree of overweight-ness will significantly increase your risk of major health problems somewhere down the line, particularly that of heart disease (which is going through the roof at the moment); diabetes isn’t likely to be a risk for the overweight unless they’re really overdoing things, but that’s also a potential, and very serious, health hazard. The trouble is that many of us find it hard to make this connection if we basically feel healthy. Despite what the doctor says and no matter how much we trust them, if we are capable of going for a nice walk and generally getting about without getting out of breath or feeling bad then we probably feel justified in thinking of ourselves as healthy. Our heart doesn’t seem about to give out, so why worry about it.

The thing to remember is that the heart is just a muscle, so if it isn’t stressed it will degrade just like any other. You know those triceps that haven’t done a press up in five years? Feel how small and weak they are? Yeah, that kind of thing can quite easily happen to the muscles that are responsible for keeping you alive. Your heart might be pumping all day long and be a different type of muscle, so the process will be slower, but give it twenty years and you might start to see the effects.

But anyway, I’m not here to lecture you about your health; that’s far too depressing and dull for my liking- the only point I was trying to make is that many of the accidental contributors to ‘the obesity epidemic’ are probably unaware that their health is in any way a problem, and not really through fault of their own. So whose fault is it then? Well, that one can wait until next time…

Misnomers

I am going to break two of my cardinal rules  at once over the course of this post, for it is the first in the history of this blog that could be adequately described as a whinge. I have something of a personal hatred against these on principle that they never improve anybody’s life or even the world in general, but I’m hoping that this one is at least well-meaning and not as hideously vitriolic as some ‘opinion pieces’ I have had the misfortune to read over the years.

So…

A little while ago, the BBC published an article concerning the arrest of a man suspected of being a part of hacking group Lulzsec, an organised and select offshoot of the infamous internet hacking advocates and ‘pressure group’ Anonymous. The FBI have accused him of being part of a series of attacks on Sony last May & June, in which thousands of personal details on competition entries were published online. Lulzsec at the time made a statement to the effect that ‘we got all these details from one easy sting, so why do you trust them?’, which might have made the attack a case of trying to prove a point had the point not been directed at an electronics company and was thus kind of stupid. Had it been aimed at a government I might have understood, but to me this just looks like the internet doing what it does best- doing stuff simply for the fun of it. This is in fact the typical motive behind most Lulzsec activities, doing things ‘for teh lulz’, hence the first half of their name and the fact that their logo is a stick figure in typical meme style.

The BBC made reference to their name too in their coverage of the event, but since the journalist involved had clearly taken their information from a rather poorly-worded sentence of a Wikipedia article he claimed that ‘lulz’ was a play on words of lol, aka laugh out loud. This is not, technically speaking, entirely wrong, but is a bit like claiming the word ‘gay’ can now be used to mean happy in general conversation- something of an anachronism, albeit a very recent one. Lulz in the modern internet sense is used more to mean ‘laughs’ or ‘entertainment’, and  ‘for teh lulz’ could even be translated as simply ‘for the hell of it’. As I say, the argument was not expressly wrong as it was revealing that this journalist was either not especially good at getting his point across or dealing with slightly unfamiliar subject matter.

This is not the only example of the media getting things a little wrong when it comes to the internet. A few months ago, after a man was arrested for viciously abusing a celebrity (I forget who) using twitter, he was dubbed a ‘troll’, a term that, according to the BBC article I read, denotes somebody who uses the internet to bully and abuse people (sorry for picking on the BBC because a lot of others do it too, but I read them more than most other news sources). However, any reasonably experienced denizen of the internet will be able to tell you that the word ‘troll’ originated from the activity known as ‘trolling’, etymologically thought to originate from fishing (from a similar route as ‘trawling’). The idea behind this is that the original term was used in the context of ‘trolling for newbies’, ie laying down an obvious feeder line that an old head would recognise as being both obvious and discussed to its death, but that a newer face would respond to earnestly. Thus ‘newbies’ were fished for and identified, mostly for the amusement of the more experienced faces. Thus, trolling has lead to mean making jokes or provocative comments for one’s own amusement and at the expense of others, and ‘troll’ has become descriptive of somebody who trolls others. Whilst it is perhaps not the most noble of human activities, and some repeat offenders could definitely do with a bit more fresh air now and again, it is mostly harmless and definitely not to be taken altogether too seriously. What it is also not is a synonym for internet abuse or even (as one source has reported it) ‘defac[ing] Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families’. That is just plain old despicable bullying, something that has no place on the internet or the world in general, and dubbing casual humour-seekers such is just giving mostly alright people an unnecessarily bad name.

And here we get onto the bone I wish to pick- that the media, as a rule, do not appear to understand the internet or its culture, and instead treat it almost like a child’s plaything, a small distraction whose society is far less important than its ability to spawn companies. There may be an element of fear involved, an intentional mistrust of the web and a view to hold off embracing it as long as possible, for mainstream media is coming under heavy competition from the web and many have argued that the latter may soon kill the former altogether. This is as maybe, but news organisations should be obliged to act with at least a modicum of neutrality and respectability, especially for a service such as the BBC that does not depend on commercial funding anyway. It would perhaps not be too much to ask for a couple of organisations to hire an internet correspondent, to go with their food, technology, sports, science, environment, every country around the world, domestic, travel and weather ones, if only to allow issues concerning it to be conveyed accurately by someone who knows what he’s talking about. If it’s good enough for the rest of the world, then it’s surely good enough for the culture that has made mankind’s greatest invention what it is today.

OK, rant over, I’ll do something a little more normal next time out.