Today I read a blog post by a woman lamenting the loss of her outdoorsy ways. She waxed poetic about how her life had been, how it had been simpler, and less taxing on her body than her current, computer-centric lifestyle. She echoed the common refrain, "but humans weren't made to sit behind desks all day!"
Normally, that refrain evokes one of two reactions in me: annoyance (because clearly the speaker doesn't realize how good they have it) or anger (screw you for telling me my lifestyle isn't natural). Today, I was annoyed, but I could forgive the author, because she was remembering. She wasn't advocating something she hadn't done, just remembering something she had left behind.
That calmness of mind got me to wondering. If humans aren't made for what we're doing, then what are humans made for? And, what if what we're made for is changing? Historically, the size of humans has indicated their health, or the health of their society. People like to point out that the average human in 2010 is taller than the average human in 1610. But, when humans settled down and started farming, they shrank. Humans in the generations after a society starts farming are smaller than their nomadic predecessors.
Does that mean that settling down and farming was a bad idea? I don't think so. If you asked one of the "humans weren't made to sit behind desks" people if a full day of farming, fetching water, chopping wood, and so on is something humans were "made to do" or "built for", I think most would say "yes". It's hard, physical work, outside, and obviously different than sitting behind a desk. But, farming isn't what humans were made to do either! That was something we decided to do, and we adapted to it.
Fast-forward a few thousand years to the industrial revolution. As with farming, automation and mechanization brought huge changes to our societies. And I'm beginning to think, that we're not yet adapted. We've had only a handful of generations, a dozen at best, to deal with the ramifications. I think our short lifespans make it difficult to see the slow, inevitable adaptation of humans to our new societal changes, like it's difficult to see the forward progress of a glacier, or the formation of sedimentary rock. I think, if anything, humans were made to adapt.
In a few hundred years, I think we, as societies and as humans, will have adapted to the new realities of automation. We will have solved or adapted to our desk-based lives, because we see the value in what we're doing. Just as the first farmers had to be kicking themselves the first year the crops failed, I think we're still making mistakes and finding our way. Like the early farmers might have longed for the good old nomadic days, looking back fondly on the way things used to be is only natural. But it doesn't change the future.