When it comes to health and the environment, we are lazy and hope for quick fixes.
We know there are incredibly beneficial things that can change our lives for the better. It doesn't matter though, because those beneficial things take effort, and that's a word too few of us have in our vocabulary.
In a simple sense, if people want to be healthy, they need to eat good food that can be sourced and doesn't include chemicals. They also need to exercise moderately.
If people want to lose weight, they need to burn more calories than they consume, and ideally the calories they consume aren't empty. Ideally, they provide some sort of nutritional value and energy, but if you burn off your diet of cupcakes then you will lose weight.
Instead, we look at herbs, pills and other means to solve our body issues. It's oversimplifying the issue to tell people to eat real food and exercise regularly. Why and how our bodies store fat, gain weight and do the weird uncontrollable things they do is more complex than that.
Understanding that we're elaborate organisms with no one-size-fits-all solutions, we should still all pretty much rely on eating good food and staying physically active.
Staying in shape is hard work though, and if, just what if, somebody somewhere discovers some easy fix to all of our health issues that doesn't require any energy or work on our part. That would just be the bee's knee. So we just sit around, waiting for that perfect solution to the problem to be created or found by somebody else.
It always has to be somebody else. We can't do it, but somebody else will do it for us.
Waiting for that white knight to come in and keep us healthy even though we pollute our bodies and refuse to exercise is easy. Being proactive, eating well and going for a brisk stroll on a daily basis is less easy.
I don't remember much about elementary school science, but I remember a little something called inertia, which in my terms means objects desiring to do what they are already doing. Objects in motion remain in motion, objects not in motion remain motionless unless something comes along to disturb it. Inertia is a powerful thing and most of us have far too much of it to change things up and do something different, even if it's good for us.
The environment is the other thing we love to care about but hate to change.
We know fossil fuels are pollutants and that pollutants are evil and disastrous to our natural surroundings. That doesn't matter much to anyone because of what they give us.
We all know oil, coal and others are dangerous and really bad for us. Put any debate about whether we should stop burning coal and what the repercussions would be aside, coal is poisonous when we burn it. That's indisputable.
But regardless of that fact, we don't want to stop burning it, because it's easier to just keep going. We know it's bad for us, even if it's good for some of our paycheques. But like eating terrible food and refusing to exercise, we don't like the idea of cutting fossil fuels out of our diet because consuming them are far too easy.
I know these things are bad for the environment and quite frankly, they're bad for our health too, but it's too easy to keep things going just the way they are. Alternatives are expensive and too inefficient. We don't want to take the time to increase the efficiency of the alternatives because coal works now.
I'm not the one who will fight for change, as a cynical person who is steadily resigning himself to the fact that we've already doomed ourselves through our own hubris. Like Norm Park, I'm not taking to the streets to demand change.
Like everybody else, I'll just wait for our white knight to swoop in and save the day.
