Trapped in the myth of advancement

Twenty minutes after 1pm, I heard the car come to a stop outside. We were meant to leave at half past one and he was right in time to say hello to my hosts, before driving us to our walking destination. 

The plan was to walk while sightseeing for about two hours. My guide is in his seventh decade of life. I was not sure what to expect, but I figured if my guide  made it, then I would manage too. 

In the last week or so that I had been a guest, I needed the walk to burn the calories. We began our walk in the beautiful state of Brittany. It was cold and breezy, but the sun was shining gently too.

Then it occurred to me. Not so many years ago, we did a lot of walking. It was our norm and default place. We walked to and from school, we walked to and from church, we walked to the market and we walked to town. These were the glorious days before the onset of boda bodas, Uber rides etcetera.

These days we either drive to every place or we take motor bikes. We take the lift rather than walk up the stairs and we drink instant coffee and eat easy processed food. We have taken up the convenient life preferring the easy way out of everything. The consequence of this sole action is that we’ve evolved into a weak, tired and sick population. The children haven’t been spared. Many are chronically ill and significantly overweight.

They feed on easy and quick food because the microwave does wonders. They are proficient with gadgets like phones, laptops and the television but they wouldn’t survive a twenty-minute walk in the neighborhood. 

They wake up to be driven to school after eating a heavy meal of imported cereal and powdered milk. The schools have no playground because the children must study, study and study some more if they are to appear in the national newspaper for scoring high grades. 

When one child gets hit by an infection, it catches and spreads like a wildfire and because the immunity is nothing to write home about, the hospitals are full with paying patients who are given tonnes of antibiotics which don’t seem to be effective anymore. 

The children do not drink water and cannot drink water. They prefer the soft drinks that are as addictive as they lack nutrition. Our population has sacrificed the basics of life for the convenient life. By simplifying life, we have complicated it. 

The bodies are overwhelmed. The more sophisticated we have become, the less life we live; trapped in the myth of advancement.