Voices
There was no estate planning in
the Paleolithic Era. There were
no retirement homes. Long-term
thinking extended to seasons,
not much beyond.
And our reaction to perils in the
modern world remains bounded
by this biology—if we let it.
We are aroused by immediate
threats, although we tend to forget them as soon as they subside.
Long-term threats that don’t rear
up on hind limbs and wave their
claws in our faces today may not
only be easy for us to ignore, they
may be hard for us to take seriously. Our perspective remains
the endowment of the savannah,
and the simple and immediate
challenges of survival. We tend to
use “short-sighted” as a pejorative term, but it is the native state
of our species.
And that may count among the
greatest challenges to our survival now because that perspective
and our Paleolithic time horizon
are obsolete.
We are choosing to do nothing about some of the most significant health perils we can see,
because we forget them as soon
as the acute threat concludes.
And we are managing not to see
some of the health perils we
DAVID
KATZ
HUFFINGTON
10.28.12
might otherwise do something
about. In both cases, time is
conspiring against us.
Bullets are an example. Bullets
fly fast, and we can readily see
both cause and effect. People get
shot, and often die. But the crises
related to guns come
and go, like those fleet
predators that once
We are
stalked us, and we
choosing to
move on. We see the
problem, but our mem- do nothing
ory is too short and our about some
concerns too parochial.
of the most
Until we get shot, it’s
significant
somebody else’s probhealth perils
lem. Once we get shot,
we can see,
it’s too late.
because
Baloney—of the figuwe forget
rative and literal vathem as
rieties alike—poses a
soon as the
problem in the other
acute threat
direction. In a society
long since mired in epi- concludes.”
demic obesity, “bad”
foods do more damage
than bullets, but do it in slow motion. Since the causal connection
between any given donut, soda, or
hour spent on the couch, and bad
health outcomes stretches over a
span of years, we can readily overlook it. It’s just a bit too slow to
see the dots connect, so we ignore