Smoking, Flossing, and Space Travel...Ain't Change a Bitch?
Have you tried to change lately? Lose weight? Give up cigarettes? A dry January? It’s not easy, is it? Can I tell you why? We weren’t meant to change. Your odds of successfully changing are 1 in 10. That’s right, 90% of the time we try to change, we fail. I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer here, just sharing some science based facts. In 1955 80% of our health care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues; smoking, drinking, poor diet, exercise and stress. Do you want to know what behavioral issues are the biggest burden to our healthcare system today? Do I need to repeat those? Yup…we don’t change.
And here’s how it works…According to Alan Deutschman in his book Change or Die, when we find ourselves in a stressful situation and we feel overwhelmed and completely powerless to affect it, our brain activates a bunch of powerful, built in psychological strategies to help us deal with it all. We shield ourselves from reality and science and facts and we remove the bad news from our consciousness. Freud called these “Ego Defenses”. An example of this working to enable a health crushing behavior is the overweight smoker who refuses to exercise until they have their first chest pain. They go to the Dr and have a choice. Change or Die. Actually, here’s the problem. Because of our advances in medical technology, they have a different choice. Change your lifestyle or undergo a terrifying open-heart surgery where you get stints and who knows what else. It’s a scary choice, and when you’re in the Dr’s office, scared for your life, you swear you can give up cigarettes and a poor diet. Salads and Peletons from now on! But guess what? You go home and start eating better and you get on the bike. Maybe you even slow down on the cigarettes. But eventually, EVENTUALLY, your fear subsides. You’re no longer in the Dr.’s office talking about horrible open heart surgery and you fall back to your wicked, wicked ways. Doesn’t’ apply to you? How many of us have come back from the dentist office where we talked about gum disease, and began flossing religiously….for the next 5 days. Then what? Back to normal. Congratulations, your “Ego Defense” just kicked in and gently placed you alongside of the 9 out of 10 people who can not change. You know that you have medical technology to lean on and it gives you an out. You don’t have to change because really smart people have figured out how to re-engineer your heart after you’ve destroyed it, or repair your damaged gums. Do you see what I’m doing here?
Recently I started researching Green Technology. Wonderful marvels of engineering such as solar power, off shore wind power, nuclear power, carbon capture, solar geo-engineering and so much more. It’s amazing what we are doing to save the planet and I don’t want it to stop. But I have a problem with Green Technology. I’m afraid it’s giving us a choice. Like open heart surgery, now we don’t have to change our lifestyle or the way we live on this planet. Just because we have access to a huge class of developing technologies, it doesn’t mean everything is okay and we can keep doing what we’ve always been doing. Please, don’t listen to that damn “Ego Defense” of yours. Damn you Freud.
We cannot re-engineer the planet. We can create tools to help us clean it up, but we actually do need to change behavior and dependencies. As great as Green Technology is, it’s most heavily pushed by the biggest emitters. Some examples; the richest 1% emit twice the carbon as the poorest 50%...and they really don’t want to change. So they (see Jeff Bezos and his Earth Fund and his space project here) convince us that technology will save us. Jeff Bezos is convincing us that his space project has been developed to save humanity. Why moderate our consumption, use, and waste when we have Jeff Bezos to save us?
At the end of the day, technology will make our lives better and hopefully it will save the planet while it’s doing that. In the meantime, let’s not forget that we need to make an impact. We can’t wait for someone else to save us. We need to be active participants in our own rescue, so don’t stop and don’t give up and don’t let your ego deny it!
