Seeing the systems

It's not enough anymore to have the right information and the willpower to change.

To live a healthy life, we must be able to see the systems that obstruct us. They're everywhere. I've listed several here. There are many, many more.

• City planning built around cars instead of walking, biking, and public transportation reduces physical activity and increases environmental damage and financial strain.

• Big agriculture and mono-cropping decrease food diversity, damage lands, and reduce opportunities to work on the land.

• Commercialization of food prioritizes palatability over health.

• Cellular has many physical and mental dangers, known and unknown.

• Email is an open door to attention thieves, disinformation agents, and fear peddlers.

• Standard home-building practices rely on costly power consumption instead of free and green traditional cooling/warming methods.

• Destruction of tree canopy has limited natural shade and damaged so, so many vital natural systems.

• Private ownership of land limits our ability to enjoy and explore nature and facilitates hoarding of resources.

• Air travel has resulted in the loss of environmentally safer railway infrastructure.

• Money and the market economy increase stress, limit access to shared resources, and lead to overconsumption.

• The industrial work schedule disallows individual and seasonal variances in sleep, eating, and activity.

• Individual family homes and private bedrooms increase isolation and have probably harmed our sleep and immunity.

• Income does not increase at the same rate as expenses.

• Retail giants have mostly eliminated local goods infrastructure.

• Placing serving dishes on the dinner table instead of away in the kitchen causes us to overeat.

• Plastic.

• "You can be anything you want to be when you grow up" probably creates some unrealistic expectations about what's possible, safe, and sustainable.

• Global access makes it easy for family members to move apart and lose common values.

• Parents (often mothers) are expected to bear many of the burdens of raising children alone, without significant participation of the other generations and community members.

• Sidewalks and pavement reduce access to raw Earth.

• Cheap chocolate hurts farmers and consumers.

• Inanimacy in our language (we use "it" for most non-human lifeforms) endows creatures we depend upon with low value and enables us to take insufficient care of them.

• Loss of public spaces deprives us of shared experiences and common ground. This includes the transition from network TV to on-demand/streaming services - few of us can bond over watching the same shows anymore.

• American exceptionalism prevents us from learning what's working better around the world.

• Anti-majoritarian institutions promote and sustain policies that most of us don't agree with.

• Outdoor artificial lighting interrupts natural rhythms.

• Hyperspecialization in medicine leads to missed and mis- diagnoses and unnecessary interventions.

• Individualism.

• Guns.

• Celebrity and CEO pay versus teacher pay.

While some of these can be circumnavigated or changed with ease, others will take great, collective action to change. Some, unfortunately, we may have to accept, with the understanding that peace in one's heart may be more valuable than we think.

But first we have to see them.