I've had terrible hay fever for as long as I can remember.
Every year around this time my eyes and nose get hit — bloodshot eyes, a constantly stuffed nose.
My head goes fuzzy. On relaxed days off especially, sleepiness hits me all day.
One day, right after dinner my brain stopped working, so I took a bath, brushed my teeth, and went to bed around 9.
I slept a few hours, woke in the middle of the night. After dozing a bit I got up and ate the leftovers from dinner. After that I took a Coca-Cola from the fridge and poured it into a glass.
The cold Coca-Cola brought a clean freshness through my body. What a happy taste, I thought.
There are plenty of delicious drinks in the world, but Coca-Cola is special. The world's most famous soft drink, and the best drink there is.
Still, in terms of calories and sugar it isn't exactly a health food.
To put it dramatically, it isn't a natural drink for humans.
Coca-Cola itself has only about a hundred years of history.
And that goes not only for Coca-Cola but for other drinks and sweets — and more broadly, most things that rest on civilization, from appliances to cars to the internet, are generally "unnatural."
I often think about whether something is natural for humans.
For example, when I climb a tall building I think a three-story building might still be within the natural range, but twenty or thirty floors feels unnatural — and staring at TVs, PCs, and smartphones every day, or feeling admiration or anger toward people on them you've never met, seems completely absurd when you look at it calmly.
Conversely, the village society many people dislike is originally a natural thing.
Humans struggle to live alone. Independent people coordinating as needed is very hard without trust in a community.
Village society can be called rationally natural.
But village society has plenty of hassles. And needless to say, today you don't have to belong to one. (Strictly speaking, "village society" is a conceptual noun and doesn't point to something concrete, so whether it's natural or not is unclear.)
What I'm getting at is: modern life, through technology and social maturity, has made all kinds of things convenient. Even if something is unnatural for humans, if it reduces the hassles in front of you or increases benefits, people will gladly take it.
I gladly drink Coca-Cola almost every day.
There are two ways of facing naturalness.
One treats what's natural for humans as the eternal origin, and returning to that origin as much as possible as the right path.
The other says humans can always adapt to their environment, so if situations and environments keep changing, that itself is the origin — the origin isn't fixed; it always moves.
People don't belong cleanly to one type or the other; it's a mix, and the ratio differs by person.
So for example, peoples living self-sufficiently deep in the mountains with no technology at all have a very high "return to origin" ratio. Living in a high-rise, eating junk food every day, never meeting people in person, lying around on a phone watching SNS and riding every emotion from that info — that's more the latter.
Neither is a problem. For what it's worth, I exercise and try not to touch my phone much, but if I had to choose I'd say I'm closer to the latter.
Anyway, I was thinking about this because lately the latter — phone addiction and so on — is treated as dangerous. In short, the return-to-origin type is treated as correct. (Again, it's a matter of ratio and degree.)
On the other hand, it's strange how rarely you see people taking the position that the latter is correct.
That is, you rarely see the claim that humans will keep adapting even if they stay on their phones all day, skip healthy food, and never meet anyone.
Probably because the clear downside — physical and mental medical problems surface easily — is obvious. Still, given how far civilization has come, I wouldn't be surprised if more people held that kind of view. Maybe I just haven't seen them.
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