In all the raging debate over health insurance and how to pay for it, very few people have asked the simple question: why do we feel so bad all the time?

When I was growing up, which despite my aged appearance wasn't really all that long ago, I doubt anybody I knew, kid or grown up, really had the first clue what health insurance was. If you got sick, a rare occurrence in my part of the world then, you went to see the doctor, found out what you needed to do and did it.

You'd get a bill, and it might even take a while to pay it off, but you didn't have to fill out a million forms, didn't talk to a dozen people without any medical training and didn't have some wide eyed 23-year-old clerk at a computer asking what your visit with the doctor was concerning.

But that's veering off the topic here, which is why do we all feel so bad all the time? I'd wager that if you were to take a random survey and ask, "Do you ever feel like you're on top of the world? Like you could just handle anything the world threw at you?" the response would be the head dropping into the hands and a strangled cry of, "No! Oh God, I just can't take it anymore!"

Why? The people who came before us (from the first person to set foot in America until about 1950) had it much worse than us. The common cold could kill them in a heartbeat. They froze to death in winter and burned up in the summer. A 50-mile trip could take them a whole day. Everything they ate came out of the ground or was raised from birth in a field.

We call them hardy pioneers and admire the way they tamed a vast, wild land in a comparatively short period of time. Then we spend the rest of the day at our desk in a warm/cool office (depending on what time of year it is), head in our hands, wondering why life hates us so much.

Because the stress is just too much. And stress makes us feel bad physically, so we go to the doctor, he talks to us for the low low price of $100 (usually 15 minutes tops) and he tells us all our tests came out fine and we probably just need more fiber in our diet. Then we rush out the door and find the first person that is willing to listen to us complain.

Why? Is it all mental? Is it the diet we eat? Is it hereditary? If somebody has a gloomy, complaining parent or two, are they guaranteed to act the same?
There's a lot of money in the health care business, more than most people can imagine. Remember the old conspiracy theory that a cure for cancer was found years ago, but the medical establishment squashed it because you can make a lot more money treating somebody that you can curing them just one time?

I know, that can go right in the same category as the car that runs on water being shot down by the oil companies.
I fall in the party that believes our diet is what's making us all feel so bad all the time. Fast food can give you a quick high, but later you feel fat and bloated and sometimes even depressed. And to be honest, I have doubts that what we buy at the grocery store is really that much better.

But I'm a sinner when it comes to that belief. I eat fast food, though not as much as some people. And most of the home cooked stuff I have comes out of a box and into the microwave. I doubt it's very good for you, even if it does say "healthy" on the box.
Because, what's really killing us is the constant striving for comfort. Why cook when somebody will bring the food to us or we can have it done in a couple of minutes with just a little button pushing?
Why walk somewhere, even just down the block, when there's a perfectly good car sitting right there?

The last 60 or so years have had one overarching goal: to make everything take as little effort as possible. A tiny little computer chip can now make a machine do a job that used to take four or five people hours to do.

Why do we feel so bad all the time? We could put our heads together and probably come up with 50 different answers, kind of like how 500 politicians seem to have about 400 ideas on how to pay for health care.

But we're more interested in solving a problem than in preventing it in the first place.

michael.thomason@advocateanddemocrat.com | 442-4575