Hi, it's Mark Sisson from Marksdailyapple.com.

Enjoy this audio narration of a recent Marksdailyapple.com post by Tina Lehman.

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Five suggestions for becoming less civilized.

Civilization has given us great gifts.

Infectious diseases rarely kill us anymore.

We have hot running water that's safe to drink, usually.

We can go down to the market and buy a thousand different

foods. Things are, for the most part, safe and comfortable. Of course, many of the benefits of

civilization have been solutions to problems it introduced. That we rarely die from infectious

diseases is significant because the high population densities of early civilizations

created such high infectious disease burdens. Nomadic hunter-gatherers didn't have that issue,

but there are benefits. Civilization has also harmed us. There's the usual laundry list of

maladies like industrialized diets, sedentary lifestyles,

dysfunctional circadian rhythms, skyrocketing rates of obesity, diabetes, and cancer that we discuss

on here all the time. But there's also our wildness. For a civil society to function,

it must tamp down excessive wildness

among its citizenry. Someone's got to maintain the roads, fix the plumbing, drive the buses,

and get up and go to work on time. Yet the call of the wild persists. Humans have always represented

the intersection of wildness and order. We have

animal urges and instincts, and we have reason and logic. We're subject to the natural world,

...