Hidden Sources of Social Stress

As discussed in the BodyMind BreakDowns Category, there are a wide range of sources of positive and negative stress. They can be physical, mental or emotional. The physical stresses can be metabolic or structural, from long-term repetitive action or an in-the-moment injury. They can be happy or sad things, they can make you stronger or weaker.
A well designed life attempts, within reason, to insulate you from as many of the negatives as possible, while maximizing the positives.

This section focuses mostly on political, economic and social factors in living healthy, whole and responsibly. So we’re going to look at one usually overlooked source of stress.
Today I’ll take one example of a hidden factor of negative stress stemming from a range of society-wide realities and converges onto the life of an individual. Except that this applies to a whole bunch of one individuals. Almost no one in a complex society like ours can escape it unless they remain collectively vigilant about important but little understood factors.

Most of us have heard of INFLATION. We are usually told by the media or less informed educators that inflation is the rising of prices, as in, for example, the price of bread or oil going up. As the price of oil goes up, the price of gasoline tends to go up, as well.

If you live in a distant suburb on a very tight budget, must drive to work everyday, and in the price of gasoline doubles, then you’ve got problems. If you cannot get your income up, you have to start cutting your other expenses. Some people live so close to the wire that the only solution is to eat less food. If you have children, it’s even worse because of your responsibilities to them.

At this point, if it happens to enough people, they start to demand that the government DO something about this problem. This is ALWAYS a bad idea, and ALWAYS makes the problem worse, in the long run.
Now, I’m not writing about how to solve the suburban dweller’s problem at this moment. Not that it’s not important, but I’m writing about what I consider to be yogic perspectives on the bigger picture of social challenges. One aspect of yoga is a deeper and wider awareness of the root causes of such problems. That’s also what (w)holistic health is supposed to be about.

If we are supposed to look at the deeper, root cause of a problem, how does this apply to the issue of inflation?

First, if we get out a proper (yet hard to find) text on inflation, we find that the true cause of inflation, or what inflation actually is, is an increase of the nation’s money supply. (A lot more people knew this many dacades ago, but it is not taught much anymore, for not-so-obvious reasons.)

Since the government passed laws giving it the exclusive right to control the money supply, then inflation is government employees and our representatives acting to increase, or allow the increase, in the number of dollars that are created and put into public circulation.

As the quantity of dollars goes up, then the value of each individual dollar goes down. (That’s the simple but little understood Law of Supply & Demand.) So when the value of those dollars goes down, it takes more of them to buy the same amount of goods, or in this case, a gallon of gasoline.

Now the really bad thing for you or our suburban dweller is that when that quantity of dollars is increased, the government is probably not going to send you any extra unless you are very well connected with the correct people.

So now, unless you can or want to decrease your expenses and quality of lifestyle, you must work a little harder and/or faster to get more money so you can afford to pay the higher prices for what you buy. That is just to keep up with where you are, not an improvement.

Your life starts to speed up. As your body and mind speed up, your neuromuscular system and metabolism must speed up too. There is an increase in stress. Maybe subtle or mild at first, but over time, it accumulates.

As you go a little faster, your body is, at some point in time, going to feel it. It might take a while, but unless you are very well off, you will eventually pay a physical price for the increasing effort you must exert.

Worse, this phenomena usually occurs over the generations, not just an occasional blip in someone’s life.

Put this perspective up against the fact that, because of what our government has done to our money, a dollar today is worth about 2 cents compared to a hundred years ago.

Remember long ago when we were told that as life improved in America we’d work less and have increasingly better lives? We were told to expect more leisure time in the future. Now, it often takes two incomes to make ends meet, and the children are left to fend for themselves or with strangers.

This scenario leads to many problems. Some of them having to do with the actual physical health of people. Others having to do with wide-spread social changes. The question is, are those changes good for everyone?

Now, the above has probably posed more questions than answers, and I am sure could, if we let it, start a few arguments. One of which is there are at least a few people out there who believe it would be good for Americans to be forced to live with less.

Okay, I hope you can see where I am going with this. Now we need to look even deeper into the problem of inflation and its causes, and see if there are any solutions. I’ll be working on and off on another website titled www.americanyogi.us designed to answer many such questions. PLEASE let me know if you think this kind of material will be useful to any of you.

Thanks for Reading and More on another day.

Take Care, David Scott Lynn