I have a question, why does our world undermine future generations? Yes, not all aspects do, but most have shown trends across the years. People’s environments and minds are changing, we could see this throughout history, and still to this day, the world is industrializing in a way we have never seen before, we have reached an exponential ideal in the technological world, where the stars are not even the limit. The human race faced many challenges in the past, wars, great resets, religious persecution, censorship, and still is, but comparatively less.“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression, Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.” quoted by Bradley Pitt in the fight club (1999). Depression rates are at an all-time high in children, and increasing.

A Psychological standpoint by Dr. Peter Gray in his TEDx Talk on Play explained how rates of anxiety and depression, increased through children, and adolescents alike lose their ability to play gradually over time, and this is thought to refer to all the graphs above increasing points, Dr. Gray points out in his talk that, we took that gift of play away from them, we increased school hours, and added more homework, which he refers to as the parents want. Dr. Gray refers to how animals live out their lives, full of play, they grow out to learn a set of skills, and they grow into the world with the skills they need to survive, a great example he set was how monkeys who were confined and treated almost like humans not lead to their natural ways, when exposed into their habitat, froze and didn’t move almost as if they were stumped. Reduced levels of play have been proven to show, an increase in all mental disorders in children, including social anxiety, and depression, to the point where kids in the time of civil wars, nuclear threats, and holocausts had lower anxiety levels than we do in our modern day crisis, during the Japanese concentration camps, children didn’t experience any anxiety, due to the play environment they were in. Not only that but, feelings of helplessness, suicide, and narcissism in children are also increasing

The source does claim 18+, However, it still includes young adults. And this is the effect of non-play, families keeping their kids in, instead of letting them explore their skills, yes many skills arise from the internet. However the internet is a two-edged sword and if children aren’t monitored carefully, with the vast availability of information on the internet, they could be exposed to anything. This increased usage doesn’t only threaten children with inappropriate content, but it also exposes them to the faulty online world, which eventually, and is dangerously influential on their skills, beliefs, and personality. A counterargument to play would also be, the dangers of the world now if we are comparing crime rates over the past 50 years, it has drastically decreased, but outside play decreased in a safer environment, not so much, it is the decrease of playgrounds and dangerous portrayal of the media that scares parents away from letting their children adapt to their social skills. when there are no kids outside, who are we supposed to play with? Suicide rates and obesity-related deaths are equalizing the violent crime rate of 14.5 per 100,000 increasing compared to 16.5 and decreasing per 100,000.

This isn’t only happening in Western countries, developing countries are also experiencing this phenomenon, where play is decreasing, and due to the increase in industrialization and technology, there are also increases in depression and anxiety. A great example of a non-developing industry in the continent of Africa is the Hadza tribe a Northern Tanzanian tribe, who rely on nothing but hunting for their food intake. Dr. Peter Gray, when analyzing “tribes”, not specific to the Hadza tribe, has shown that their physical capabilities as kids exceed the modern child, stamina (energy), happiness, and joy, concerning their dry living conditions and great lack of industrial development. In the Joe Rogan experience with David Choe on the Hadza tribe: *excuse the language.

David Choe, an American artist, when asked about his experience with the Hadza tribe, he replied with all the amazing and unique activities these people attribute to, and shared his experience hunting with them, they would run for miles and not shed a sweat, the kids would go into a bee nest, grab the honey with the honeycomb, they were completely immune to the stings, while David Choe, experienced a really bad swelling everywhere he got stung, their energy levels triple the modern average west human being, their obesity rates where almost non-existent, they had completely different microbiome in their guts makeup compared to the western diet. The kids were fully engaged socially, showing most of them as bright kids, that would easily thrive in modern-day education, this all correlates with the research done around play, as all of their environment is the wilderness. This isn’t the first time old generations outweigh our physical capabilities due to their environment, in the unfortunate event of the German camps in WW11, a testimony in his book night, Ellie Wiesel a Jew depicted how when transferring to another camp from Auschwitz due the reds army’s salvaging, They had to run 40 miles and he was a minor during this time, his father a Rabbi also had to run with him, surviving on rations of bread. not the greatest set example, but relevant to our health back then, and our extreme physical capabilities in face of hard and crushing times.

Maybe our ideas about a healthy functioning society, aren’t like we see in the movies rather, it is what we have right now, which is our greatest gift, nature. We know that nature, doesn’t mess around, we are trying to alter our nature and animal nature to our likeness, and we may have improved in many ways since our history in the last millennia. however believe it or not, many thousands of years ago the pyramids were built, and have been the tallest structure for 4800 years, the product of an organized niche of society, way more advanced as we find out about them and their social structures and political beliefs. Play is important and complementary to our lives, we can’t live in a box, confined by our amazing tech, and forget about the beauty of this world, and we can’t force our kids away from it.“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh## we don’t need.”–Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk.