Live forever!
Civilisation is killing us — we’re overfed, overheated and understimulated. The remedy? Get cold, wet, hungry and . . .
WHO are those people who want to prolong life by dieting, not drinking, taking exercise and other hardships? I have never understood them.
The years we gain, as we creak towards our 100th birthday, are hardly the years we want. If only life could be frozen in time at, say, 25, before baldness, ex-wives, mortgages and false teeth appear on the horizon to spoil the fun — then you’d be talking.
Instead, we find these stringy, bad-tempered characters in late middle-age who go in for long, solitary bike rides, competitive squash and, if you are Scott Carney, invigorating runs up Kilimanjaro wearing nothing but a bathing cap.
Having learned how to defy altitude sickness and convulsions by adopting the breathing techniques taught by a Dutch guru called Wim Hof, Carney ascended the 19,341 ft mountain in 28 hours.
Most ordinary people take a week. I stay at home and look at the photographs.
Carney’s beef is that modern life has made us sluggish. We are ‘fat, lazy and increasingly in ill health’. We go from the house to the office and never breathe in fresh air. ‘The humans of this millennium are overstuffed, overheated and understimulated.’
Where our Neanderthal ancestors had predators to outwit, famine to endure and ‘species-ending cataclysms to evade’, we have airconditioning, abundant food, warm clothes, soap and hot showers. Instead of being grateful for civilisation, Carney is indignant.
Having ironed out the environmental stresses of the caveman, we’ve let our nervous systems grow lazy. Carney thinks that if only we could become cold, wet and hungry, turn our backs on skyscrapers, plastics and cosy beds and ‘crack into our inner biology’, we’d be more fulfilled.
Everything from rheumatoid arthritis to mental illness, Parkinson’s and asthma is apparently the result of this big breach between the primordial creatures we once were (and deep down allegedly still are) and the nambypamby articles we have become: ‘Even though our nervous systems crave connection to the world they evolved in, the tendency in the modern era is to think of humanity as fundamentally different than anything else.’
If everything started to go wrong when cavemen harnessed fire to do the cooking, used stone tools and wore fur skins, by the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century ‘our technological prowess became so powerful’ it broke the last links with our fundamental origins.
Electric light, indoor plumbing, motor cars and so forth — in Carney’s view, ‘the things we have made to keep us comfortable are making us weak’. So, let’s start suffering again! To ‘recreate the sorts of harsh experiences our ancestors would have faced’, Carney fell in with Wim Hof, who believes a person can be trained ‘to tap into unconscious processes and control their autonomic nervous system’ by meditation and stripping off in the woods.
By holding his breath under water for ten minutes at a time, Wim Hof also had mystical experiences, but when he tried to dive under the Arctic ice, ‘his corneas began to freeze over and crystallisation blurred his vision’. He had to be rescued by the police.
Undaunted, he encouraged his followers to roll around naked in the snow to ‘break into their deepest physiology’. The cold ‘tweaks insulin production, tightens the circulatory system, and heightens mental awareness’.
Next, the disciples had to spend time in the sauna, where ‘arteries suddenly pop open and blood surges back into those cold areas, generating an excruciating wave of pain’.
Wim Hof ’s programme is now a multi-million-dollar business. They love him in California. Orlando Bloom, for example, goes in for weight-lifting underwater.
‘We always have to keep a special eye on Bloom,’ Carney is told. ‘Just about every time he’s up here, he goes floppy at some point in the routine. We call them Bloomouts.’
TESTING the processes of heat loss and the limits of human endurance were Nazi concerns, when they plunged victims into icy tanks in gruesome experiments. Carney visits the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, where similar investigations are being made — though with willing volunteers — to prepare soldiers for the extreme Afghan and Iraqi terrain.
The sight of ‘scores of cadets fitted with rectal thermometers marching on treadmills in cold chambers’ is not something one will easily forget. It’s a boot camp atmosphere our author relishes.
Nor is he alone in his desire to reject the sophistication of civilisation and go back to what is seen as the wholesomeness and moral purity of the wilderness. Four per cent of our DNA is Neanderthal, after all, and yet can you believe 8 million people have bought a Squatty Potty, ‘a device for the toilet to help a person poop in a squatting stance like our forebears did’? Mother of God, what next?
Neanderthals had a more resilient digestive tract, so their guts could deal with raw meat. Should we chuck out our stoves? They had more body hair, too, and powerful jaws so as to chew roots and bark.
‘No Neanderthal ever had cause to visit a dentist,’ says Carney — which is as unanswerable as his rhetorical query, ‘Have you ever seen a rabbit go into a pharmacy, a hospital, or a mental asylum?’ I’m sure they did in Beatrix Potter.
This man clearly hates the fact evolution occurred. If Darwinian developments cannot be reversed, at least danger can be replicated.
To generate cortisol, a hormone released at times of major stress (adrenaline with knobs on), Carney joins the 3.4 million people who, over the year, ‘compete to abuse their bodies on whatever challenges the organisers throw at them’, at obstacle courses which go by the names of Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash, BattleFrog and Civilian Military Combine.
At these events, which seem to have evaded Health & Safety, contestants grapple with electrified grids, crawl under barbed wire, wriggle along sewer pipes, immerse themselves in freezing puddles and fox holes, and make gruelling climbs up ropes and nets. ‘They compete until they are so tired their muscles shake. They puke in the mud with tears in their eyes.’
SHELLING out an entry fee of $200 and putting themselves through misery on purpose, these people are deliriously happy. ‘Blood drips down my leg,’ reports Carney. ‘The sight of the superficial wound invigorates me more.’
In 2013, 37 contestants in every thousand ended up in A&E. Nevertheless, ‘it’s addictive and awesome and only happens when your body switches to survival mode’.
When the body works harder, acidity builds up in the muscles, causing fatigue.
One of Carney’s friends thought to counteract this by consuming large doses of bicarbonate of soda, which creates a metabolic buffer.
Unfortunately there was a sideeffect, ‘a long, unpredictable and explosive case of diarrhoea’.
It was worth it, however, as fivetenths of a second was shaved off this chap’s running time — running to his Squatty Potty, in all probability.
Doing his best to bang the drum for the instincts of brute nature, and decrying the evil of things such as sat navs (which have made us lose our navigational skills — once we could work out location with a glance at the stars), Scott Carney’s What Doesn’t Kill Us, a bestseller in Trump’s America, is the ideal handbook for suburban estate agents who plan to go on a team-building weekend in a forest. What doesn’t kill us makes us daft.
22 Longest time in minutes a human has held their breath under water