Screens everywhere, uninterrupted connectivity, pressure squeezing us to be thinner, stronger, happier, more real. We’re not the first organisation to recognise that modern life is tough. The number of people suffering from stress and anxiety is frightening (it’s an ‘epidemic’ according to the World Health Organisation). In developing ASICS Movement for Mind, we found ourselves wondering why. What is it about the modern world – with all its advances in medicine and information – that still manages to leave us unbalanced and often, unhappy?
Bestselling author, academic and historian, Professor Yuval Noah Harari, traces the history of our species in his seminal work, Sapiens. And he presents one possible explanation that really resonated with the ASICS Movement for Mind team: We’re not designed for our modern environment. As humans, we spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving in essentially the same world. We lived in small groups, intimately connected to nature. Our survival depended on a profound understanding of the natural world and how we moved within it. Now, we can’t begin to explain how the phone in our pocket works. We’ve evolved collectively in a way that leaves the individual behind.
As Professor Harari writes in Sapiens:
1 To understand our nature, history and psychology, we must get inside the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers. The past 200 years, during which every increasing numbers of Sapiens have obtained their daily bread as urban labourers and office workers, and the preceding 10,000 years, during which most Sapiens lived as farmers and herders, are a blink of the eye compared to the tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered. The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era. (2011, p45)
So, our minds were forged in the forests and fields of the hunter-gatherer. It’s no wonder we struggle to come to terms with modernity. By looking back, ASICS Movement for Mind gave us the chance to reconnect to some of the things our ancestors would recognise. It’s why the programme is grounded in simplicity. Movement, an awareness of the natural world, small groups and a chance to break away from counting, recording, competing and timing – in our own way, we’re trying to help people to be more human. It sounds simple (and it is), but we’ve become increasingly distanced from even the most essential things that make us who we are.
Through ASICS Movement for Mind, we’re trying to change that. Our goal? To give us a space where we can be who we evolved to be.
1 Harari, TN (2001) – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage
