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The Proposal
With its origins firmly based on my own experience of Burn-out1, my Final Major Project will explore the wider impact of modern life on the human body.
The first identifiably human species first walked the planet some 2 million years ago. Since then, several species of humans have emerged, disappeared or converged, until about 200,000 years ago when modern humans, Homo sapiens, appeared. Their success? They were sufficiently adapted to survive the harsh climatic changes of the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs. As we await the declaration of a new human-driven Epoch, the speed at which these seismic man-made changes have occurred means the very thing that secured our ascent up the evolutionary ladder, our adaptability, is not fast enough to accommodate the challenges modern life is demanding of us.
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Our bodies are simply not meant to experience life in this way and they are “defending and deforming themselves in response” (Cregan-Reid, 2004: 18). Many of the risk factors, such as physical inactivity and poor sleep, are behavioural and thus modifiable, but these are the very things modern life insidiously promotes.
1 In 2019 the World Health Organisation (WHO) defined ‘Burn-out’ as: “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” A global benchmark for diagnosis and health insurers, burn-out was characterised in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases by three dimensions: 1. Feelings of exhaustion;2. Increased mental distance from or feelings of cynicism related to one’s job; and 3. A sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. (World Health Organisation 2022)
“The feotal heartbeat was distinct, fluttering like a bird over the oceanic swell of the mother’s pulse”
(Francis 2016: 90)
