Health
I’m interested in how modern life affects our health.
My primary interests on the physical side are jaw expansion to address underdevelopment from soft diets (its own section), diet in general, and pollution (air, noise, etc).
I’m also on a bit of a foot-shaped shoes/barefoot kick at the moment. Currently wearing Saucony Peregrine 14s with incisions at the front to let the toes splay a bit more. I’ve done a few barefoot runs but the social pressure to wear shoes is strong.
There’s a potential connection between footwear and jaw expansion: see this video, in which Mike Mew talks about a proposed “frontal line” of fascia connecting the tongue to the big toe. My sense is that the constricting effect of modern narrow footwear inhibits proper tongue posture via this connection. The mouth is also connected to whole-body posture in the other direction, via multiple mechanisms described by Neal Hallinan in Releasing the Psoas.
On the psychological side, I’m interested in the general mismatch between how we live now and how we’re supposed to live (in small hunter-gatherer bands), in particular loneliness and lack of purpose.