A Wonderful Problem to Have

Sometimes you have to look on the bright side of things. For example, an increasing percentage of our species suffers from being overweight:

In 1980, there were 857 million overweight and obese people on the planet. Today that number is 2.1 billion, which means that nearly 30 percent of the world’s population is obese or overweight, concludes a study published in The Lancet yesterday. And what’s more worrisome is that no nation has managed to significantly decrease its obesity rates in the last 33 years.

The horror! 30 percent of the population is overweight, which puts a burden on our socialized healthcare systems! Overweight people obviously hate society!

OK, let us step back for a moment and consider the problem. Having one third of our species overweight is actually an incredible problem to have. Consider what it means. It means that a considerable amount of our species no longer has to invest every waking hour into obtaining enough food just to survive. In fact for those people food is so plentiful that they have to swap some of the time that used to be necessary to obtain food to deal with the side effects of having too much food. Instead of complaining incessantly about people being fat we should be celebrating how far we’ve come as a species. We’re damn lucky to have reached a point where we have to deal with these sorts of problems.