We get on the subway, we respond to a notification, we complain about the traffic. Everything is normal, at least apparently. But, if we could look at what happens inside us in those moments, we would discover a different story: our biology continues to behave as if we were in the savannah, not in a city pulsating with lights, motors and screens.
Two researchers, Daniel Longman and Colin Shaw, have tried to bring order between what we experience and what our body really perceives. Their thesis is simple: the modern environment has changed too quickly and we have failed to keep up with it. It’s as if we’ve upgraded everything, like homes, jobs, transportation, technologies, except ourselves.
How everyday life activates responses that are thousands of years old
When Shaw uses the image of the lion, it almost seems like hyperbole, yet this is exactly how our nervous system works. The lion would come out, test you, then disappear. The alarm didn’t last long. Today that lion has taken a thousand forms: the phone that vibrates while we are driving, the crowd that crushes us on the sidewalk, the noise of a scooter outside the house at two in the morning. There doesn’t need to be a real danger: the brain just needs to interpret it as such.
The result is not “dramatic” stress, but silent stress, which stays on and consumes us slowly. It’s the kind of tiredness that doesn’t go away with a night’s sleep, that feeling of always being one step behind. In the long run it affects everything: the quality of rest, blood pressure, attention, memory. Even on the immune system, which struggles to regulate itself because it lives in an environment too distant from the one in which it evolved.
Researchers recall that we spent millennia in contact with soil microbes and parasites that trained our defenses. Today the “clean” life of cities and hyper-sanitized homes sends the immune system into confusion. Allergies and autoimmune disorders, not surprisingly, are on the rise.
Added to this are more recent environmental factors: microplastics, pesticides, pollutants, all elements that our body had never encountered before. It is not surprising that even fertility is changing, especially male fertility. We are biologically in trouble, and the point is not guilt or alarmism: it is simply the distance between what we are and what we experience.
Shaw says it clearly: it takes thousands of years to change the profound mechanisms of our physiology. Industrialization transformed us in the span of a handful of generations. It’s an unequal race.
We cannot change ourselves, but we can change our environment
And this is where the research opens up an interesting perspective: it is not we who need to become faster, but cities who need to become more humane. Longman insists on the role of green spaces. Not as an “ornament”, but as an essential part of our health. Just compare a walk in a park with one in the city center: in a few minutes the rhythm of your breathing changes, your heart rate lowers, your thoughts clear up. It is not suggestion, but biological response.
Thinking of cities as places where nature is not an intruder, but a constant presence, means building environments that do not force us to live on constant alert. It means remembering that, even if we have become “modern”, we are still animals designed for a different world.
Shaw calls it a moral responsibility: if we have the ability to create spaces that are healthier, kinder, more in balance with our biology, we should do it. Not out of nostalgia, but out of realism. Maybe we’ll never return to the savannah. But we can stop acting like we no longer need what made us human.
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