A World Made to Vegetate

Name of Book: I’m A Stranger Here Myself

Name of Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Broadway Books

City Published: New York City

Copyright Date: 1999

A World Made To Vegetate

Do you ever wonder what other people do when they go home? Do they do their homework or extra work they didn’t finish at the office? Do they read a book or sit in front of the TV just staring? Do they do something active and healthy for their bodies? Yet a better question would be how they get home. We live in a world where the human race has to do nothing to get from point A to point B. Although this mostly happens in America. Other countries with sufficient needs to do the same have not jumped at the opportunity and to prove it they have a lower obesity rate. Bill Bryson, the author of I’m A Stranger Here Myself wrote many articles of his shock of having to readjust to the American lifestyle after twenty years in England; eventually those articles were put together into his book. On of those articles is named “Why no one walks”. He talks about the ridiculously high level of laziness that he has encountered in his town and that other researchers have discovered. The American population has increased significantly in its level of laziness; reasons for that being the change of culture in America that mandates a drive to the store that is ten minutes away, the increase in technologies help, and the ways that the cities are built.

In his article Bryson describes how when walking to town, as he usually does, someone will inevitably ask if he needs a ride. When he announces that he actually enjoys walking they look at him as though he is some sort of alien. He goes on to say “People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what those lower limbs can do.”(102). Bryson is amazed by the fact that a person will walk out of one store, get back in the car, drive to the next store that is two doors down. American society has become dependent on cars to do everything for them; they have depended completely on new technology. According to the Federal Highway Administration, Americans make fewer than 6% of their daily trips on foot. That is ridiculous, the other 94% you hop in the car to go down the block. At the University of California there is a researcher that made a study of the nations walking habits which states that the average person walks less than 75 miles per year; which is 350 yards a day. The question here is why we live this way; well because we can.

People live in the suburbs with the nice big yards and the houses that look the same. Then they all drive over to wherever they need to go and life is good. There is no longer a need for walking, we have cars. Yet we then wonder why Americas obesity rate is so high, basically the highest in the world. The head of the CDC’s Active Community Environments program, Tom Schmid says, “Obesity is not just (that) we’re