On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

But Wanda’s body—now only cosmetically different from yours or mine—hasn’t had anywhere near enough time to adapt to the insane, sparkling, deafening, terrifying, all-singing, all-dancing modern world. Wanda’s body and nervous system still think that tigers are everywhere, and she’s just as likely to jump out of her skin if you knock on the window now as she was a week ago. And the very thing that’s saved Wanda’s life millions and millions of times has suddenly become deadlier to her than all the tigers in history. Wanda’s stress response flails around in the mostly tigerless modern world. It’s occasionally useful, helping a panicked mother lift a car off her child or a soldier survive an ambush, but those situations are the exceptions, not the rule. And the flailings of humanity’s uprooted stress response are deeply involved with the “diseases of civilization”—heart disease, obesity, cancer, depression, anxiety, diabetes, etc.—that afflict first-world countries.