Our daily gestures are the ultimate expression of the historical changes that are taking place.
I will illustrate.
The first morning gesture: turning off the alarm clock. For most of our history we lived without having the day divided into hours, we cared about the seasons and days.
Since when do we measure the hours?
It begins with the monks and the need to set prayer times, but the great advance in measurement accuracy is linked to the appearance of the railway in the 19th century and the telegraph. Paris sent the time to all its colonies.
Now it dominates us.
The precision demand is brutal, the first mechanical watches only had the hour hand, now the stock market transactions are measured in thousandths of a second.
Washing has changed a lot.
We tend to think that hygiene is something that has progressed progressively, but throughout history there have been setbacks, a person in the Middle Ages could be cleaner than someone from the early 18th century.
What happened in the eighteenth century?
The scientific revolution begins and it seems that reason prevails; doctors believed that bathing softened internal organs and skin, which, by opening the pores, allowed diseases like plague to enter.
Did doctors advise against bathing?
Yes, that's why they took those powders that covered the skin and the big wigs, because the smell that accompanied them must not be pleasant at all. And for example in the case of London they were cleaned with excrement.
¡…!
The Thames was a river full of dirt and excrement used by a population that in the 19th century was already a million inhabitants. All the water that people used for drinking, cooking and washing came from the river, hence all the epidemics.
After washing up, we get dressed.
A Westerner today has many more clothes in his closet than people of high income had for most of our history. Today's access to cheap clothing is unique, a 16th century hidalgo had one or two shirts because his clothes were covered, but even kings had little undergarment because they didn't change it very often.
And then we have breakfast.
Coffee, tobacco, tea, all the stimulants that came from Asia and Africa, and later from America, were associated with the devil. But Pope Clement VIII tried the coffee, he loved it and he became fond of it; paraphrasing his boss: he saw that he was good. So, in order to fix the problem and be able to consume it without having to worry about his soul, he blessed it.
Who invaded the cities with cars?
They were a surprise as to how the urban planners at the end of the 19th century imagined that their inhabitants would move. Ildefons Cerdà, for example, when designing the Eixample in Barcelona, thought of rectilinear, parallel and transversal streets, because he foresaw that movement through the cities would take place on urban railways.
But the car prevailed.
It was the big oil companies that aborted the use of public transport in the city. And that they conspired to turn the United States into a country at the wheel.
We arrive at the office.
It is very surprising how many sociologists, economists, psychologists and architects have been thinking about what the perfect office should be like, the one that allows work to be productive.
AND?
It has been a failure, studies show that the office does not help productivity, and that in the coffee machine chats, where people talk much more freely than in meetings, is where ideas arise.
We had lunch.
There have been devastating famines that have decimated populations that had first-order nutritional sources within their reach, only that no one thought of eating them, such as potatoes, corn and wheat. Cereals for millennia were considered weeds.
Pick up the girls from school.
Throughout most of history children have been little more than tiny adults. The high infant mortality led to no one getting too attached to them. At the other extreme, the sons of nobles were treated like the lords they would become.
The children were adults in the making.
Yes, the concept of childhood does not appear until the Enlightenment with Rousseau, despite the fact that he could not stand children.
Back home.
It is a proven fact that, despite the proliferation of screens, the overstimulation of stories that surround us, there are still millions of children who, every night, fall asleep while an adult reads them a story.
