Dr David Bratt
In the last 12 months, the pace of life seems to have increased both locally and internationally. Perhaps this impression is somewhat related to elections?
Internationally, we have seen the rise of authoritarian, so-called “strong men.” To the south, the right-wing leader from Argentina. To the north, an elected president sending out a video showing him dumping what looks like faeces on his people. To Europe, where the Russian oligarch does his own sort of dumping on smaller nations and to the Middle East, where the head shots of little children by Israeli snipers have shocked even the most hardened of IDF supporters.
Locally, we have our very own gentle PM stepping out of her crease to tell citizens to “empty the clip” when faced with criminals and to encourage the American military to “kill all drug traffickers violently.” I understand and sympathise with her thoughts but such language!
It’s all a bit much, so I took a trip to London on medical business and a short vacation, hoping that in that centre of European civilisation, I could relax a bit, see a couple plays, visit museums, soccer stadiums and corner pubs and perhaps begin to understand what was going on in the world.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve found myself being exposed to some of the most interesting facts about life in the fast lane in these days of weirdo leaders. Some are taken from an article by Derek Thompson in his Substack of September 18, 2025, but the comments are mine and a lot of it is about children and young people.
There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world. How much of this is due to the child-rearing practices of the late 90s and early 20s, where mothers were encouraged to have Caesarian sections, newborn babies were separated from their mothers at birth and breastfeeding was looked upon as “low class”, is not known. Add in present advice by commercial influencers advising parents not to pick up their crying babies, let them cry it out by themselves to “toughen them up” and to lock them in their rooms to fall asleep alone, is a recipe for the development of abnormal personalities.
Surprisingly, young people in the States and in Europe hate alcohol now and, perhaps relatedly, young people aren’t having nearly as much sex as they used to. In 2024 Poland, almost two in five young men said they had not had sex for at least a year. In the US it’s one in four for men, one in ten for women. Some of this is abstinence, which has become political: right-leaning men and left-leaning women are the likeliest to be sexually inactive. Some is social. Marriage is becoming rarer. In the 1940s, the average 25-year-old American woman had an 80% chance of getting married. It’s now around 20%. And the latest social gadget, the smartphone, instead of bringing people closer, is driving people apart.
Unsurprisingly, the number of births has fallen precipitously worldwide. Well, we know that. Ours has gone from 30,000 in the 1980s to under 10,000 last year, around the same number of people who die annually.
Half of Americans don’t get their news from traditional sources but from social media. In 2015, three-quarters of adults were getting their news from newspapers, radio or television. That’s dropped to 50% in 2021 and remained there since.
In T&T, it’s probably even less. I am the only one in my street who gets the daily T&T Guardian.
Talking about streets, electric cars (EVs) are here to stay. They are all over London. Taxis, sports cars, buses, you name it. The UK has over half a million electric vehicles and sales increased by 30% in 2024. Still far behind China, which has over 11 million EVs in use. And while on the subject of cars, well, self-driving cars are happening. Self-driving taxi services were approved in California in August 2023. The safety profile is said to be better than human-driven cars.
My uncle and I used to joke that every bodysurf we did at Maracas added a minute to our life. Well, there is now a plausible theory that every minute you spend in moderate or vigorous exercise extends your life by five minutes. Good news for Chancellor people.
Perhaps the best health news of all, apart from the benefits of immunising children and walking as an adult, is that childhood bacterial illness and famine have been reduced so much (except in Haiti, Gaza and the Sudan), that the greater global danger to children is obesity rather than starvation.
On second thought, that’s not such good news at all.
