Just how many problems in the world would you wager are due to apathy? If you were to look into your own past when the struggles of your life were compounding, how many people who could have helped moved on with disinterested eyes? Or when it comes to light that one of our American politicians did something absolutely abhorrent, how many people just shuffle along the proverbial boardwalk of their day without crying, “Tyranny!!”?

Tyranny begins as an insidious bud of a flower which is allowed to bloom when good men sit by, instead of savaging the soil of their gardens free of weeds. Because at the end of the day, a garden is exactly what the whole of the earth is, what a country is with its own people and culture, what a city is, and what each individual neighborhood is. Each is a box of soil that needs regular observation, planning, care, and hard work to maintain a physically safe and socially healthy environment. 

Yet, the aforementioned isn’t the “problem." The current status quo of our bevy of bad politicians is a local and global environment born from the issue of broad, growing, and widespread apathy. That apathy is sometimes and briefly suppressed by things like rage-bait articles, which themselves seem to drive a cycle of intense anger spikes to opposite lows, which only makes settling down in a bed of mud – the comfort of apathy – more appealing. Perhaps comfort breeds apathy. There is the historical annotation that is always attached to ancient Rome, "bread and circuses,” where free bread and gladiatorial games were put on to entertain and distract the masses. 

Our current analogous items of comfort to the colosseum would certainly be doom-scrolling social media feeds, which are filled with corporate dogma and memes planted by foreign governments, as well as an endless streaming of movies, sports, video games, and easy access to candy, drugs, and sweets. Yet, those themselves are things that surround humans and draw attention - even rapture. 

The above are all items that can be ignored or cut out of a life, hewn away with discipline. But internally, what drives our system? The National Library of Medicine hosts an article titled “Understanding the Secular Decline in Testosterone,” by Oscar Fraile Martinez, Miguel Ortega, and Cielo Garcia-Montero. They open the paper by writing, 

“Testosterone is a key regulator of male and female physiology.” They go on to write about how metabolism, bone and muscle health, sexual function, and “psychological well-being" are all tied to a person having healthy levels of testosterone. "Growing evidence indicates a secular, age-independent decline in testosterone levels across populations…impairing the quality of life. From a medical perspective, low testosterone levels are strongly associated with various chronic maladies, including metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality.”

Dang. So, a simple reduction in testosterone pushes a person’s chance of death up; and,

“Psychologically and socially, low testosterone levels are linked to increased rates of depression, anxiety, reduced motivation, lower quality of life, and impaired social behaviors such as competitiveness and engagement.”

Apathy. 

The American Urological Association says healthy levels of testosterone in males (average) range from 450 to 600 ng/dl (‘nanograms per deciliter’. But honestly, for those without a medical background, you could just put ‘Units of T’ instead, especially in this next comparison). Low testosterone is below 300 ng/dl. LabCorp’s data shows that at the lowest end (adult) men can have as little as 246 ng/dl, but some men have as high as 916 ng/dl. For adult women: 10-55 ng/dl, (and for post-menopause, 7-40).

I had always heard that men had more testosterone, but those numbers are quite different. Especially when placed against the data from the paper, “A population-level decline in American men,” (also found in the National Library of Medicine), which they report from a rigorous study that lasted decades, “they found that testosterone concentrations dropped about 1.2% per year…from 1987 to 2004.” This data, like that from the paper at the start of this article, wrote “secular,” which means that the decline of testosterone is happening regardless of age, which has its own level of decline.  

The difference between men and women in testosterone loss then would be 0.63 ng/dl per year, compared to 6.3 ng/dl per year - this means men are sixteen times more affected by a secular loss in testosterone each year than women. 

If low testosterone in people is linked to “increased depression, reduced motivation,” then how happy must governments be that half of their population, which has historically rioted, brought about and carried out revolutions, is year-by-year losing even the ability to care at a secular rate sixteen times that of women. 

Not that I am pushing for any such thing as revolt (it is not viable change currently and deserves its own essay – but the garden of the world, the city, and the neighborhood has been allowed to become overgrown with terrible politicians and policies, for behaviors in children to go untended – for that box of soil we all share to fall into disrepair and overgrowth. Great, regular physical activity and restful sleep (and a run from sedentary lifestyles) can angle the numbers in the other direction. 

Thus, the garden would once again have more people consciously tend to the tyranny around us. 

(Understanding the Secular Decline in Testosterone:)

“These findings highlight that the secular decline in testosterone carries not only individual health risks [neurodegenerative decline, dementia] but also broader demographic and societal implications.”

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.