Oftentimes, we are fickle about the meaningless and apathetic to the meaningful. We go to church to be seen, emphatically place a check in the offering, but steal a fork from the local restaurant (I’m looking at you, Italian women). We buy the latest and greatest car despite needing a new water heater. We rack up credit card debt to keep up with our neighbors and let our student loans accumulate interest. We would rather SEEM happy and successful than BE happy and successful. How people perceive us supersedes how we perceive ourselves. Don’t beat yourself up, it’s a pattern that’s deeply rooted in our DNA. It’s a survival mechanism and old survival mechanisms die hard.

Joe and Jane the Cavepeople (see what I did there to avoid backlash from BuzzFeed) needed help from other Cavepeople to survive. You couldn’t do it on your own when there were hoards of sabre-toothed tigers and other tribes of Cavepeople that wanted you dead. To become a part of a tribe, and increase the likelihood of survival, Joe and Jane needed to prove their worth to Jim and June and James and July. They needed to be accepted so that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. They needed to survive.

Judging people on their outward appearances, although unfair, is something that is inescapable. We look at a person’s body composition, clothing, cleanliness, grooming, and vehicle to measure someone’s worth. A person with neat clothing, grooming, a healthy body composition and a nice car tells our puny little subrains that they are successful, hard-working, productive, and attentive, all characteristics important to survival. All things you’d want in someone who you’re going to share your chances with.

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention chronic back pain in the things that we judge people for. It’s not something that will pop out at you when observing someone walking down the street. You cannot sit next to a couple at a high-end restaurant and deduce whether or not they have shoulder pain (unless you’re me). Until you get to know someone, or they have overt, acute pain, you don’t know how bad they are hurting. Chances are, if you’re in a room of more than a couple individuals, one of them has chronic pain that is impacting their lives.

There’s little incentive for an individual to get their pain fixed. While the returns on getting an expert diagnosis and treatment may be high for their own personal life, it may not be high on how they are perceived. This differs from obtaining healthy body composition or obtaining a new car or new clothes or a new haircut (NOT NOW CHIEF, I’M IN THE ZONE). From a survival standpoint, you can obtain greater returns on your investment. You can improve your status by losing weight. You can’t improve your status by eliminating your chronic, 3/10 knee pain (unless your tribe is health-focused, but that’s a topic for another article). We don’t care about our joint health because our egos perceive that there is more to gain from something else.

Deep down, we know that it’s not true and establishing awareness of that story is the first step. The story is not productive. We know that having back pain sucks. It prevents you from carrying your children. It can prevent you from pursuing that healthy body composition. It can prevent you from sitting down at work to focus. It makes you crabby. We know that not possessing optimal joint health robs us of what matters most. It robs us of our ability to truly become a better, more productive human. It prevents us from growing. Pursuing greater joint health may not stoke the fire of our egos, but it will stoke the fire of our True Selves, thus delivering happiness, satisfaction, and peace.