NEWS RANT: Sperm count crisis and how more free time makes you happier.

Ok so every so often I like to take either a story or a few stories from the news and give my 2cents on them. Ok so the first bit of news I am going to get into is the fact that several sites announced that due to sperm counts dropping one day the human race could become extinct. Now obviously I think there is a fair degree of shouting and screaming going on here in order to try and make people rush to read the news so lets look at the facts here. Major studies have shown that Sperm counts have plummeted by nearly two-thirds since the 70s with experts blaming modern living for damaging male fertility.
Scientists claim that chemicals in plastics, pesticides, poor diet, smoking and obesity are all harming peoples sperm counts.

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reviewed 185 studies involving 43,000 men.
There findings indicated that men in Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand have seen their sperm concentration fall by 52 per cent in the past four decades. Apparently though men in South America, Asia and Africa have been unaffected.

''Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species''Dr Hagai LevineHebrew University of Jerusalem

 Ok so am I worried at all about the future of mankind, well not really at least not as far as sperm counts and fertility issues go. We already have so many people having kids that they dont really want or need, the world is quiet frankly over populated and I think most of the issues we have are down to over population, if the population shrinks then it would only actually help the world to carry on and well less people less plastics and such will be needed, also I am a big fan of Jurrasic Park so I strongly believe the quote ''Life will find a way''.

The second piece of news I want to talk about is the fact that there was a study in to what makes you happier time or money. To put it simply this study showed that if you used money to free-up time rather than either buying junk with it or just hoarding it you could increase your happiness. In all honesty this didnt suprise me in the slightest, partly because I used to work like 70 hours a week at one point and have no time to myself at all and I was miserable and partly because I was always told a certain gem of advice when I was younger and thats''Be careful how much you work because the one thing you cant buy with the money you earn is more time'' Now it might sound like thats saying that working in general is a waste of time but I dont mean that at all nor did the people who said it to me what they were trying to tell me is that the pursuit of money is not everything and you shouldnt spend all of the time you have trying to get ahold of it at the expense of hobbies and loved ones and other things you can spend your time on.

So basically in the experiment that was done individuals reported greater happiness if they used £30 to save time. So how do you use money to save time well they did it by doing things like paying other people to do chores for them. Psychologists have basically argued that one of the major things which stresses people out is worrying over lack of time and that this leads to lower well-being and also contributes to anxiety and insomnia. It was apparently shown in the study that if you used the money to gain yourself free time it actually helped you a lot more than trying to use your money to buy things such as films or alchol. I could have gone in to this story in a lot more depth but as a person who has gone from a long hours career into a part time job in an effort to better manage my mental health I found this news very intresting and while I am not suprised to read the findings of this experiment I do hope that this makes some people stop and think about how they live there life and manage there own mental health.

So does anything tie these two stories togther? Well they are both about health be it physical or mental, I think both of them just go to show that we as people are not really doing very well when it comes to managing our own health, we concentrate to much on money work and industry and we forget the simple pleasures in life, if everyone just took a little bit more time out to stop and smell the roses I think things would be a little bit better for everyone overall.