Future Pundit makes me want to get down and dirty. I often worry that I am too clean. I mean, I bathe daily, I brush my teeth and I floss, I do my laundry every week, and it sometimes gets to be a real drag, and I wonder what's it all for? Am I going to die clean, and die an early death?

A theory holds that auto-immune diseases and some other disorders related to the immune system are caused by a lack of exposure to microorganisms that our immune systems are designed to handle (this idea is known as the Hygiene Hypothesis). The absence of real enemies makes the immune system incorrectly attack friendlies and to otherwise malfunction. Are imbalanced immune systems due to clean environments making people depressed?

there is mounting evidence that disruptions in ancient relationships with microorganisms in soil, food and the gut may contribute to the increasing rates of depression.

According to the authors, the modern world has become so clean, we are deprived of the bacteria our immune systems came to rely on over long ages to keep inflammation at bay.

...the useless you depresses you.

A further study would be how purposelessness causes depression.

Let's take Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as two examples. They were so busy discovering, inventing, tinkering, and coming up with new ideas, that they probably didn't have time to contemplate the purposelessness of life. Now, some might call that foolish and say that they missed out on an important ultimate realization, but I think they were better off being purposeful than purposeless. And not only were they better off, we are all better off.

The strange thing is, neither one of them was known for adhering fastidiously for what we take for granted today as basic standards of personal hygiene.

At his inauguration, Jefferson was described as "decidedly unkempt in hair and toilet." However, he does seem to have bathed regularly (which in those days may have meant weekly or monthly). Unlike Benjamin Franklin, who was said to have "hated water baths."

Then there was Thomas Paine who " was apparently so unkempt in his appearance that one contemporary called him "the most abominably dirty being upon the face of the earth."

Franklin and Jefferson lived to be 84 and 83 respectively, and although Paine only made it to 72, it apparently took more than being dirty to kill him ("Paine's last years were marked by poverty, poor health and alcoholism.")

Considering that the average life expectancy in colonial America was 25 years of age, all three of them did pretty well.

Nature used to have its way with people, and bad organisms ran amok. Since those days, modern medicine has waged a steady war against nature, and has learned how to thwart many of the bad organisms which used to routinely kill people.

Whether we are thwarting too many of them (and thwarting them too much) is a good question. While I can't see dirty as being healthy, it is very possible that an excess of cleanliness is unhealthy.

I'd hate to be pouring my natural life down the drain.