Why is everything going backwards?
I’ve always worn two hats: an architect’s hat and a yoga teacher’s hat.
Both have something in common—they make you look forward. They ask a simple but persistent question: why are things like this when they could be so much better?
People could be healthier. Happier. More secure. More connected to purpose and agency in how they live and where they live. From both perspectives—built environment and inner environment—you become acutely aware of change. And not always the kind that serves life well. At their best, we should be creating places and systems where people and communities can thrive as a baseline, not an exception.
But increasingly, that feels harder to recognise.
Last week, a new Health Foundation report based on ONS data recorded that 2.8 million working-age people in the UK are now too sick to work. Alongside rising mental illness, it offers a stark reminder: the nation’s health is not improving—it is deteriorating. Healthy life expectancy measures not just how long people live, but how long they live in good health—free from chronic illness or disability. It is a more honest metric than life expectancy alone, because it reflects quality, not just duration.
The picture is concerning.
While other high-income countries are seeing gradual improvements, the UK has gone backwards. Over the past decade, healthy life expectancy has fallen by around two years. It now stands at 60.7 years for men and 60.9 for women. In real terms, many people are now spending part of their working lives in poor health—often before reaching retirement age. In more deprived areas, like Blackpool (a place I know through past regeneration work that never quite found sustained momentum), healthy life expectancy drops below 55.
I’ve seen how systems fail here. People with the capacity to create change working within structures that are underfunded, fragmented, or simply not held long enough to make lasting impact. The consequences are both human and economic: rising pressure on the NHS, reduced workforce participation, and lost tax revenue. As the Health Foundation notes, a growing economic impact sits alongside a substantial human cost.
So why is this happening?
The usual answers are true: inequality, lifestyle, housing, education, overstretched services.
But beneath that is something less often named—the erosion of attention, connection, and agency in how we live. We tend to treat health as something external. But it is also shaped internally—by how we live, how we relate to stress, and how present we are in our own lives.
This is where yoga, meditation, and social prescribing begin to matter differently. Not as alternatives to medicine, but as ways of restoring relationship—between body and mind, individual and community, attention and life itself. Because health is not only about fixing what is broken.
It is also about creating the conditions in which we stop breaking ourselves.
Call to action
This is the work behind beanddo: helping people return to attention, awareness, and agency through yoga and meditation.
If this resonates, explore our practices, join a session, or bring this work into your organisation or community. Small shifts in attention can begin to change how we live—individually and collectively.
Oh….and by the way. Happy Star Wars day…