Some Thoughts
2025-03-17
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While I am still posting updates to my capsule on a regular basis, I haven't been writing in my log very much. I simply haven't been motivated; real life tasks and events have pulled my attention away. Beyond that, however, I sometimes worry about the state of the modern world, and I don't want to whinge about it on my capsule without putting any thought into my feelings.
Late last year, I read a book titled "Good Energy" by siblings Casey and Calley Means. Casey Means is a former ENT surgeon with Stanford training, and Calley Means is a former political consultant for the food and pharmaceutical industries. Both left their respective fields and founded companies to promote health, aiming to escape what they believe is a treadmill of processed food that makes Americans sick and big medicine that profits off the sickness. Mainstream media accused the Means of politicizing health after they appeared on podcasts with Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but the book itself is entirely apolitical, focusing on the science behind how industrialized food harms our health and providing concrete steps to help undo the damage.
The book opened my eyes to how unnatural many seemingly normal things in the modern world are and how harmful they are in aggregate. It discusses in detail how "big food" products, like those from Nabisco or Oscar Mayer, carry no nutrients and fill our bodies with junk. More disturbingly, the Means reveal the history and the science behind how ultraprocessed foods hijack our satiety mechanisms. They have been carefully designed and perfected to make us never feel full, so we never stop eating.
As a result of reading the book, I am slowly but steadily moving my diet away from processed food. I now eat a lot more whole foods than I ate six months ago, and that has translated into improved health and lost body fat. Thanks to the change, my weight now stays below 220 lbs consistently, and I hope my weight will go down even more as I remove more processed foods.
"Good Energy" covers a lot of issues besides just food. There is a class of chemicals called "obesogens" that interfere with the body's metabolism and can influence obesity. Obesogens are found in everything from non-stick cookware to thermal paper to commercial pesticides, and the book argues that our constant exposure to them contributes a great deal to the obesity epidemic in the United States. Americans spend less time outdoors than ever before; many people get less sunlight than maximum-security prisoners. We get fewer hours of sleep than we did 100 years ago, and we corrupt the darkness of night with artificial light. News sites and social media fill us with stress. We are a largely sedentary people. The list goes on and on.
These problems all echo some feelings I've had about life for a while. As time goes on, more and more of American life feels fake to me--not in the visceral sense of being an illusion or a hallucination, but in the philosophical sense of having no real substance or meaning.
Probably the most prominent example is media. Art of all kinds is engineered by psychologists and marketers to be as pleasant to consume as possible. Movies are generic and shallow; TV shows are banal and repetitive; music is empty lyrics accompanied by interchangeable synthesizers; even many popular books right now are slight variations on the current "romantasy" trend. And of course, these products become popular because giant media corporations control the mechanisms by which people are exposed to them: advertisers, SEO providers, streaming services, and large retailers.
But the phenomenon isn't just limited to creative pursuits. One negative side effect of modern life, bemoaned by almost everyone, is the ubiquity of plastics. Not only is plastic an obseogen and a xenoestrogen (a hormone-disrupting chemical that reacts similarly to estrogen), but many people agree that plastic simply feels cheap and fake. Ultraprocessed food might be tasty, but we know at some deep level that it's not real food, and after eating it we don't feel that it actually satisfied us. Cars are cushier and more efficient than ever before, but we don't get the same fulfillment out of operating a vehicle as we did when we tuned our carburetors and shifted gears by hand. Even our work is becoming more inane: as more people become knowledge workers, our vocational pursuits become increasingly mechanized, automated and analyzed through cold numbers. Gone are the days of crafting and building a tangible product using one's own skill and holistic understanding of a process. Everything is done by machine, and the human has nothing to be proud of.
The conundrum of modern life is convenience. Everyone is trying to sell something that is supposed to save either time, money, effort, or some combination of all three. Their ploy is: "Don't worry about this thing. We'll take care of it for you, so you have more time to focus on the things you really care about." That's a very convincing ploy, because the very mark of civilization is the creation of tools and organization that eliminate the need for every single person to be completely self-sufficient. The problem is that every single company, in every single facet of life, is taking the exact same position. It's nice that Microsoft Excel can handle my budgeting needs or that a taxi service can take me from my house to the airport if my car is in the shop, but now all the effort is also being taken out of my entertainment, sports, hobbies, and even family quality time. If literally everything I want to do is done for me by someone else, what is left for me to do myself with all my newfound free time?
Convenience also leads directly into issues of wealth inequality. When a company's entire business model is based on performing tasks for the customer, it's only natural for the company, not the customer, to own all the resources they use to perform those tasks. The drivers of wealth are not financial capital, but functional resources such as machinery, computer code, chemicals, building materials, farmland, and infrastructure. Private individuals own these resources in very small quantities, but effective control over them (not to mention production) is maintained by business or government institutions. No-one can independently make things for himself anymore.
I worry about all this for a number of reasons. "Good Energy" made a big impact on me because I now understand the modern world's effects on my health much better. But it's not just about health: the economy of modern convenience is unsustainable. Big interests--not billionaires themselves, but the companies they found and lead--are taking larger and larger slices of the global wealth pie. There's a reason why most of the money made in the world today comes not from businesses selling products to consumers but to other businesses. They have all the money, and that's where the growth comes from. I am not against capitalism, as I think this is a cultural and moral failing instead of an economic one, but it still leads to an increasing downward trend of asset poverty and a lack of agency in the economy. Prices can't keep going up like they are forever, and humans cannot afford long-term to get so little out of the world as they are, be it food, fun or fulfillment.
It also belies a much deeper spiritual crisis. I am not a practicing Christian, but I have respect for the prospect of a higher calling that religion provides, and my respect increases with time. Of course one doesn't need religion to be a mindful or altruistic person, but society's race to find the lowest common denominator means that nothing society produces satisfies our innate desires to be good people. The things we buy are designed to cater to our dopamine triggers, not our sense of community or duty to others. We only get enough to satisfy our own immediate personal needs: for example, consumer-model cars have the minimum power needed to carry a few people and some light belongings, while movies and video games are restricted by license for personal use only. Everything requires a subscription, has vendor lock-in, and still has planned obsolescence, creating huge amounts of waste while leaving nothing for future generations to benefit from. We, as a culture, have barely any sense of the future, let alone respect for it, and we are a far cry from building functional futures for those who will come after us.
I'm not looking to get political in this post. Some people blame the current state of affairs on the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. I feel the problem goes much deeper than Trump, and indeed much deeper than politics in general. In "Good Energy," Casey and Calley Means emphasize that the harmful practices of big food and big pharma are not driven by politics. They are driven by money. The cruel truth is that for these industries, it makes economic sense for people to be as sick as possible for as long as possible without dying. A sick consumer, addicted to trash food, is an endless supply of money for drugs, for hospital visits, for chronic treatments, and of course for more food. And it's not capitalism or politics themselves that lead to that economic reasoning: it's a lack of moral clarity and respect for the world around us. It's a lack of appreciating the things that make us human to begin with.
When I worry, I become introspective, and I tend to retreat from things. I've spent a lot of time recently simply reading about gardening and working on projects around the house. I also spend time with real-life friends and am trying to volunteer in the city more often. I don't want to be a mindless, addicted consumer: I want my life to mean something. My generation is going through a serious crisis of purposelessness, and I firmly believe the artificial nature of our society plays a big part of that. But naturally, if I become introspective, I'm not talking about the things on my mind on Gemini.
As I said earlier, I'm still updating other parts of my capsule: I have some updates for the twisty puzzles section in the works, and as I work on my microblog script, I've been documenting some of the POSIX-compliant scripting tricks I use. But if you've wondered why my log has been quiet in the last few months, now you know.
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[Last updated: 2025-03-17]