Modernity is Pathology

This is a list of devices, artifacts, observations, and informations that detail precisely how our modern world is inversely-proportional to human health and wellbeing. The list to-be-curated may include lengthy descriptions, or bullets. Pointedly, we are compiling many different and interesting archetypes of both triviality and significance to display the truly disastrous effects and affects of our current way of life.

The list may be both negative and positive in some. While focusing on the negatives, some may choose to point out the necessary positives of the respective item. For example, with shoes, they constrain our feet and change the morphology of the bones and muscles, while simultaneously offering protection from glass shards and other dangerous materials found on the ground. We must acknowledge the dual-purpose of such items with rigour and precision. It is highly likely that this list will be added to in the future.

Mirrors: The frequency of interaction with mirrors is rather unhealthy in modern society. Constantly staring at yourself causes a disproportionate amount of things to occur for your psychological health, like focusing on things that other people don’t deem important or even noticeable. This generates a perverse incentive for people caught in this trap to invest in skincare products and other therapies to rid themselves of these ill-perceived wrongs of their face / body. Thus, buying these products causes them to pay more attention to their physical appearance, making them buy more products, causing them to pay more attention, ad nauseum. In the times of old, you wouldn’t be able to see a reflection of yourself unless you were by still water — a rather uncommon occurrence. Thus, we are not hardwired to deal with this instant perception change, this instant understanding of how we look. This causes the comparison trap to occur in full effect because it warps the way we see ourselves in comparison to others; in daily life and on social media. Our fixation on our appearance transcends from the daily, to the hourly, to the moment, and there’s nothing to rectify this. Nothing to slow it down other than completely abstaining from the practice of looking at yourself entirely. This is a dire modern pathology.

Towels: Towels are seemingly bad since they force people to rub cloth on their skin and hair. Air drying is far better for the body and skin, but it’s very time consuming. Towels are faster and provide immediate relief, hence they are widely used.

Bars / widely available alcohol: The prevalence of alcohol has gone beyond a social tool for inebriation and connection, morphing into a lifestyle expectation and enforced behaviour for people to partake in regardless of preference or health risk. When alcohol was scarce, it was purer but also used for bonding in safer times (you couldn’t get drunk every day in the jungle, you’d die!). Now it’s muchly different. The availability of alcohol means that any human can engage in unhealthy drinking behaviour at any time; in modernity this might be restricted by age but this is usually a trivial matter as people below the age limit of their respective society are perfectly adept at finding a way to consume alcohol.

Widely available sugar: Sugar was meant to be a rare phenomenon. Berries and honey were limited, so naturally we sought to consume as much as possible whenever we found it. Now I have access to unlimited sugars and foods / treats with high sugar concentration. This means that our relationship to sugar has fundamentally changed, and now we are almost sugar-poisoned.

Cigarettes: self-explanatory. Cigarettes cause cancer, and are highly addictive. But are so good when you’re drunk. Dammit.

Fast food: Fast food, also known as fake food, is horrid for the human body. It’s not even food, essentially. It’s a concoction of chemicals that together resemble food. But they are not organic, whole foods like broccoli or chicken. These chemicals seep into the body and wreak micro-panic on the nervous, digestive, respiratory, circulatory, and excretory system. Fast food can offer cheap alternatives for poorer individuals, while also providing quick alternatives for people who need food at that very moment.

Tap water: Water from taps is very bad. It’s filled with molecules and tiny particles that are incredibly detrimental to human health.

Microwaves: Microwaves are baked into society without question. Basically every household has a microwave. Every kitchen in hotels has a microwave. Kitchens are not complete without microwaves of some sort. This is very interesting, since we as biological beings have problems with radiation, and yet we use this to cook our food and reheat our leftovers. Of course, microwaves are very beneficial; but this is missing the broader point. We lightly constructed a society around microwaves when we never understood how harmful the technology is in the first place.

Grocery stores / infinite amounts of food: It has become widely accepted — but not widely ingrained — that eating constantly will kill you faster. It doesn’t matter as much what you eat, just how often you eat. This is backed up by copious modern science and ancient Chinese and Indian accounts of health and longevity. Every advanced civilization in history, even our own in the year 2026, has figured out that the quantity of food is one of the vital keys to living a long life. Grocery stores retract the enforced scarcity of non-terraformed environments, allowing any human with sufficient funds to buy — and thus, consume — as much food as they possible can afford. The scarcity, in this case, revolves around their bank account and the amount of food they can carry home.

Staring at screens: Staring at screens is bad for the eyes and bad for sleep. Constantly staring at a screen completely kills eye health, and doing so before bed reduces melatonin, a vital neurochemical for sleep. Screens are essential for daily life now, for work, socialization, entertainment, etc. However, no one began to question if screens in abundance were a positive or a negative for humans. The answer is obviously negative.

Reading books: Tilting your head down for books is bad for the neck, very straining on the spine for posture. Books are my favourite vehicle for information so it pains me to write this, but using anything that forces the neck down in posture for long stretches of time is quite bad for the body and spine and overall functioning of the body.

Couches and chairs and cushions: sitting on very cushiony surfaces is bad for your buttocks and back in general as these surfaces reduce the tension on your body and create bad sensations for the back and spine.

Living in cities with loud cars and sirens: Trying to sleep or concentrate while loud sirens and cars revving is horrible for the human ear, especially at night as these sounds disturb sleep. There are no sounds of nature, nothing to really put one to sleep or calm the mind.

Living in cities with no nature / all concrete: Having no access to nature when living in the city is such a unique facet of modernity that we almost never talk about it. The internet quip “touch grass” is absolutely true! We all need to touch grass, and hug trees, and walk on grass, etc. This is very important for human health and the absence of this is rather undocumented. Never before have humans existed for quite a long time without access to nature or the natural world. But in places like New York City or Shanghai, these things are normalized, taken for granted, completely ignored. While the access to humans and opportunity is far greater (on paper) there is nothing healthy about this in the long-term, or the short-term. It is well documented that humans lower their stress hormones through interacting with nature, so in hyper-dense cities like NYC or Shanghai, it makes sense why people are so stressed! Not having access to nature means that people don’t have inner access to themselves, which is a disaster.

Light pollution: Light pollution is very bad for a critical reason as it separates our relationship with the cosmos. We have no relationship with the heavens now, so we disrespect our planet because it seems like we are the one and only rather than a small part of the larger universe. I have a feeling that if we restored this relationship somehow, we’d be more adept at asking the question of “Why” across the board, and really engaging in long-term projects rather than short-term thinking and bandaids.

Streaming services: I can never get to the end of Netflix, or Disney+, or Prime Video. This is a curious phenomenon. My ability to just sit and binge shows is at an all time high. Billions upon trillions of dollars are loaded for me to sit and do nothing; just consume and watch TV shows and movies and pay money to do so! This is very bad for the mind, the body, and the soul at large. Being distracted and addicted to streaming services means that as every hot new TV show or movie comes out and is marketed in the way it always is, there is an easy incentive to watch and binge and not pay attention to anything else in life. Like a zombie, you sit and stare at the TV with no intention of getting up or stopping or anything.

Domesticating animals in an individual households, ~1 dog per home, removing it from its family: Dogs are great. They create a family unit in most cases, and they have so many health benefits. Simply looking a dog in the eyes for 30 seconds lowers stress hormones. This is a remarkable facet of animals in our lives. But we never question just how they operate within the nuclear family, or even in terms of a companion. Usually, one “gets” a dog. This entails removing the pup from its mother, which is completely normalized and terrifying. Or we get the dog from an adoption centre, but usually we only get one and keep it by its lonesome. Rarely (but more commonly now) are dogs bought in pairs or more dogs bought for the purposes of keeping each other company since it costs a lot of money to care for even one animal.

Alarm clocks in the morning: This shock to your system in the morning is the worst way to wake up. You are soundly asleep and then one second later, you are jolted awake and your adrenaline and everything spikes. This is very bad for the body, no matter how ingrained in society — or necessary or productive for our daily lives — it is. We must wake up with the sun, naturally, and allow our bodies to take itself out of the restful state. What we do with alarms is horrible for our bodies and our minds. And it’s the first thing we experience in the day! We start all of our days in absolute fear and shock. Would this be good or beneficial to any society? I think not.