The Road to Devolution: How We Ended up Sick and Unhappy

When I turned 22, I developed an eating disorder.

Over the next couple of years, this crippling condition would gradually seize control of my life. As an optimistic and previously healthy young guy, this wasn’t exactly how I had pictured my early twenties. It was a bummer, to say the least.

About twelve months earlier, I had started studying at a top university?and?started my first company (a specialty coffee business). This sounds impressive. But deep down, I was conflicted. I wasn’t convinced that the conventional educational path would take me any closer to the life I wanted, and my goal of becoming a successful entrepreneur. And it seemed to me like the internet was right there, ripe with unlimited avenues for learning, growth, and opportunity.

But I lacked the courage to follow my intuition and skip school altogether. So, in pure, desperate ambivalence, I started a side business to compensate for “being stuck” in school for another 3+ years.

This wasn’t a good situation, and it didn’t take long to realize I had spread myself too thin. I worked longer and longer hours and sacrificed most of my social life. But my performance still suffered, and I was increasingly miserable.

Why did I develop an eating disorder as a method to cope?

Perhaps it was my upbringing. Maybe it was my genetics or some weird personality trait (I have a few). Or perhaps my short stint in the toxic modeling industry played a role. But then again, my problem wasn’t?not?eating – my problem was?binge?eating.

Ultimately, my condition led to gut issues, prediabetes, and depression. But like a typical addict, this didn’t do much to change my behavior.

I still remember the day I hit rock bottom. That’s when I found the deep, fiery determination and hope that kickstarted my journey back to health.

The irony is that I was already into health and lifestyle medicine long before I got sick. I had read books like?Low Carb, High Fat Food Revolution?by Andreas Eenfeldt (the founder of Diet Doctor), and others like it years prior. But the tendencies that would lead to my full-blown eating disorder had been stirring in the background, confounding the cause-and-effect relationships I was looking for. And since I didn’t yet have the results I wanted, it was hard to connect the dots and understand what was actually true – especially what was true for?me.

At one point, I adopted a plant-based diet, becoming a vegetarian for twelve months and then vegan for nine months. I had been sold the idea that this was best for my health and for the planet, and I took that at face value because it was sold to me by “experts” (this is a discussion for another day, but I now believe the first part of this popular notion is dead wrong, and the second part is way too simplified even to approach the truth, let alone be useful general advice).

Long story short: it only made things worse and contributed to my illness.

I started to suspect that something was wrong on a fundamental level. I thought:?“if this ‘expert’ advice turned out to be so wrong, I wonder what else is..?”.

When I started pulling on the threads unraveling my beliefs about plant-based eating, it led me down a deep rabbit hole of questioning everything I thought I knew about nutrition, lifestyle, and health in the modern world.

What I discovered was way worse than I could have imagined…

The deeper I went, the more clearly I could see that the underlying structures and values of modern society make it almost impossible to nurture our natural state, which, like in every other species, is health. And like?boiling frogs, our perceptions have gradually skewed so that most of us don’t realize how far we’ve drifted from this natural state, or that most conventional health beliefs are not only misguided but straight-up wrong – often the very reason we get sick.

What proof do I have of this?

More than half?of the people in developed countries like the US now have?at least one?chronic health condition. And because of the boiling frog situation, no one in the general population seems to have any kind of proportionate reaction to that (just imagine if we found that the majority of individuals in another animal population were sick – we’d conclude that the species were going extinct!).

But it gets worse. In recent decades, we’ve seen an explosion in more diffuse, undiagnosed health problems, such as mood disorders, chronic fatigue, digestive issues, multi-chemical sensitivities, and frequent migraines.

Though they seem novel, these developments are a result of a multi-generational process of decline. A more illustrative example of this is the need for most people to remove their “wisdom teeth” – there is literally not enough room in our jaws to house all the teeth in the genetic program passed down from previous generations (and btw, this is coming from a dentist’s son who indeed had his own wisdom teeth pulled).

All things considered, I’d argue that at least 95% of the?worldwide?population is now cut off from the full experience of their health and vitality.

So yeah… we’re basically fucked.

But anyone with an ounce of faith in humanity will want to refuse to believe it. How in the world could we have gotten ourselves into this situation? Wouldn’t we want what’s best for ourselves??

Sure we would.

In fact, it’s not actually?our?fault we ended up in this situation (although we certainly screwed up). I used to think these problems were just “unintended consequences” of historical events like the industrial revolution, and that we just needed some time to catch up and adjust.

But it’s something much bigger than that…

Allow me to explain.

In the last century or so, a novel development in the scope of our evolutionary history has reached its culmination; for the first time, our health is now entirely at the mercy of our explicit knowledge and deliberate actions, more or less in isolation from natural circumstances. This is a binary shift from the natural and elemental harmony that guided our behavior, shaped our bodies and minds, and simultaneously defined our health throughout evolution.

In theory, this would be fine –?if?we had a complete scientific understanding of the human organism (and some immortality-crazed techno-utopists would probably have you believe we do). But this is far from the truth. We hardly understand a fraction of the biological mechanisms and environmental interactions that make us thrive.

In other words, we’re tasked with manually operating a complex system we don’t understand, designed to run on autopilot within the parameters set by its creator, i.e nature/evolution or God (depending on your primary brand of brainwashing) – which we also do not fully understand.

Okay, this sounds problematic. But still, how did we?get?here?

The answer to that lies in the genesis of our post-agrarian, hyper-industrialized, hyper-centralized, petrochemically inflated, technology-driven societies.

It all started the moment we invented technology. In that very moment, we unknowingly brought a relentless force into the world. In hunter-gatherer societies, the manifestations of this force could be harnessed with few side effects (in the form of stone tools, etc.). It was only later when we settled and started domesticating plants and animals, sowing the seeds for concepts like?private?property?and?money as a store of value,?that we gave this force its physical form,?i.e. modern society?– the perfect vessel for it to take hold, proliferate, and grow (kind of like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter saga).

This monster has slowly been building momentum through the millennia since, employing a number of devices like markets, innovation, political power, and ideological & religious memes to expertly?warp and exploit human nature.

It’s very much like modern society is an organism in and of itself, that domesticated?us?after we domesticated the natural world. This organism is entirely agnostic to the good of humanity and fanatic about furthering its own inherent goals.

Our health is simply collateral damage.

And the profiteers, as we now know, are a few elite individuals at the superficial level, but fundamentally the only winner is the system itself.

Or, put in the words of?Charles Eisenstein?(whose book,?The Ascent of Humanity?inspired the name of this newsletter):

In thus mastering nature with technology, and mastering human nature with culture, we distinguish ourselves from the rest of life, establishing a separate human realm. Believing this to be a good thing, we think of this separation as an ascent in which we have risen above our animal origins. That is why we naturally refer to the millennia-long accumulation of culture and technology as “progress.” It is separation, then, in the form of technology and culture, that defines us as human.

He then goes on to say:

Underlying the vast swath of ruin our civilization has carved is not human nature, but the opposite: human nature denied. This denial of human nature rests in turn upon an illusion, a misconception of self and world. We have defined ourselves as other than what we are, as discrete subjects separate from each other and separate from the world around us.

Indeed, it is this?separation?caused by our naive relationship with technology that underlies most, if not all of our problems in the modern era. We equate technology and modernity with progress and improvement. We think it gives us power and control. But in fact, it’s mostly the other way around.

The insights I gained from this unraveling soon got me the results I was looking for. This was the first clue that I was on to the “truth”.

After this whole experience, a few things became abundantly clear to me:

• If we want to be healthy, strong, conscious, and free in the modern world, almost every part of it is stacked against us.
• Most people don’t realize how far we’ve drifted from our natural state (and what we’re missing out on because of it).
• In the jungle of misinformation, hidden agendas, and contradicting opinions, it’s hard to know what is actually?true,?and particularly what is true for each unique individual.
• Even if we do know?what?to do to take back our health, it’s difficult to overpower the modern environment and make sustainable changes (this is one of the reasons I started my company?Holo).
• True health is not just physical – our values around things like quality, work, relationships, and purpose, as well as our relationships, are major contributors to overall health.

So, what is the solution?

Do we all just go back to living like our ancestors,?Liver King?style?

No, I don’t believe we can,?or?should.

Technological “progress” makes life easier (or rather, the immediate experience of it) and because of that, we tend to never go back. So this is simply not a feasible solution for most people. Besides, tech can be pretty cool… when done right, it can add more to our lives than it takes away.

Instead, I believe the key is to identify the right technologies and strategies to navigate the modern environment while constantly modeling and adapting to our evolutionary needs – and reject everything else.

If you want to get practical insights and essays on how to do that, i.e. how to find true health in the modern world – I'd recommend joining my Substack.

You can also follow my work at Holo Health ?and as a?podcast host, where I have the privilege of interacting with the leading experts in #lifestylemedicine and personalized #healthcare on a daily basis. This gives me access to real-world practical knowledge and insights often unavailable to the broader population.

In closing, I want to say this: there is so much?unnecessary?suffering in the world.

This pisses me off but mostly makes me sad. Life is ultimately precious, and the fact that so many people have been robbed of their health means they are missing out on theirs.

I want to change that.