The first disconnect.
🟡🟢
We exist as primitive beings in a modern age, and we face a unique challenge: thriving in an environment that changed faster than our biology could adapt.
As we established in the last post—Purpose & Burden—maintaining health requires effort.
While this is true, it doesn’t make it any less unfortunate.
We have to go out of our way to learn:
- How to sleep
- How to move
- What to eat
And in many ways, we are the only species that has to do this.
The only animal that has to consciously figure out how to take care of itself.
This raises a fair question:
Why?
It’s easy to assume something is wrong with us.
A lack of discipline.
A lack of knowledge.
A lack of consistency.
But the issue runs deeper than that.
We are out of place.
A common analogy is a fish out of water—something removed from the environment it was built for.
Awkwardly flopping on dry land.
Cursing the air.
But that’s not quite right.
We’re not gasping on land.
We’re still in the water.
The water has just changed.
For most of human history, life required:
- Regular physical movement
- Exposure to natural light and darkness
- Real, whole, minimally processed food
- Effort tied directly to survival
Our food came from a plant or a mother.
We moved to build, to hunt, to gather, to protect.
We slept in rhythm with the sun. Darkness was only penetrated by firelight—not bright, artificial light that stimulates the brain and delays rest.
Our physiology was shaped in that environment.
Not over decades.
Over hundreds of thousands of years.
Then, in what is essentially a blink of an eye on that timeline, everything shifted.
The first Homo sapiens appeared roughly 300,000 years ago.
Our biology—our need for movement, nourishment, rest, and recovery—has remained largely the same.
But the environment we live in has changed dramatically in roughly the last century:
- The rise of ultra-processed, highly convenient foods
- A shift toward sedentary, desk-based work
- The introduction of artificial light and extended waking hours
- A culture that increasingly prioritizes productivity and output
The scale of that shift is difficult to grasp until you zoom out.
As Yuval Noah Harari notes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, since the 1500s:
- Human population has increased roughly 14-fold
- Energy consumption has increased 115-fold
We’ve created a completely different environment.
And yet…
Our biology is largely the same.
Food is no longer something we seek.
It’s something that surrounds us.
Movement is no longer required.
It’s something we have to choose.
Sleep is no longer governed by the sun.
It competes with artificial light, stimulation, and modern demands.
In a very short period of time, we became:
Overfed, but undernourished
Stimulated, but exhausted
Connected, but often disconnected from ourselves—
from our nature and primitive needs
And then we ask:
“Why is this so hard?”
It’s not just you.
It’s the world that surrounds you.
We have become a product of our own advancement—
living in an environment shaped by convenience, efficiency, and technological growth.
But this doesn’t mean modern life is the problem.
It has given us safety, longevity, and opportunity that previous generations never had—especially when compared to our primitive past.
But it does mean this:
The environment no longer supports health by default.
Which means health is no longer automatic.
It requires intent.
Reconciling the Disconnect
This isn’t about rejecting modern life.
It’s about reintroducing the conditions your body still expects.
Not perfectly.
Not obsessively.
But consistently.
That might look like:
- Choosing foods that resemble their original form more often than not
- Getting exposure to natural light, especially early in the day
- Reducing light and stimulation later at night
- Building movement back into daily life—not just what we do in the gym
- Creating small boundaries in an otherwise boundaryless environment
These aren’t advanced strategies.
It isn’t about obsession or optimization.
It’s simply a return to baseline conditions.
The foundation.
Because when those basics are in place, we’re in a much better position to experience:
- More stable energy
- Improved sleep
- Easier appetite regulation
- Movement that feels more natural
Not because we’ve “hacked” our biology.
But because we’ve stopped working against it.
Where This Goes Next
This is only the first layer.
Because it’s not just that the environment has changed…
It has intensified.
And that changes how our brain, behavior, and biology respond in ways that are far less obvious.
That’s where we’ll go next.
