somethings missing...

we're too old for this shit

Hi sweet humans! Apologies for the few weeks of silence—this piece ended up taking a lot more research than anticipated, and I discovered along the way that many of these sections deserve their own essay. If there’s any topic that stands out and revs your engine, let me know in the comments!

Enjoy!

XX Erin

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By most modern scientific accounts, humans (Homo Sapiens) emerged 300,000 years ago. For that time, hunting and gathering was the primary means of survival for 290,000 years. Then came farming, which reigned for ~9,700 until the industrial revolution in the 1700s to… whatever it is we’re doing now, that really only emerged 50 years ago, more or less, depending on who you ask.

For those of you who are more visual, I made you something:

The human animal is more ancient than we sometimes give credit. The conditions that it’s currently living in… more modern than we give credit. At least for me, it’s easy to fall under the assumption that we’ve lived how we live now for a long time. But things that many in the Western world take for granted, like plumbing and electricity, have only existed for a few generations—a mere blip of a blip on the human timeline.

For most of us, in our air-conditioned homes, and jobs that involve tip-tapping away on keyboards, eyes glued on screens, it’s hard to imagine living lives as hunter-gatherers—but it’s how we lived for the vast majority of our lineage, a life that our DNA remembers:

Foraging, hunting, fishing, making tools and weapons, punctuated by socializing, food preparation, childcare, rest, storytelling, and ritual. Daily life was shaped by seasonal rhythms, group cooperation, and mobility.

But there are still people in some parts of the world living exactly this way today, such as the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of the Kalahari, and the Agta of the Philippines.

As we go down this technological road, things seem to only be getting worse for us humans (in the Western world, anyway)—all-cause mortality is up, life expectancy in the United States is down, and mental illness abounds. They keep coming out with new interventions—pills, “hacks”, intricately stacked routines—but they’re mere band-aids to the fact that, somehow, somewhere along the line, we entered into captivity—except, we’re our own captors. And just like animals in a zoo, we’re suffering without our natural habitats, unable to express our natural instincts.

Whenever I see a new wellness trend—the next silver bullet—I think, are we really unwell for lack of reformer pilates, greens powders, and cold plunges? Or, is there some essential nutrient we are missing that no amount of capitalism could ever put back?

That’s a leading question—I think you probably already know the answer.

Movement

Coming from a fitness person, “fitness” is… kind of dumb. It makes me sad that so many people think of movement as an hour on machines in a fluorescently lit box, or a walk with a cutesy name, with an (arbitrary) steps goal, if they even get any meaningful movement at all.

It’s movement without a purpose—other than trying to stave off obesity, crippling anxiety, and existential dread. Which might sound like a worthy purpose up front, but it's really just managing the symptoms of domestication.

Giving humans a gym is like giving a rat a wheel.

We are designed to move, not to exercise. Movement, for hundreds of thousands of years, was utilitarian, playful, and social. Now? It’s isolated, monotonous, and uninspired.

Modern hunter-gatherers walk 6-10 miles a day, and can break out into a sprint over varied terrain and vegetation at the drop of a hat with little effort. They can climb, squat, stoop, crawl, and carry loads without a second thought. Torn ACLs, bulging disks, and joint degeneration? Not a thing. These are symptoms of sitting for most of the day and compartmentalizing movement to stiff, unilateral, inhuman, dysfunctional movement patterns, leaving our bodies unfit to adapt to the sudden demand.

I see movement as nutrients, and most of us are getting the processed food of movement—feet planted on the ground, counting reps, fear and hate behind our eyes. Can we survive? Sure. But do we want to survive or thrive? If yes, then we need to put back what has been lost.

It’s shocking to me how many people in classes that I teach can’t even sit on the ground comfortably, let alone easily get up and down off the floor without strain or even fear. And yet, they’re lifting weights and doing Pilates and wondering why they still feel and move like shit.

Our bodies have become foreign to us.

We’re not unwell for a lack of gyms, we’re unwell because we lack an environment that demands anything of us, least of all that we move like humans.

Deep, Interdependent Community

Hyper independence and a strong emphasis on individualism have done us no favors. Sure, managing interpersonal relationships can be tough, but so is living in isolation… choose your hard. Inconvenience is the cost of community, as it were.

For 95% of human history, we lived in small groups of about 100-250 people. Even when nomadic bands and tribes only consisted of about 30 people, their broader network could extend to 100-250. As agriculture allowed for larger, denser communities to form, people still split into sub-groups of about, you guessed it, 100-250 people. Even as sprawling civilizations and cities emerged, we were still able to find our inner circle.

This number, this notion that humans can only maintain around 100-250 personal relationships, is called Dunbar’s Number, from evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar’s work in the early 90s. He found that, in terms of cognitive load (the brain can only keep track of and handle so many personal relationships), time (which it takes to create intimacy, which we have a limited supply of), and trust (you can only cooperate and share with so many people), give or take 150 seemed to show up consistently, both anthropologically and neurologically, due to the size of the neocortex.

But now? Now, we follow thousands of people online, but only manage a meager handful of close relationships, if any at all.

Could the push towards isolation be a reaction to the overwhelm caused by exposure to literally billions of people when we were only meant to keep track of 150? Could it be that what we call “anxiety” might just be loneliness with a WiFi connection?

In the modern world, we can do everything on our own—food, shelter, work—even the illusion of socializing—can all be done alone inside your home. It seems like social connection only exists in the modern world for social connection’s sake—we do it because we know it’s “good for us”. We don’t technically need anyone. But actually, we do. We really do. It’s in our DNA to need people. To know and be known.

Purpose Tied to Contribution, Not Consumption

Purpose, the concept, seems to be in both the air and water supply these days. Purpose—as elusive as Moby Dick, as coveted as the last seat on a life raft as the Titanic goes down. The problem, though, is that most people look to their careers, relying on them to derive purpose and meaning. Which is a sensible place to look when that’s how you spend most of your time.

But what if purpose is not something you find? What if it’s inherent when all of the conditions for the human spirit are met?

For most of human history, meaning came from being needed, from making meaningful contribution. Identity was tied to utility, not productivity. Everyone would contribute in their own way: hunting, gathering, cooking, caretaking, weapons making, art, storytelling. When numbers are small, everyone has something they can contribute to the collective. Everyone is essential. Everyone plays an important part.

Hunter-gatherer communities today are still incredibly egalitarian and lack rigid social hierarchies.

We saw this play out during the lockdowns of the pandemic: work delineated into essential and non-essential. And boy, were there a lot of non-essential jobs. Which begs the question: if the ways in which most of us are contributing are not essential to collective other than earning a paycheck so that we might be able to participate in the economy, then, respectfully, those jobs are bull shit.

If we’re looking to get meaning from the work we do, which has been the case for hundreds of thousands of years, but the underlying purpose of most of our jobs is so that we can consume, we’ll never derive purpose from them.

We’ve alienated ourselves from anything that gives context to our suffering.

Rhythmic Stress and Recovery Cycles

Stress is ~supposed~ to be cyclical—a clear beginning, middle, and end. You hear rustling in the grass. Your pupils dilate. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. Breathing becomes rapid and shallow. You begin to perspire. Blood is shunted away from the organs and into the muscles as they tense, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice.

A bird emerges from the dusty blades.

You immediately relax—your parasympathetic nervous system takes over and you return to baseline, returning to napping in the sun. OR….

A lion emerges, and you immediately must decide: do I fight, do I flee, or do I freeze? Either way, the threat must be neutralized—you get away, you fight it off, or get it to leave (or you die… still concludes the stress cycle, I suppose 😅). Once the threat has subsided, you return to rest.

The stress cycle is complete, recalibrated and ready to go again.

But today, we never get to complete this cycle. Stress is pervasive: burning like an unrelenting low-grade fever, always on in the background, gnawing at us like the kitchen exhaust fan that we can never turn off.

The bad news and opinions of billions of people that we were never meant to consume, family, maintaining a social life, bills, work, a barrage of texts and emails… around and around we go.

Our nervous systems were built for sprints, not marathons of anxiety.

If we never get to rest, if we never get to complete the stress cycle, our health—both mental and physical—will greatly suffer long-term.

Face-to-Face, Body-Based Communication

55% of communication is body language, 38% is vocal cues, i.e. tone and pitch, and only 7% is the actual words that are said. Human communication is incredibly complex and nuanced. And that nuance can only be appreciated and expressed in face-to-face interaction.

And it’s not just what we’re trying to communicate—it’s things we’re probably trying not to communicate. We are constantly, subconsciously attuning our nervous systems and co-regulating with those around us. Eye contact (or lack thereof), breathing, posture, touch—mirror neurons that cause us to share emotional states. Put simply, when we’re with others, we automatically sync up and begin to match in vibration (sorry if that sounds too woo-woo for you, but it's true and the only way I know how to phrase it).

However, when we’re connecting digitally, we miss nearly all of this. The world becomes emotionally flat (literally). When we confine the vast and vibrant world of human communication and connection to a 2”x5” 2D screen, we completely bypass the oxytocin-rich circuitry that was designed for connection—the very pathways that tell our nervous systems we are safe, seen, and not alone.

When we forsake the richness of real, human connection, we get nervous system dysregulation, social anxiety, poor boundaries, the inability to read emotional states, and lose the ability to create bonds irl.

It’s why, I reckon, I (and many others) work better in public settings like coffee shops or libraries. It would be more convenient for me to stay at home, but I’m much more creative and focused with other people around. Because, as much as we like to think we enjoy solitude, and yes, sometimes people can be annoying, our nervous systems were not built for isolation. We were designed as co-regulatory beings. The mere presence of others lets us know we’re safe and frees up mental capacity for creative thinking.

Connection to Nature and the Elements

As I write this, millions of acres of public land are at risk or going up for sale in the American West—including land practically right outside my own doorstep—to make room for “infrastructure and housing” (that I’m sure will be affordable rolls eyes).

This isn’t just “empty and difficult to manage” land. It's places that people go to connect with nature and each other. To hike, fish, and hunt. To experience beauty, awe, meaning… even danger. It’s where we go to remember what it is to feel human.

Personally, not to brag, but I live in one of the most beautiful places in the country—maybe even the world. Whenever I feel myself battling with existential dread, walking into the wilderness is a potent and immediate salve for my soul. It’s where I remember who I am, where I find profound meaning in simply existing. I never question who I am or why I’m here when I’m out in the wilderness.

The fact that they want to sell it for profit directly speaks to how disconnected we are from the land: seen as a commodity, there to extract whatever we want from it.

But nature is where we evolved.

We are nature. Though we often forget.

We evolved with the dirt, the stars, the water, the wind, the sun, and the animals. Not just with them, but a part of them, and they a part of us. When we remove ourselves from the only place we actually truly ever really belonged, what do you think is going to happen? When we extract, abuse, and commodify the very land humans have walked and evolved on for hundreds of thousands of years, with no care or stewardship, what do you think is going to happen?

We evolved in nature, extracted ourselves from it, put ourselves in plastic, temperature-controlled, fluorescently-lit boxes, and wonder why we’re suffering.

We once knew the rhythms of nature. Now, we’re clapping on the one and the three, if we’re even able to hear the music at all.

One more thing:

Call your senator and tell them to touch grass.

(As I edited this section, this song came on. You can’t make this shit up)

Time Abundance + Presence

Listen—after researching for the last 4 days, I discovered that to really do this topic justice, it needs to be its own essay (article? piece? post? I’ve been writing on Substack for over a year, and I still don’t know what to call these things lol).

But what I will tell you is something that might devastate you: Hunter-gatherers only work about 20 hours a week. Turns out, in the absence of capitalism and a race to have the highest GDP that no one asked for, humans don’t actually need to work that much.

The 8-hour work day was created during the Industrial Revolution and has very little relevance in the Knowledge Economy. What was originally established to improve working conditions and increase productivity now feels like it has the opposite effect—in fact, I think the Knowledge Economy and the things most people in the Western world create today actually suffer from the 9-5 model. And yet, we keep doing it out of fear of letting go of an old paradigm that worked really well in its prime.

Studies have found that in a typical 8-hour work day, people are only actually productive for 2.5-4 hours. Because, I’ll say it one more time, we are not designed for this. We are not meant to spend our days in front of computers, under fluorescent lights (I really do hate those fluorescent lights lol), hundreds of feet above the earth, in restrictive clothing and even more restricting masks of corporate speak and business lingo.

We’re not meant to have so many open-ended tasks that generate open-ended rewards with delayed feedback and reward. We’re not meant to focus on a single task for hours on end without breaks. And we’re certainly not meant to “multitask,” which is really just rapidly switching from one unrelated task to another.

I don’t want to sound like a lazy crybaby who just doesn’t want to work. To say that we should just all go back to hunting and gathering, even farming, is a farce (although, as a significant amount of the farming population is about to age out, some of us definitely should if we want to avoid the biggest wealth transfer in history in the form of trillions of dollars worth of farmland. ANYWAY). But the way that we work needs major reform. Because giving away our time, our most precious and non-renewable resource, to companies that couldn’t care less whether we live or die, just so that we can be consumers and participate in the economy, all the while AI is taking over most jobs, doesn’t seem to be working well for hardly anyone.

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This is not meant to be a romanticization of the past, but a call to action as we make decisions moving forward. As we progress, can we consider what it actually is that is making us unwell? Can we consider how we’re designed and wired, and work with it, rather than against it, to create solutions, rather than just band-aids?

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Cover photo by Matthieu Paley