How We Got Here: Chapter 1

You’re Not Broken. You’re Living in a Weird Time. 

8 minute read

 A few weeks ago I caught myself standing in my kitchen eating dinner while simultaneously scrolling Instagram, half-listening to a podcast, and replying to a text message that absolutely could’ve waited until tomorrow. I had one of those moments where you suddenly become fully aware of what you’re doing in real time, almost like your brain briefly zooms out and goes:
“Dude… what am I doing?”

This kind of behavior has become so common now that most people barely notice it anymore. People wake up exhausted, drink caffeine just to feel functional, stare at screens all day, eat lunch while answering emails, listen to podcasts about reducing stress while multitasking six other things at the same time, scroll social media while watching Netflix, then finally climb into bed exhausted only to realize their brain suddenly refuses to shut off the second the stimulation stops.

I’m not saying any of this like I’ve escaped it either. Half the reason this series exists is because I kept catching myself participating in things that felt genuinely absurd once I paid attention to them. Sometimes I’ll be scrolling Instagram and a health and fitness "guru" pops up explaining how terrible social media is for your attention span… while asking me to follow him for more content about dopamine addiction.

What really messes with me is that I’m posting online too because that’s literally part of running a modern business now. Everybody knows social media is probably not great for our brains at this point, but modern life also requires participating in it. Businesses need it. Creators need it. Brands need it. Even staying socially connected feels tied to it now.

Sometimes modern life feels like an environment optimized for everything except actual people.

Something about the way we’re living feels deeply strange lately. Not in a “society is collapsing tomorrow” kind of way. More in a quiet:
“Have we optimized life a little too much?”
kind of way.

Modern life has become unbelievably efficient. You can answer work emails, doomscroll social media, order dinner, buy a supplement stack for “optimal recovery,” and watch thirty-second videos engineered by algorithms to hold your attention for as long as possible without standing up from the couch for three hours.

Every inconvenience humanity spent thousands of years trying to eliminate has slowly disappeared.

Yet somehow everybody feels like they have no time.

That contradiction has bothered me for years because getting time back was supposedly the whole point of all this. Faster transportation. Instant communication. Online shopping. Food delivery. AI assistants. Productivity systems. Fifteen different apps designed to “streamline” your life. We were told all of this efficiency would make life easier and give people more freedom.

Instead it feels like we mostly used the efficiency to cram more things into every available second of the day.

More stimulation.
More noise.
More work.
More scrolling.
More consumption.

We saved time, and then immediately spent it.

What’s become completely normalized is how casually people talk about being exhausted, anxious, burnt out, unable to focus, unable to sleep, constantly inflamed, hormonally wrecked, or emotionally numb like it’s just adulthood now. Somebody says they got four hours of sleep, survived entirely on caffeine, stared at a screen for twelve hours, and feel like their nervous system is collapsing, and everybody else just nods like:
“Yeah man same.”

Is that really how this is supposed to be?

Somewhere along the way, being “busy” even became a weird status symbol. People wear exhaustion almost like proof that they’re important or productive. Honestly? My goal is basically the opposite now. I don’t want to feel constantly busy. I want to have the things I need, do meaningful work, spend time with people I care about, and still feel present enough to enjoy my life while I’m living it.

That’s one of the biggest things I’ve realized from coaching people. Most people think their struggles exist entirely inside themselves. They think they’re failing because they lack discipline or motivation or mental toughness. Some people convince themselves they just lost the genetic lottery and feeling terrible is permanently built into who they are now.

Obviously genetics matter. Still, I think modern people massively underestimate how much their environment shapes the way those genetics express themselves over time. Humans do not exist separately from their environment, and the modern environment is intense in ways I don’t think we’ve fully processed yet.

Kids are developing health issues that barely existed a generation or two ago. Adults in their thirties are exhausted all the time. Attention spans feel cooked. Anxiety feels everywhere. People are simultaneously overfed and undernourished. Human genetics did not fundamentally change in the last fifty years.

So it’s probably worth asking what did.

Before anybody interprets this as me saying modern life is entirely bad, that’s obviously not what I mean. Modern medicine is incredible. Technology is incredible. Air conditioning is incredible — especially when you live in Florida and walking to your mailbox in July feels like entering a sauna with mosquitoes. Being able to watch an NBA playoff game while flying across the country is objectively insane in the best way possible. I also very much enjoy not dying from infections that would’ve killed somebody in 1840.

Every system creates tradeoffs, and I’m not sure we’ve fully processed the tradeoffs of modern life yet because everything changed so quickly. Humans went from relatively slow, physical, community-centered living to hyper-convenient, indoor, digitally saturated life in what is basically the blink of an eye historically speaking. Sometimes I genuinely wonder if our brains are still trying to catch up to the environment we created around ourselves.

That’s really what this series is about. Not wellness culture. Not optimization hacks. Not pretending the answer is becoming some biohacking cyborg measuring your sleep score every morning.

Half the “biohacking” industry is basically just people rediscovering things we probably needed the entire time. Sunlight. Sleep. Walking. Movement. Eating real food. Going outside. Somehow we turned “go for a walk” into a premium wellness strategy.

This series is more about stepping back and asking how we got here. How did people become so disconnected from basic human rhythms? Why does stillness suddenly feel uncomfortable? Why are chronic health issues exploding while we simultaneously have more health information than ever before?

The deeper I’ve gotten into health, the more I realized a lot of these outcomes are not random. They’re connected to incentives, industries, technologies, corporate interests, cultural shifts, and systems optimizing for profit, efficiency, stimulation, engagement, and endless growth — not necessarily long-term human flourishing.

Once you notice some of these patterns, it becomes difficult to unsee them.

Sometimes I’ll be watching TV and see three commercials back-to-back that perfectly summarize modern life. First a fast food commercial. Then a weight loss drug commercial. Then a beer commercial. 

Like...What are we doing here?

Sell the problem.
Then sell the solution.
Then sell another problem.

Meanwhile everybody’s attention is being pulled in fifteen different directions all day long. Food companies want you buying more food. Social media companies want you scrolling longer. News companies want you emotionally activated enough to keep watching. Every app on your phone feels like it’s fighting over tiny pieces of your brain all day long.

I also think we’ve been a little tricked by the phrase “social media.” It made entire generations feel like they were connecting socially when a lot of the time they were really just consuming carefully curated versions of other people’s lives. Watching somebody talk into a camera for thirty seconds is not the same thing as real connection. That’s not the same thing as sitting across from your buddies at dinner laughing so hard somebody almost spits their drink out.

At some point modern life stopped feeling like a place people lived and started feeling like a giant machine trying to keep everybody consuming things forever.

To me, trying to blame some evil mastermind for all of this is too lazy. This is what happens when systems continuously optimize for short-term growth, convenience, profit, and engagement without anybody seriously stopping to ask:
“Hey… what is this actually doing to people over time?”

One of the things that frustrates me most is how often we’re told all of this optimization and efficiency is “better for society,” while most normal people feel more exhausted, disconnected, distracted, anxious, and pressed for time than ever before. A lot of the rewards from these systems seem to flow upward while everybody else gets sold convenience as the prize.

Systems move toward what they reward.

Over enough years, those systems start shaping human behavior whether people realize it or not.

I still catch myself feeding into it constantly too. I still scroll too much. I still multitask too much. Sitting quietly for too long sometimes feels weird now, which is probably not a great sign considering people survived most of history without notifications vibrating in their pockets every six minutes.

Awareness has helped me a lot though. Not perfection. Not throwing my phone into the ocean and disappearing into the mountains somewhere (although some days that seems like a great option). Just paying closer attention to what genuinely makes me feel better versus what simply keeps me distracted.

Most of the things that help me feel human again are embarrassingly simple. Going for walks without my phone sometimes. Eating meals without a screen in front of me. Sleeping more consistently. Moving my body regularly. Going to a sporting event and feeling thousands of people collectively lose their minds over the same moment. Going to a bachelor party and spending an entire weekend laughing with friends in real life instead of reacting to each other’s Instagram stories. Letting myself get bored once in awhile instead of immediately filling every empty second with stimulation.

Simple stuff.

That honestly might be part of the problem. Modern life became so loud, complicated, optimized, marketed, and overstimulating that we started overlooking the basic things that make people feel good in the first place.

So what do we actually do about it?

I don’t think the answer is becoming anti-technology or pretending we can completely escape modern life. Most of us still have jobs, responsibilities, businesses, bills, families, and group chats that somehow receive 47 messages while we’re in the shower.

I do think we can become more aware of the systems competing for our attention and start being more intentional about how we spend our time, money, energy, and focus.

Go for a walk without listening to anything sometimes.
Eat one meal without your phone nearby.
Call somebody instead of just liking their story.
Read something longer than a caption.
Move your body because it feels good, not just to optimize yourself.
Let yourself get bored once in awhile.
Spend time with actual human beings in actual real life.

Not because silence or simplicity magically fixes everything.

I genuinely think part of what happened to us is that we built a world so focused on efficiency that we accidentally trained ourselves to fill every empty second with more input, more noise, more work, more distraction, and more consumption.

We saved time, and then immediately spent it.

Somewhere along the way, we got better at optimizing life and worse at living it.

Next week, I want to talk about the realization that really sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place: what happened when major tobacco companies started buying some of the biggest food corporations in America during the 1980s — and why I think that changed modern food far more than most people realize.

Stay Connected

I’m Coach Andy, founder of Protean Fitness. Through coaching, writing, and content creation, I explore the connection between modern life, movement, nutrition, stress, recovery, and long-term health.

This series is my attempt to make sense of the modern health world, the systems shaping our habits, and the things that actually help people feel better again.

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If you’re interested in working together or learning more about Protean Fitness, you can visit ProteanFitness.com