True health can exist inside modern life

We just need to understand how: an op-ed

Jun 27, 2026

Every day in elementary school, I opened a brown paper bag packed with food my family had grown or made themselves, and every day I tried to trade it away.

A homegrown carrot cut carefully into tiny spears, a sandwich on bread my mother baked, with jam from our own trees and peanut butter from the peanuts grown in the basement.

I would have handed over the entire miraculous, from-scratch lunch for a single Hostess Twinkie. Nobody ever took the deal. Nobody wanted a homegrown carrot. You cannot trade real food to a kid who has tasted the manufactured kind. The manufactured kind always wins.

I grew up on an urban farm before that was ever cool. We had chickens and rabbits. My father hunted. My mom brought tote bags to the grocery store long before plastic became the enemy.

It was, more or less, 1942 in my house. And I hated it. I wanted the Twinkie. I wanted to be normal, by which I meant I wanted to live like everyone else, inside the bright, packaged, convenient world assembling itself just past our garden and chickens.

It took me about thirty years and the near-total collapse of my own life to understand what I’d been handed: a childhood built around real things. We had real seasons, real hunger, and real rest. A life lived on the body’s terms, before I knew there was any other kind.

By my early thirties, I’d gotten exactly what I wanted. I had long left the garden behind. I worked in technology and risk management for global wellness companies (and yes, I see it now, the joke writes itself: I spent my days managing risk for organizations in the business of wellbeing while quietly running my own into the ground).

I had the title. The salary. The office. The packaged, convenient life. I had finally traded the carrot for the Twinkie, and the Twinkie, it turned out, was hollow.

What makes this strange is that I, of all people, should have seen it coming. I’d spent my young adulthood as an athlete. I was competitive, drawn to adrenaline sports, and the kind of person who read physiology papers for fun, just to understand fuel and recovery.

I knew, in my own body, the difference between the pain you push through and the pain that meant stop. I knew that recovery wasn’t the absence of training but part of it. In sport, I listened to my body like it was the only coach that mattered, because it was.

And then, in the rest of my life, I unlearned all of it. I overrode the signals I’d spent years learning to read. Tired became something to caffeinate. Hungry became something to schedule around a meeting.

The body that had been my finest instrument became an inconvenience to manage and a thing to keep running long enough to hit the next deadline.

Then the bottom fell out. Burnout, the real kind, the kind that doesn’t resolve over a long weekend. And in the same month, my dog died.

Somewhere in that deep grief, I understood I had been mourning my loss of drive for a long time already. I had lost my passion for the work I’d built my whole identity around, and I didn’t really notice.

The things I’d been so sure were important turned out to be a set I’d been handed and never questioned. I had been plugged into something, living a life that looked right from the outside and felt like static from the inside.

So I undid it. All of it. I went to therapy. I sold my car. I surfed every day. I dog-sat other people’s dogs because I wasn’t ready for my own.

And I moved abroad. Not to find myself on a beach in some tidy way, but to dismantle, deliberately, the belief that a life had to mean a salary, an office, and a title.

I knew, the way you know things in your body before you can argue them, that there was another way to live. I had grown up inside it. I just had to find my way back.

This is the part where you might expect me to tell you I moved to a farm.

I didn’t. And that’s the whole point of what I want to tell you.

Because here is what I finally understood, with the farm behind me and the burnout behind me and enough quiet, at last, to think: modern life is not the enemy. The garden was never going to be the answer. I’d hated the garden. But neither was the Twinkie.

What broke me wasn’t technology, cities, or convenience. It was surrender.

It was handing over the whole system and letting it tell me, on its schedule, when to wake and eat and work and stop, until I couldn’t hear my own body asking for anything different.

Consider the smallest version of this, the one you’re probably doing tonight.

You lie in bed in the dark, and the only light in the room is the phone an inch from your face. Your brain does not see a phone. It sees light, bright and blue-tinged, arriving out of the dark, and it draws the only conclusion a few hundred thousand years of evolution prepared it to draw: morning.

Dawn. Time to begin.

So it does the responsible thing. It pulls back the melatonin, nudges the body toward alert, and cancels your night. Your phone at midnight is a tiny, confusing sunrise, and your body believes it.

That is the whole problem in miniature: a manufactured signal overriding a real one. And once you start looking, it’s everywhere.

The body is always asking.

For light in the morning and dark at night. For movement. For food at a reasonable hour instead of at all of them. For the company of other people. For a moment, at the end of the day, to come down.

For most of human history, those requests were answered automatically — the sun set, the work stopped, the village gathered, the dark fell. Nobody had to schedule rest; the day enforced it.

The genius of modern life, and its cost, is that it answers none of those requests on its own. The light never falls. The work never stops. The food is always available. The feed never ends.

Take stress. The body’s stress response is meant to be rhythmic. Up in the morning to get you moving, down at night to let you rest. It was built for a world where the day had an ending.

Now there is no ending.

No sundown to signal the descent, no closed office, no off switch. So the thing that was supposed to rise and fall just stays up, humming, all day and into the night. We call it burnout and treat it as a personal failing. A lot of it is simply a body that was never permitted to come down.

Or take loneliness, which is the one I’m most careful about, because I can’t hand you a clean mechanism for it. But it’s hard not to notice the same shape.

Connection used to have a rhythm and a place: the shared meal at an hour, the gathering after work, the season that drew people together. We replaced it with something technically constant that somehow never lands.

A feed of contact with no presence, no timing, no end. You can be in touch with hundreds of people and not have been with a single one.

The request the body is making isn’t for more contact. It’s for the kind that has a when and a where.

And here is the part that makes all of this hopeful. There is no single right answer for any of it. I learned this first as an athlete and again, more rigorously, in my training: we are each an experiment of one.

Your ideal eating window, your light, your sleep, your tolerance for stress and stimulation; none of it matches the person next to you exactly. The principles are shared, but the parameters are personal.

Which means no app, no protocol, no influencer, and no expert can hand you your answer. The only instrument tuned precisely to you is you.

But listening inward is not the same as doing whatever you feel like.

The body’s signals can be hijacked. Sugar feels like a craving. The feed feels like a need. Not every want is a true signal, and learning to tell the difference is most of the work. Timing and attention are levers, not cures; they won’t fix everything, and they don’t replace real medicine for real disease.

What they do is return you to the conversation your body has been trying to have with you all along.

This is where modern life, the thing I’d blamed, turns out to be the gift.

We have tools our grandparents couldn’t have dreamed of: data, science, the ability to see our own patterns. A glucose monitor doesn’t replace the wisdom of listening to your body. At its best, it teaches you to hear it again.

The point of all that information is not to outsource yourself to it forever. It’s to use it until you can feel what it was showing you, and then to need it a little less. The tools in service of the signal, not in place of it.

The how is smaller than you'd think, and it isn't a protocol. It's giving the day back its edges. Let the morning be bright and the night be dark. Step outside early, dim the screen that's pretending to be dawn.

Allow the day to end: build the descent the office no longer builds for you.

Eat while the sun is still up, more often than not. Find the connection that has a when and a where. The meal at a dedicated hour, the face instead of the feed.

None of this requires leaving your life. It requires noticing where the signal got buried, and putting one real thing back where the manufactured one took its place.

I’m writing this from a life I built on purpose, on the far side of the undoing.

I surf in the mornings. I eat while it’s still light. My days have an ending again.

I didn’t go off-grid. I didn’t go analog. I kept the tools, the science, the freedom I bought when I sold the car and got on the plane. And somewhere in there I became, at last, the kid who wanted the carrot.

That’s the whole thing, really. I think we all grew up wanting the Twinkie and the bright, packaged, manufactured version of a life. The whole world wanted it and now we have it; I wanted it badly enough to spend a decade getting it.

But health was the carrot the entire time. The real thing nobody would trade for, because they’d never been taught what it was worth. You don’t have to leave modern life to get it back. You just have to get quiet enough to remember you wanted it, and to hear your body, which has been trying to tell you, this whole time, exactly what it needs.

What did you grow up with that you didn't value until it was gone, and have you found your way back to it?

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