Commusings: Culture Is Fast. Evolution Is Slow.

Dear Commune Community,

Why are we so sick? Why are the rates of diabetes, dementia, obesity, and heart disease cresting like tsunami?

One effective way to excavate these questions is to study them through a bio-historical lens.

Let me introduce my distant East African ancestor, Ffej Onsark (my name spelled backwards for those curious). Ffej lived as a hunter-gatherer, like his father, and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, on the plains of what we now call Kenya some 12,000 years ago.

Ffej, like hundreds of generations before him, endured significant environmental discomforts. He was an opportunistic omnivore, eating 800 different plants, seeds, tubers, and occasional wild game, but was also forced to withstand periods of food scarcity. He bore bouts of extreme heat and cold, relying only on his internal thermostat to maintain core temperature homeostasis. He walked and lifted heavy things. He lived communally and yoked with nature, woke with the sun, squatted, and wore minimal shoes.

You could say Ffej lived with the H.I.P.P.I.E.S. (Health Imparting Paleolithic Period Inconvenient Environmental Stressors). Ffej’s way of life was the norm for 200,000 years, and across this unfathomable swath of time, Homo Sapiens evolved, developing adaptive mechanisms in relation to environmental adversity. Nature selected for the traits most apt to foster physiological balance and resilience.

Ffej and I share virtually the same exact biology. In fact, give him a shave, some jeans, and walk him down main street and no one even bats an eye. While our genome may be virtually identical, the cultures in which we live could not be more different.

You and I live in a very different setting than old Ffej. And, of course, we cannot separate who we are from our environment. We live in an ecosystem characterized by the Big MACs (Modern American Conveniences).

On a whim and from the palm of my hand, I can order up any type of ultra-processed foodstuff 365 days per year. I can get a summer squash delivered to my front door within an hour – in the winter! Like most denizens of modernity, I sit sedentary at a desk for eight hours per day (writing this damn musing) in a climate-controlled office. I inhabit a culture where it is the norm for humans to spend a mere 6% of our time outdoors and to live largely alone, often in gated communities, single family homes, or vertical boxes. We enjoy, 24/7, on-demand entertainment, wrap our feet in squishy plastic, and lounge about in cushy armchairs.

Over the past century and a half, our lifestyle has been engineered primarily for ease and convenience. In an evolutionary blink of an eye, culture has hijacked our adaptive mechanisms and rendered them maladaptive. The Big MACs – the overabundance of nutrient-deficient, highly-caloric food, our incessant eating cycle, blue light exposure, temperature neutrality, sedentariness, technology, individualism, and other creature comforts – have up-ended our hard-wrought evolutionary advantages.

Culture is fast. Evolution is slow.

Modernity has created a panoply of evolutionary mismatches that are making us sick. While it’s true that Ffej’s life expectancy was less than half of mine, his abbreviated life span was primarily due to infant mortality, the inability to treat infection, and the spread of communicable diseases. Indeed, modern medicine has made great progress in these respects.

However, no one in Ffej’s tribe had heart disease or diabetes or dementia. Cancer was extremely rare. Fatty liver disease, kidney disease, autoimmune diseases and mental disorders like ADHD, autism, PTSD and others were virtually non-existent.

If Ffej and I are “wearing the same genes,” so to speak, why are we so sick with chronic disease? The answer is simple and obvious. It’s our lifestyle.

Our culture of chronic ease is creating an epidemic of chronic dis-ease.

Here is a smattering of our comfort-induced evolutionary mismatches and their knock-on impacts:
 

• Modernity’s constant feeding cycles hijack the body’s programming to store energy, resulting in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
• Exposure to hormone-disrupting blue light in the evening results in insomnia.
• Sedentariness results in sarcopenia (muscle loss), osteoporosis (bone loss), and obesity.
• Temperature neutrality results in low metabolic rate and decreased resilience.
• Information overwhelm results in distraction, comparison, and an inability to concentrate.
• Digital communication results in polarization and lack of cooperation.
• Rampant individualism results in an epidemic of loneliness.
• Industrial agriculture grows nutrient-depleted food resulting in poor health.
• Indoor living, comfortable shoes, easy chairs, and a divorce from nature results in muscle atrophy, poor immunity, lack of balance, and higher stress levels.

In 2024, we are predominantly choosing the way we die — and not with abundant thoughtfulness.

Of course, humans have always sought some degree of convenience: The mastery of fire opened nature’s pantry, providing a surfeit of calories that led to a doubling of brain size. Humans also developed tools, weapons, and forms of shelter that provided protection from predation. We used animal hides to protect our feet from puncture and frostbite. However, such advancements were typically slow and adaptive. In the last 150 years, however, cultural innovation – generally driven by economics – has jumped the perch of evolution.

There are two ways to solve for these evolutionary mismatches that have seen “survival of the fittest” morph into survival of the sickest. We can mask the symptoms of disease with expensive drugs and attempt technological moonshots to change our genetics in order to adapt to our culture. Or we can choose to “inconvenience” ourselves and re-align our lifestyles with our biology by embracing the protocols of “good stress.”

In my new course, Good Stress, I make the case for the latter, for living a little more like Ffej.

Good Stress outlines how we can self-impose short-term paleolithic stress in order to live in accordance with our engineering.

The course explores the protocols and benefits of fasting, heat and cold therapy, light therapy and resistance training. There are meditations and breathwork, a guide to eating “stressed” plants, and tips for rewilding. I even prescribe a social fitness regimen.

Sign up here for free and discover the transformational benefits of doing hard things.

In love, include me,
Jeff