Our anti-human world
The pace of change is crushing humanity
Most weekdays, my workout begins with a seven-kilometre run on lonely country roads lined with rolling pastures of tall green cornstalks swaying with the wind and fields of cows grazing on dewy morning grass.
Two kilometres into my running route, I pass a long gravel driveway. It leads to a white-panelled house that sits alone on the crest of a small hill surrounded by fields. The farmer who lives in that house, Mr. Rea, is in his late seventies. He rises early each day, as he has for decades, and works with the tireless relent a farmer earns his living by.
One morning this summer, Mr. Rea was at the bottom of his driveway with a wheelbarrow of gravel doing patchwork. He was leaning on a shovel catching his breath when I ran into sight. I looked at him, smiled widely, and jovially shouted “Morning!”
Like the caged blades of an oscillating fan, his eyes locked with mine and his head slowly swivelled with me as I ran. His laser eyes looked me over with some combination of disdain and amusement and, after what felt like minutes, he jestfully replied, “You must have lots of extra energy, do ya.”
“Yes sir!” I said with a grin.
For the rest of my run, I thought about the generation Mr. Rea was from and how it had shaped him. Before he spoke, I already knew what he thought of running through the slanted angle of the suntanned wrinkles stacked on his forehead and the way the skin was pinched on the outside of his swirling turquoise eyes.
The idea of running for the sake of it and expending energy without doing purposeful work is nonsensical to him. He works hard when there is work to be done and rests when it’s time to rest.
His seemingly terse reaction had a kind honesty and charismatic bluntness to it. With little more than the expressions on his face and a few words, Mr. Rea had planted a thought in my head: You and I live on the same earth but we come from different worlds.
~~~
The world is like it’s never been before.
The human experience we are living through today is the furthest removed it has ever been from the preceding 300,000 years of our species’ existence.1
To get a snapshot of how different our lives are from all of the generations before ours, let’s transport back in time 100 years, 0.03% of human existence, to the 1920s…
Students still used tablets made of slate.
The first crossword puzzle was published.
Regular radio broadcasts were rising in popularity enabling people, for the first time, to tune into news and entertainment from around the world.
The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which produced time clocks, became IBM. They didn’t create the world's first mass-produced computer until 1953, just 71 years ago. It weighed 5,400 pounds.2
Many grocery stores were mom-and-pop shops, much smaller and more limited in selection than what we have today. Butchers and produce vendors operated separately. Frozen foods and sliced bread were hot inventions. Six-packs of Coca-Cola hit the shelves.3
Cars were becoming more prevalent, and dangerous, but horses still did much of our transportation and agriculture work.
If you transported a middle-aged farmer from 1924 to 2024, their understanding of how the world works would crumble. If they didn’t end up in an insane asylum, convinced that the world was possessed by magic or God or some other preternatural force, they might explore innovations of the last century. They’d put down the first ever produced crossword puzzle and scroll Instagram. They’d ditch the radio and watch Netflix. They’d skip the local butcher shop and SkipTheDishes instead.
~~~
Innovation has pried our humanness from our fingertips. And you don’t need to go as far back as 100 years to see the impacts of technological transformation.
I’m 25. My grandparents were born in the mid-1930s and my parents in the mid-1960s.
It wasn’t until my grandfather was my age in the 1950s that TVs and washing machines entered homes in the masses.4 Cell phones didn’t become popular until he was in his mid-sixties.
My parent’s generation, born in a time where they adapted to technologies as they came, have felt the biggest change of all: from Rolodex to the Contacts app, typewriter to computer, paper maps to Google Maps, vinyl to Spotify, filing cabinets to the Cloud, encyclopedias to Wikipedia, libraries to electronic repositories, travel agents to travel apps, branch banking to mobile money sending, talking on phones to tapping on phones.
Everything we treat as normal today—wifi, driving, smartphones, earning a living with our minds instead of our bodies, being globally jealous over all the lives we aren’t living on social media, cheap unlimited access to hyper-palatable foods that only exist due to food engineering, unfettered access to drugs, alcohol, pornography, and news—is extremely modern and unnatural to the human experience 100 years ago, let alone 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 years ago when our circuitry was in its developmental stages.
The pace of change and how it’s altered our humanness is staggering.
We act like what we are living in is normal to the human experience. But it’s not. The time we are in is so different and we are so unprepared to handle it.
~~~
With each innovation and technology we accepted, we made a tradeoff.
In exchange for lives of convenience, comfort, and ease and the elimination of boredom, we sacrificed that which fully utilizes our uniquely human traits: interactions with others and the activities, largely rooted in work and effort, that make us feel human.
But I’m optimistic. On the fringes, people are reclaiming their humanness.
Cooking and chatting with their families over an aromatic stovetop instead of ordering out.
Deleting social media in rebellion of endless comparisons and false but unavoidable feelings of inadequacy.5
Travelling to take in the culture and talk to the locals without the compulsion to portray how lavish their lifestyle is through cool-captioned Instagram posts.
Opting to order their coffee from the counter with a cheery smile and a friendly hello rather than behind the blue glow of a smartphone screen. Then repeating these neighborly interactions at the local library and farmer’s market.
Ditching the news for its lack of usefulness and actionability and focusing instead on the people we pass and the communities that envelop us.
Abstaining from the mindnumbing grips of the Internet, the poison of modern food, and the despair of drugs to experience life in its raw sober beauty.
Modernity and all the technology that has come with it should have a place in our lives. But that place should be one of strict utility, not one that possesses our hearts and minds and eliminates the actions and interactions that make us feel human.
With love,
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I’m trying to wrap my brain around you being 25. You are much wiser than 25. Loved the flow and message of this piece, Jack.
Flowier as Tommy says 😁
What an insightful and compelling journey you took us on with this one Jack. Your thoughts interspersed throughout are - like many others have said - wise beyond your years.
And this especially resonated - “Ditching the news for its lack of usefulness and actionability and focusing instead on the people we pass and the communities that envelop us.”
🙏