Health in the Age of Technofeudalism
And an excerpt from the book I am writing
Thank you.
Coming back from a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat—arguably the best way to escape the chaos of the past three weeks—I was met with your thoughtful comments and suggestions on my last poll. They truly filled my heart with joy.
Thank you.
Catching up on global headlines, I found myself wondering if I should do a quick U-turn and go back to being a monk for 4 years.
Imagine we all did nothing all at once together?
Nothing would cause less harm.
Sometimes, nothing beats something.
We’ve already done everything.
(By the way you could listen to these essays and take me with you on a drive or walk by downloading the Substack app)
Join The Nothing Revolution
So I’ve been doing more nothing, keeping the meditation alive day and night, going to the gym, working like mad on my book which I will share a snippet of with you today, and now doing health mentoring work that I love. Life is beautiful. I am immersed in it.Yet, I keep falling into a dark spiral. While there is always more I can do to tend to my own wounds, the heaviness I feel is not related to my circumstances.
The heaviness is in the world. The heat is rising. The suffering is exponential. America has beef with all its neighbors and most of its allies. Israel is on a six front war, with Egypt and Jordan getting weary of these antics. Everyone is adjusting, and even the best of us realize that we are hanging by a thread.
There is a harshness to the soil of humanity right now.
It feels dry af, man.
I isolate, I search for weed, or porn, or sugar, or Instagram, or anything to numb the painful existence.
So today, I explore with you
where we are in terms of collective health
what our potential could be in this new Maga-death era we’ve entered, and
what the two things that keep me from despair are.
In the meantime, I am hosting a four-part free online health workshop series every other Thursday, starting March 6th at 6pm PST.
I will cover:
The new scientific health paradox about 1st and 2nd gen immigrants who work in science, tech or engineering fields.
How to navigate a toxic environment and how it impacts your health
How to excavate identity through intergenerational trauma techniques.
How trauma relates to health behaviors and habits and how to break the cycle
How to measure health to have meaningful comparisons with your own baseline rather than comparing to others.
Conversations, Exercises and Demonstrations!
Please share this with that friend of yours that isolates rather than asks for help. This information saves the lives of many.
Register to get the recordings as well, or even better, join us and be part of the discussion!
Ok now let’s get into todays topic.
Where was I?
Oh yes…
I was saying that we are entering…
A Strange Sick Techno World
The trumpets play a sad song, bids farewell to good ol’ corporate oligarchy (the devil you know, and love to hate).
They welcome a new era of billionaire oligarchy (the devil you thought you knew). As Yanis Varoufakis puts it, “Capitalism is dead, and what we have now, Technofeudalism, is way worse”. His 2-year-old book is eerily on the nose.
I can’t comment on RFK’s plan for health just yet, although access to alternative medicine, healthier food, and more non-biased scientific studies all make perfect sense. Believing it however…is a big fucking pill to swallow!
He did eat that McDonald’s Happy Meal on Air Force One after all, so even if RFK Jr’s intentions are as great as he says they are, it will certainly be an uphill battle for him. #justsaying
Jokes aside, the President’s love for highly processed foods is not the only obstacle. If HHS follows suite with DOGE (and the President’s overall policy preferences on cutting costs on services), then we may be talking about a much darker healthcare reality where people are not just very sick, but they can’t access their meds or doctors either.
Let’s hope for more yoga and meditation yes, but also more affordable and universal coverage because that is still what most people need.
Some may say, why not believe in him? He may not know Jackshit about healthcare, but how much worse can it get?
To these people I say, Touche!
Indeed, the new Health and Human Services Head is up against a long sad history of terrible policies that have caused much suffering to the American people.
Let’s discuss that today, and take a pulse check of where we are when it comes to our collective health in America.
The following is an excerpt from the book I’m currently researching and writing a proposal for under the current title: Healthy Humans Sick Society.
For any other thoughts on the title or the excerpt below, please reply to this email or leave a comment and start a discussion about it.
How the Industrial Revolution Century Shaped our Health
Over the last century, the Western world has engineered an exciting yet strange new reality. While we have inherited a world of magnificent marvels, it is also laden with buried burdens. We live in an era of technological comfort, yet we lack the fundamental rhythms of human health.
We have to ask ourselves:
Why are anxiety, addiction, and depression at an all-time high?
Why are more people burning out and quitting their jobs more than ever before?
How have we become so isolated?
Why are family relationships so fractured by politics?
How have metabolic diseases become our biggest predators?
Why are more children committing suicide now than at any other time before?
Why are our bodies rebelling against us with autoimmune diseases?
Even more puzzling—why are we getting sicker in an age where we have all the tools to remain healthy? Perhaps the question is no longer: ‘How can we cure cancer?’ but rather: ‘Why is cancer more prevalent than ever before?’
My friend Paul asked a beautiful question after caretaking for a family member that had Non-Hodkin’s lymphoma:
"Is it just a coincidence that, in an age where we are obsessed with ‘Growth’ , the defining disease of our time—cancer—is a pathological, unchecked growth of cells that spirals out of control?”.
Powerful question.
Here are some more:
🔥 Is it also a coincidence that inflammation is now the biggest culprit behind chronic diseases, just as our climate heats up and employees burn out?
📊 Is it possible that our bodies serve as dashboards, reflecting the dysfunctions of our society?
⚠️ Could our bodies be warning us about what our minds refuse to acknowledge?
The current evidence says yes, the mind and the body are two sides to the same coin, and if they are disconnected by distractions then we start developing diseases.
A majority of these diseases are spiraling out of our internal and generational anxieties and work-related stress.
These “Jobs” Politicians Talk About, Suck…
In 2021, a decade after I left medicine, 334,000 physicians and other clinicians left the workforce due to retirement, burnout, and pandemic-related stress. This is not just a medical personnel issue or a COVID-related problem—it’s a societal crisis. You and I are not alone in our struggles with modern ailments largely propagated by stress and stress-related diseases.
While our parents might argue that work has always been stressful, the modern work experience is a completely different ballgame. According to McKinsey’s 2023 report, 51% of the global workforce is either barely managing, drowning in, or overwhelmed by work demands. That is more than half of all jobs in the world!
Gallup’s 2022 survey revealed that 17% of the U.S. workforce is actively disengaged, and this trend is rising. Industries most affected by severe mental health issues include government, transportation, technology, healthcare, higher education, law, and finance.
According to a 2023 survey by Mason Frank and Salesforce, the tech industry has a burnout rate of 44% among full-time employees, with 42% considering quitting their jobs!
Think about that for a second: The people running our governments, the doctors meant to heal us, the tech engineers holding some of the most coveted jobs, the drivers and pilots ensuring our safety, the visionary entrepreneurs we idolize, and the legal professionals who are supposed to protect us—are all deeply suffering.
Check that. They are dying. Although the media is focused on the CEO that got murdered, 19 other CEOs died on the job in 2024, many in their 40s.
What is happening? Why are we generating all these diseases in an era where we have unprecedented resources to prevent them?
Then there is the ‘Wellness’ Illusion, sold for an additional $5.7Tn dollars
Instead of addressing these pressing questions, society offers us quick fixes: a pill for obesity, a smoothie for IBS, a yoga retreat for those lingering feelings of angst. The $5.7 trillion wellness industry convinces us that we feel this way because we are not doing enough push-ups, drinking enough probiotics, or sweating in enough saunas.
Both healthcare and wellness industries have become bottomless wells of expensive “to-dos,” propagated by a narrative that convinces us we must navigate this world alone. These industries thrive on the same thought patterns that keep us trapped in cycles of stress and sickness. What we fail to realize is that our trauma turns into beliefs, those beliefs turn into thoughts, which turn into behaviors, which solidify into habits, and ultimately manifest as diseases and poor health outcomes.
The 2024 survey by the American Psychiatric Association found that 43% of
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