You Are What You Eat

From psychedelic microdosing to turmeric coffees to Vipassana silent meditation retreats to Mindfulness and a vast array of yoga versions, to infrared saunas, it seems as though we are not just enjoying but overwhelmed from a preponderance of “wellness.” “We’re living in a ‘wellness epidemic,’” Is nowdays quite usual to pop in fancy cafés were you are expected to sip custom drinks with names like “Intellectual Humility,” a thick liquid containing “long stalk cistance,” described as a “Mongolian extract for libido boost.”

This wellness and mindfulness epidemic likely is a reaction to the uncertainty and restlessness of our times, a cognitive dissonance cocktail we undertake at the begining of our days just to read the news. The amoral and dubious business models of Facebook and it´s several companies and Google produce a pulp of low-substance, easy-to-consume and false information, pseudo-media with no nutritional value. Feelingless algorithms worsen the outcome, incentivized to feed us a diet consisting of, as quote by a former Facebook engineer, “endless sugar and fat.”

Contemporary users and consumers of information are spinning in a funhouse that’s not fun at all. Our modern equation is looping controlless instead of spiraling, to say... our snake is somehow eating its excreted tail. You could even call this epoch “trans-modern”; and I believe its best exemplified by the worst and embarrasing eerily oracular Trump tweet or the secrete, steady but terrifying march of Chinese artificial surveillance and intelligence.

In our modern society words no necesary have to mean things, and this is a perfect oportunity for authoritarianism. All over the world, nasty people (men and women) have taken advantage of the blurring of fiction and facts. They’ve bought a ticket for a front row seat to watch the whole world burn: Real reality TV.

Therefore we need to ask ourselves if we are well...and I dare to say that we are not well. Or even “well.” The Internet is breaking apart humans.

Taking into account many metrics, we’re better off than we’ve been ever before; women are making economic gains, we’re wiping out poverty,life expectancy is high, child mortality is low, , and so are literacy and sanitation getting better. But these global improvements do little to calm the feeling that we’ve gone off the board: #metoo, Brexit, Russian hacks, being shot in schools, children separated from their parents at borders, children and the spectacle of it all broadcasted on social media. Most people are enjoying better quality-of-life and more longevity, but we can’t evade the feeling adn sensation that we’re stuck in a collective bad dream, a collective nightmare where the only positive though is that we’re in it together.

Waking up find this American president, and the influence of his stupidity to the wholde world, this wave of abundant toxic news environment and this very ackward time is particularly hard on the psyche, specially for those of us suffering from anxiety and depression . A cast of volatile beings, narcissistic individuals who don’t read books, rest at their fingertips the power to kill us all instantly. And they offer the sad show of arguing over whose button is bigger. On Twitter. Social media realty...

Could the fact of being in it all together be enough to stave off the desire to quit this life? There are invisible strings that connect us that we can’t see or fathom. “If humanity ever captures the energies of love, it will be the second time in history that it will have discovered fire,” a quote by Reverend Michael Curry at the Royal Wedding, itself the union of a colonial figurehead to a descendent of slaves. Only love did that.

I have never felt cooler as when I felt like Anthony Bourdain, as an explorer of the great, uncharted landmass of my life and the eater of a scorpion deep-fried in Chiang Mai or a humble Icelandic hot dog, no turmeric lattes in sight.

Bourdain insisted that we get both spiritual and physical sustenance (and of course substance) from our consumption, whether it is prose or cheap noodles . He recomend us to inhabit the moment rather than escape it, no matter how messy or unfamiliar. Bourdain’s said: “You must change your life.” And: “You are what you eat, so eat beyond what you are.”