this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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We are not built to drink milk beyond infancy, yet we do. We are not built to cross oceans in a few hours, wake up in one time zone and fall asleep in another, yet we do. We are not built to eat ice cream on a scorching summer afternoon or preserve food for months and experience flavors from far away, yet we do.
The argument that something is "unnatural" has always struck me as incomplete, because humanity's defining trait is that we are not merely shaped by nature, we reshape our relationship with it. We build tools, cultures, institutions, and technologies that allow us to transcend many of the constraints our ancestors lived under.
That does not mean every new capability is wise or healthy. Some inventions enrich our lives; others burden us in ways we only understand decades later. But the fact that something exceeds the limits of our evolutionary past is not, by itself, an argument against it.
Human flourishing has always depended less on the number of people we can reach and more on the depth of the few relationships that truly matter. I miss having many Facebook friends (some I have never physically met) and seeing their life updates every once in a while, because now we all think Facebook is no longer cool.
Fair points, though, maybe more so in the abstract. To be fair, when I go try and fix or adjust or tweak something, I do always tell myself "we're humans, we change our environment to suit our needs."
Though I think you're excusing burnout and BS social media hustle culture when some people simply don't want to do that. If you want to post everything on IG, go for it. But people shouldn't feel shame for falling into the lower right square. It's a decision some people make consciously, and others less so. Which, for me, feels like loss. We had this nice thing where it was great to see what my friends from 20 years ago were up to. And now I can't participate in it because it harvests my data, and I would tell them the same. The infrastructure found us, friction-free. And when it turned out that pipes were to suck us dry, the gap was real, and the previous infrastructure not up to the task of casually serving up information. Now it (barely) takes work to say hello to someone and has to be meaningful again. People should be allowed to be OK with that.
Which is to say that my evolution argument is that we have, within a generation, taxed the limits of a part of us that hasn't gradually worked up to a universal higher capacity. Better weapons have extinguished genetic lines with no regard for adaptation or evolutionary traits other than what country someone was born into. Given 30 generations, we don't physically adapt to having bombs dropped on us. We aren't selecting for terminally online people to reproduce more and be more successful in the species, either. Maybe we are and I'm so far out of it that I can't tell.