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.
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.