In the last decade, I have spent most of my time in “wellness” spaces. Retreats, resorts, yoga trainings, high-end hotels with spa therapies and so forth.
The most common thing I noticed is the facade of wellness that exists within these spaces. We tailor everything to the high-paying guest, give them a memorable experience, but then that guest returns right back into their old routines and habits that keep disconnecting them from themselves.
And best yet, in these wellness spaces, is the staff who surely isn’t practicing, who isn’t given the opportunity to be treated with the same standards of wellness the space is promoting to its guests.
This is where humanity puzzles me most.
Questions like *how are you feeling?* and *who are you, really?* are the most difficult to answer.
People simply don’t know what to express. Maybe there’s a numbness that keeps the answer out of reach. Or maybe we’ve been buried by the to-do lists of “who we are,” as identity long ago has shifted from who we are to really, what it is that we do instead.
Is it society that breeds this? Does anyone truly put in the effort to be fully present anymore? And what does presence even mean now, when we’re always under pressure to outsource our lives? It’s exhausting to live in the current world. A world optimized for content to bring you validation, to recognize your work, and establish your ranking of success in your environment.
Forget privacy. Privacy has a price tag now, and you’re told to sell yours for better algorithm engagement. Most of us lean in and comply, turning an eye away from what we’re normalizing just to fit in.
I recently shared some thoughts on social media about how striving for an image, instead of having an experience, has diluted our sense of wonder, of being, of simply existing.
Our attention span is sold to the highest bidder. It perpetuates an ongoing dopamine addiction that keeps humanity influenced and desensitized; less capable of critical thinking, less capable of holding an authentic opinion.
In a time of connectivity and information, we’ve become more isolated and lonelier than ever. It makes me question what this is actually doing to our biology.
Vedic teachings talk about three paths to disease. One refers specifically to the misuse of our senses. I wonder if this is exactly the tool being used to make a society more subordinate. The biological imbalance rising because our organism can no longer sustain the demand technology places on it, pulling attention away from ourselves and into whatever keeps us tethered to our immediate environment.
A friend recently responded to my wanting to meet in person instead of texting with: “Who meets nowadays?”
That’s a frightening reality to be adapting to, where expressing yourself feels safer behind a screen, where the nonverbal cues disappear, where a conversation flattens into whatever the reader’s state of mind decides to make of it. As someone who’s spent most of her life observing and studying human behavior, that question left me speechless. Does this friend actually believe meeting another human being has gone out of style? Or have we become so used to relating this way that meeting someone in person now feels unnecessary?
I recently listened to a podcast with couples therapist Esther Perel, where she described her first encounter with a man in a relationship with an AI chatbot.
A relationship. With a chatbot!
My mind immediately tried to reason it out. Does it feel safe? Is it because AI is always available? Because it doesn’t ask anything of you? Because it has no needs of its own? What is actually being fulfilled here?
The real question is what part of being human starts to disappear when we get used to relating this way.
Is this how we lose our humanity? Not all at once, but the moment we stop relying on our senses to experience the world, and start relying almost entirely on the stories our mind tells us instead? Maybe the satisfaction of climbing Mount Everest stops living in the climb, the exhaustion, the awe, the thin air, the transformation only direct experience can give you instead, it starts living in a photograph of the summit. Information replaces experience. Familiarity replaces wonder.
This is where I go back to something I tested almost a decade ago,while working at a production company, during the early days of VR gaming. We were testing Oculus headsets, and the strange part wasn’t the graphics. It was what happened in my body when I put on the mask, held a controller that vibrated in my hand, put on the headphones, and watched a rollercoaster climb the tracks in front of my eyes. The sound, the vibration already mimicking a bodily experience, and before the drop even hit, I was screaming, throwing my body sideways, bracing, as if I were actually on that rollercoaster. My body produced the sensations of something that was not happening.
If a headset and a pair of vibrating handles could convince my body it was falling through space, what does a photograph convince us of? A text message? A conversation with a chatbot trained to respond exactly the way we need it to, in the exact moment we need it?
The nervous system doesn’t seem to require truth to believe something is happening to it. It only requires enough signal.
That’s what unsettles me most. If a simulated sensation can fool this body so convincingly for a rollercoaster, a simulated connection can fool it for a relationship. A simulated presence can eventually convince us for an entire life.
What We Know, and What We Ought to Keep Questioning
That’s not a hypothetical. It is already happening and it’s already showing up in the numbers. We live in a culture where loneliness and social isolation are reaching massive proportions, and the ability to connect has been slowly atrophying underneath all the signals we keep feeding it. Are we forgetting how to register real connection, even when it’s right in front of us?
A recent study (Wild, Willroth, & English, 2026, *Social interactions and loneliness in daily life: A study of younger adults and cognitively diverse older adults*, Developmental Psychology) named this social asymmetry. People’s felt loneliness frequently doesn’t match how much social contact they’re actually getting. Someone can be in near-constant interaction with others and still feel unseen. Someone else can spend most of the day alone and feel completely at peace. The gap was most pronounced in older adults with mild cognitive impairment. More social contact didn’t mean less loneliness. Being around people and feeling connected turned out to require its own skill, separate from simply not being alone, and it seems to be the one we’re losing fastest.
Now with the new generations, it starts early. Esther Perel has talked about how basic human interaction in early childhood shapes a person’s entire social development. The sense of curiosity, playfulness, mystery. All of it is getting stripped out as tech becomes our default way of communicating. More kids are sitting alone in front of screens instead of playing outside with each other. Attention deficit is rising. Neurodevelopmental imbalances are shaping more young teens than ever.
And it shows up in how we even approach each other as adults. An analysis titled “Risk Aversion and Dating” by Alexander (@DatePsych), published on Date Psychology, found that roughly 45% of men between ages 18 and 25 have never approached a woman in person. This is a striking shift in one of our most basic forms of human initiation, slowly turning into a social vestige.
What I keep noticing is that connection now mostly develops through illusory attachment. This is the low-effort consistency of simply texting someone. It creates a kind of dopamine dependability, training the nervous system to expect a steady stream of superficial interaction. It’s the same signal-over-truth pattern as the rollercoaster. Enough signal, no substance and it might explain how people end up in relationships with AI bots. It creates dependency without real accountability, without real depth either. Staying vulnerable behind a screen protects you from the actual depth, and the actual risk, of human connection.
How Does Trust Play a Role in Human Interactions?
Protection comes at a cost, and I think it’s trust. The younger generation isn’t dating, interacting, engaging in authentic behavior the way it once did because nowadays people form entire impressions of each other through social media profiles and AI before they ever meet, filing one another away as “cringe” or giving off “ick” before a real exchange even happens. Even language has started reshaping itself around what gets a person accepted. Sharing your life stories with someone is highly dependent of your intuitive ability to trust another and feel safe to express, and this is what is missing when the genuine in-person exchange is lost. Trust itself has been misplaced. We hand it blindly to authority figures, algorithms, and institutions, while genuine connection with another person gets treated like something to be wary of.
Curiosity has gone with it too, and so has our attention span. We’ve trained ourselves on quick information in and out, and now anything slower just feels unbearable and registers as boredom.
Pema Chödrön teaches that boredom is often the moment just before we meet ourselves. Instead of reaching for distraction, we can get curious: what does this boredom actually feel like in the body? What is the mind trying to escape? How many of us actually stay long enough to find out?
I think about this when it comes to neurodivergence as well. The body-mind compensates for the conditions of its environment. If that’s true, a lot of what gets diagnosed is a product of the environment, and the responsibility for fixing, repairing, regulating sits with that environment, not only with the individual living in it. Meanwhile, to keep profiting from technology, we’ve become complacent about who and what gets our attention. More people get told to medicate for ADHD, while the very systems producing the “problem” keep profiting from it.
How Do We Remember What Makes Us Human?
Constant digital stimulation is taking us further from our bodies, further from our own nature, to a place where we might stop finding our way back. Being human is a sensory experience, and we’re being trained to misuse our senses until we comply into subordination.
Kids need imagination. How does a kid imagine anything when every image is already handed to them on a screen? How does a neuroplastic brain respond and grow when play has become a video game instead of a body moving through space?
So what is the essence of humanity, underneath all of this?
We’re biologically wired to recognize beauty. That’s essential to the human experience. It’s part of what separates us from other mammals on this planet. It’s what teaches us compassion, connection, depth, value. The ability to feel joy without needing to possess it, awe without attachment, curiosity for its own sake. That’s where humanity actually thrives. And slowly, that mastery is being stripped from us through the lack of expression in everyday life. Look at the architecture around us, the minimalism, the color palettes… all of it going bland, flat, lifeless.
We have been drilled to consistently ask How do we optimize ourselves?
But in truth, this is the wrong question, as human nature is already optimized. The real question is how we remember what makes us human, and return to that design. Return to nonverbal ques in communication, in trusting our intuition, presence with what is rather than the physical isolation and mental overstimulation. External optimization was built for machines to function in a linear efficient fashion. We are not linear. We were never meant to run efficiently. We were meant to feel, process, take in the world through our senses and experience beauty.
The Five Elements as a Practice of Belonging
This felt sense is the one optimization that keeps asking us to recognize what already lives in us, and its coded into the sensory and motor systems we develop through the elements. It’s our most direct experience as we are made from the same material as this Planet Earth itself.
Prithvi, or earth element is grounding and stable, the felt sense of weight, of having somewhere solid to stand when everything else feels like it’s shifting. Jala or Water is about emotion and adaptability. A feeling allowed to move through the body the way water moves, without resistance, without needing to explain itself. Tejas or Fire is transformation and vitality, the heat underneath every real change a person goes through, the actual burning down of an old pattern to make room for something else. It is about digestion on every level, from the physical to the energetic. Vayu or Air is the wind, breath and connection, the most basic exchange two living things can share, happening constantly and mostly unnoticed until we slow down enough to feel it as intimacy instead of biology. It is the life force, the current that carries movement, information, direction. Akasha or Space is the silence in awareness, the thing we medicate away the fastest, the first thing we fill with a screen the second it opens. But space is where perception sharpens. It’s the container that everything else needs in order to be understood, recognized, processed, awakened.
The Movement toward remembrence
As we drift further from our own biology, and with it from each other, the question becomes: what part of being human do we want to keep alive in our cellular intelligence, for the people who come after us?
I don’t think we’re losing our humanity overnight. I think we’re slowly forgetting how to practice it.
Moving forward is about what we’re willing to remember and what qualities we, collectively, refuse to lose.
Personally humanity without wonder or curiosity, or our ability to bond with another is not a future I would like to entertain would you?
Ayurveda was born the moment humans left the forest and built civilizations. Coincidently this is also the moment disease entered the picture, and people, children, and animals started dying from the distance they’d put between themselves and their own nature. Ayurveda came as a manual for staying human, a way to notice when we’ve drifted, and how to come back.
We’re at a point in history where we have to ask ourselves how we actually want to move forward. How to hold onto what makes us human while everything around us keeps offering to trade it for convenience. How to practice depth, and real emotional connection, in a world that keeps optimizing it away.
I don’t fully know what that looks like yet. Maybe it starts as small as a room, a circle, a handful of people willing to build something together. What I do know is that this needs to become a conscious movement. Communities of people who refuse to settle for technology as a replacement for each other.
But I keep coming back to the same question my friend asked me, the one that started all of this: who meets nowadays?
Maybe the more honest question is who’s still willing to.
