Nathaniel Perrin

[Image Credit](https://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/style-photography?mediatype=photography)

Medicine is rooted in the notion of *vis medicatrix naturae*. Nature is the healer. We merely aid or inhibit its process.

An organism possesses an internal equilibrium which exists in relation to an external equilibrium of its environment. Given water of a suitable composition and temperature, a fish may survive with an internal equilibrium through metabolic, circulatory, and other physiological systems.

Disease is the disruption of such internal equilibrium, whether from internal or external causes.

Medicine is the corrective process which seeks to re-establish this homeostasis of the organism.

For the history of our species, humanity has existed with a relative homeostasis compatible with many different climates and biomes, often through the medicinal adjustments of clothing and shelter for more extreme weather conditions.

However this relative environmental stability has come under threat in recent centuries with the advent of industrial technologies and its ecological impacts.

Many attribute simple phenomena changes such as regional temperature fluctuations to this through the rhetoric of climate change. Perhaps a helpful phrase but unfortunately excessively reductionistic.

Consideration of ecological change should not be restricted to temperature or vague symbology of pollution. Prudence requires more targeted investigation of the causes and effects industrial civilization makes upon human ecology and consequently physiology.

One such pollutative phenomenon which is only beginning to gain widespread notice is the effect of plastics and its radical metabolic impacts on animal and human populations. There are others to be sure, but these are not to be documented here.

Humans now suffer internal disequilibrium as part of the fruits of industrialism and man's war on both God and nature. The external environment has been poisoned against us by our own machinations.

Unfortunately, the instruments of power do not lie with us to holistically and cohesively revert external ecologies to a more suitable equilibrium.

This means that medicine has acquired in our time an additional responsibility: to protect our internal equilibrium against the poisons invading us from industrial society.

We must counter-act the damages wrought upon our bodies by sedentary lifestyles, the screens, the pharmaceuticals, the various electrical and chemical alterations flooding through us, the stressors baked into modern life.

To return to pre-industrial cortisol baselines, we unfortunately do require the use of medication.

This I view as the first object of the science of nootropics. To correct and counteract the technological miasma pervading us and slowly corrupting and degenerating the human organism. Rather than a transhumanist project, it should fundamentally be a humanist one.

We cannot in total prevent industrial society from poisoning our bodies, but we can certainly mitigate it. That is where the fight begins. The fight for life, vitality.

Brief thoughts on self-medication

[Daniel Boone](https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/daniel-boone-american-pioneer-an-illustrated-scene-gm1286950756-383303148)

### Neural Sociology

One way to consider the current state of affairs is this. The average human being exists as a neuron within a larger cranial complex, one whose neural networks are the vehicle for the transfer of two fundamental entities: financial assets and political consent. Both could fall under umbrella labels such as capital or consumerism, but they are also irreducible to each other.

Just as electricity operates as the currency of exchange and communication within the physiology of the brain, so too do money and ideology operate as two corollary vehicles of flux in this parallel model of network exchange. Neurons respond to stimuli. With regard to consumerism, marketing and sales are the technical disciplines directed to stimulate the human node for the sake of eliciting very precise responses of the purchase, the upsell, and the product referral. Some marketing and sales teams are sophisticated enough that they have been able to remold some human nodes as self-stimulating (i.e. addicted) through phone brain and other means. This is how the consumerist sciences can optimize the human nodes. To minimize the financial stimulus (ad spend) required to produce the maximal amount of transferred financial assets. 

What must also be considered are the network effects of consumerism. How various nodes are better positioned to influence others into the same kind of consumerist responsiveness. Which is why the consumerist sciences place considerable weight on securing access to influencer nodes as they can have considerable, even exponential downstream effects.

The techniques and processes of the science of material consumerism have been applied with relative success to its sister phenomenon: political consumerism.

A pure democratic system could be said to also operate on this neural model where localized nodes receive ideological stimulus and secrete or effuse ideological output which manifests occasionally in votes but more often in the politics that lies outside the election cycle through discourse, leveraging, and other means. This is why centralized democracy in both monopolistic and oligopolistic flavors tends to instantiate and cultivate ideology factories that aim toward the near constant if not omnipresent informing of political neurons. 

Thus the procedure of political information depends on the twofold goal of (1) determining what the political neuron should think about this given here-and-now event as well as (2) cultivating the right kind of responsivity that the neuron will be able to produce the desired kind of opinion in response to future events without external stimulus. More so than even the case in material consumerism, the node should believe themselves the originator of these opinions, interpretations, and ideologies, or at the very least incapable of framing the situation in such a way so as to realize how their thoughts are merely the product of systems of mass consent manufacturing.

Both neural models may be decentralized in that no intent, will, or intelligence is attempting to guide the patterns of stimuli and response across the network.

There may also exist models in which certain agents may have directed ends or goals they wish to meet and possess the tools with which to slowly and gradually transform the stimuli-response patterns of material and political consumers toward certain aligned patterns. This may be called social engineering. To enact social engineering on entire human populations requires both considerable technological, financial, and political resources and is a painstakingly slow and often erroneous evolutionary progression. 

What further complicates understanding Intelligent Design in social engineering is that even if a few clusters of agents are pulling the levers so to speak, their goals are often at odds with one another so they may be engaged in tactical neural warfare, or they may simply be incompetent at influencing outcomes so the changes they gradually introduce into the social neural ecosystem is not aligned with their goals or objectives.

One could go on to consider how demography, jurisprudence, religion, and other factors influence the behavior of human nodes, but this is a general lay of the land.

The end result of a neural system where human intent is at play is that the human being is framed as a clinical subject to be completely and fully enclosed within a purely controlled environment. Each node's material and political choices are controlled by upstream factors and levers to produce the desired outcomes for whoever's jurisdiction they fall under. A covert feudalism where lords operate from shadows to leverage mass populations to enact the goals of the few.

It is a world where the masses are subject to the machinations of graph theory. Consensus is coaxed if not coerced. And much of this would have been impossible merely a century ago, but with the advent of many technologies of "colossalism", it is now possible to centrally manage or distribute control both over a wider range of human entities and at an exponentially deeper level than would have been possible before. 

Where before it would have required immense effort to track the geographic region and financial resources of even a few individuals, now even the eyeball movements of entire populations can be safely computed and tracked. Generative AI provides immense opportunities for enshrouding each individual within an abundance of custom-tailored content to meld and shape the clinical subject as desired.

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### Responses to Totalistic Consumerism

This model is not novel. It can be described as post-human or anti-human. For it completely eschews human agency. But one should also wonder, if there are such systems of social engineering at play, would they not also be directed toward whittling down and reducing human agency as much as it can? Receptors are more useful than agents. The degree to which such machinery is able to modify the extent or grip of the human will is a question beyond consideration here.

One thing of material consideration here is the trajectory of such a reshaped neurology. What does it converge to?

This is perhaps best described as the hyperreal.

What in our lifetimes we have taken to be authoritative disbursers of knowledge may become so radically and pervasively (and clumsily) manipulated, that many register a certain degree of mistrust toward any of these instruments of media in both the material and political flavors of consumerism. And while many of us are used to being lied to through such instruments, there are few things as offputting as being lied to poorly. And when the lies upcrank in frequency, it certainly does not mend matters.

And one resoundingly common instrument in this supposed program of manipulation is the Internet.

There will always be many either without the sense or will to recognize the ideological zoos they have been born and bred in. Others may see the zoo for what it is but acquiesce for they understand that significant opportunities for advancement often accompany participating in the exhibition. A dolphin that dances for the masters will get more fish than the grump in the corner. These cynics buy in and do the circus show for the rewards it entails. If needed, forgetting what they give up in the process. They engage in the proxy wars of the hyperreal as the various conumerist-politico wings engage in their endless neural dance.

A third class may also exist of those who feel on some instinctive level the dissonance between the hyperreal of social engineering and the other real world which existed before the Internet. They may sense something is off, but their dopamine triggers are so deeply ensnared and entangled within a neural system, they lack the necessary wherewithal to do anything about it. They remain passive, despondent like animals consigned to experimentation. The roll of dice to decide how things turn out for them.

As often happens, people will not necessarily fall under one single class but have a certain mixture of the different ones to varying degree.

What is likely to happen is the continued growth and perhaps ascension of a fourth class: the offline.

The offline can be described as those who live primarily analog lifestyles that are disconnected the neural machinery of social engineering.

Their senses are not constantly bombarded with ads or digital content, so they have no need to resist or fight the urges and impulses a phone may implant in them.

They are not subscribed to the everyday cycle of news outrage, so their cortisol levels are not inflammed to the same extent the enplugged may be with the ongoing stream of news events.

What an offline lifestyle looks like may vary. Those old enough to be pre-boomer may still persist in this lifestyle (though even these are often subject to network television, even when they do not use the Internet). Those who live in the rural recesses of society often have a greater propensity to live in this degree of disconnection. We have always had the Amish, embedded within American jurisdiction but disconnected from it.

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### The Offliner

Utopianism emerges in waves, ever since the foundings of America. Here we have a new wave. One digital symptom of this is the effusive growth in the DIY and homesteader genres across many regions and both genders. As digital cynicism deepens so too does a desire for an "off the grid" lifestyle.

But desire does not always produce change. Many dreams are craved for, and few are realized. And in fact pro-offliner content remains still an instrument of the digital. It can be a psychological facade by which the influencers of the genre broadcast how offline they are through online means. And those who spend hours reading DIY content or basking in homesteader images remain engaged in a form of digital consumerism rather than developing the habits by which they become offliners.

To be offline is not to be completely disconnected from the Internet in total. But rather to have one's agency unimpaired and unimpacted by the dual tweezers of smartphone and Internet. They do not subconsciously crave the tingle of haptic feedback or social media viewership. They use the tool without the tool using them.

This community will become more self-aware and well-defined as time goes on.

Perhaps it entails hamlets and communes disconnected from the Internet. Intertribal communication conducted through physical mail and private couriers. Encylopedias and manuals in physical rather than digital form. A return of artisanal apprenticeship for metallurgy, carpentry, etc. The boundary between analogue and digital is not firmly fixed (where does the fax reside?), and it will likely be up to each respective community to develop and ordain the proper restrictions on technology as the Amish do.

In the next decade or two, we will most likely see an upsurge in the popularity of the "offliner" as a concept in the digital sphere. Homestead literature will abound. New forms of courtship that are decidedly post-dating, a return perhaps to practical marriage in response to the current digital burnout. Starter kits and perhaps financing plans for those seeking to go offline. These are not trends that will take over society wholesale, but rather subgroups among the more conservative-minded who want to reject the digital politics of global Internet cosmopolitanism. Those enamored with recapturing the frontier aesthetic as it existed in the American grain. 

This of course presuming that regulatory or other action does not directly or indirectly block these neurons from cutting themselves out of the network equation.

There are aspects of this offliner future that reflect trends already underway across the West.

First, a disinterest in anything happening outside the physical community or region, much in the same way of a medieval peasant. Events happening halfway across the world will hold no interest for the offline. The more remote or vast an election, the more likely they are to say, "Who cares?"

This self-enclosure would also entail a greater distrust of the outsider. Not just in the physical presence of visitors but an epistemic xenophobia as we have already seen in the Covid era. Intense skepticism toward knowledge or expertise presented by centralized governmental or scientific bodies, and perhaps a general rejection of "scientific truths" that have been deemed valid for at least a century. Instead, the offliners may depend on local "clerics". Those who live with them who are deemed learned and have expressed their opinion on certain manners. Much in the way medieval ecclesiastical servants would have functioned, though without even a Rome to pay lip service to. Congregationally-approved experts then, and the politics that all entails.

And because these systems will invariably evolve into tribal political entities, federal and state governments may proactively block these developments, but that remains to be seen. There is only so much one can do to force consumer to be plugged in before there are compulsory pleasure pods.

Again, the offliner way of life will not predominate American society. This is merely the emergence of dual lifestyles. The hyperreal urbanite versus the post-digital offliner. The two will likely live in relative antagonism toward each other. The offliner will seek independence from a cosmopolitan system which depends in part on the comprehensive totality of its enforcement. In David Fischer's view, this was the fundamental ideological divide underneath the Civil War. But this all remains to be seen.

The offliner will be a new kind of person, a novel atavism. What more this could look like would need to be the subject of future investigation and speculation.




A future is offline


Self-improvement is the bread and butter of the American culture. A cultural strand that can be traced from our contemporary vloggers, through business executive self-help books, back through corny early twentieth century pamphlets, all the way to Ben Franklin's autobiography. To understand the American spirit, one must grapple with the entrepreneurial drive that underpins our culture, in both action and talk. The American mentality is tied up in a firm, concomitant belief that we are volitional selfs with both self-defining power as well as some capacity to will our destiny. This belief is not without its consequences, only one of which I will consider here.

To define self-improvement is difficult. It is an energy, a mindset. The onus is on you the individual to bring yourself forward, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. By sufficient application of willpower, many things (if not all things) are possible.

There is much to laud in such an optimistic temperament. But it is not without its dangers.

And few writers name this danger better than Byung Chul-Han who writes frequently on the burnout and depression endemic to the systems of self-improvement culture. In *Psychopolitics* particularly, he articulates a rather illuminating point on this topic.

Traditional Marxist theory is built on what can loosely be described as the employer-employee dichotomy. How the employer oppresses the work through arduous, menial, alientating labor. A story many are familiar with.

Byung Chul-Han believes that this analysis has become obsolete in reference to contemporary office culture. For the source of motivation to be more productive is no longer rooted in the boss but in ourselves. It is no longer so universally the case that the taskmaster applies the whip to the workers in order to make them more productive, we apply the whip to ourselves. The professional class is one that has automated oppression and alientation by casting such conditions upon ourselves through cultural drives.

One dominant cultural narrative of our day, the "you can do it" rhetoric, has inculcated a new impetus, particularly in millennials on down, that the rat race can be won if you apply enough grit and elbow grease. And if you don't win, well it's your fault.

In this model, bosses don't need to be over-demanding to get more work out of their employees. Rather the employees, driven on by a urgent mixture of guilt and lust for opportunity, feel the need to put in overtime or become better "contributors" so that they can be noticed, move up the ladder, be successful, etc. Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company.

And for the guilt-ridden, there is no limit of what can be asked of yourself. So long as you live in the gap between where you are and where you want to be (which is almost the entirely of our lives), there is always more to be done.

Thus we burn ourselves out in a manic frenzy to do enough so that we can succeed. Because the sky's the limit. If you don't get what you want, after all, it's only you to blame.

And as cultural streams often go, this mindset is not limited to the career sphere. It bleeds downstream, into other pools of life.

Self-improvement culture has slowly percolated outward to become, in the minds of some, a universally applicable dictum to all spheres of life. Nothing should escape the optimization mindset. A lot of this I believe is a bequeathment of Web 2.0, a necessary development out of the envy and desire that the new glut of luxury imagery produces. There are other contributors to this development, to be sure, but this particular swathe of tooling has certainly accelerated this particular evolution in our collective psychology.

One of the most evident cases of the expansion of self-improvement culture is its application to the body. Bodybuilding is deeply tied in with the self-improvement ethos, so much so, that the vast majority of traditional self-improvement programs are almost anchored in gym-going as the necessary condition to improve one's life. The discourse is rooted in the gym.

Between 2000 and 2019, gym memberships nearly doubled in the US from 32.8 to 64.2 million. In the next five years, fitness industry spending is expected to increase 171.54%.

These are extreme growth numbers, especially as the United States population is an aging one, and 60% of gym membership holders are below the age of 35.

It is speculation to tie these two as correlation, but let us suppose they are related. How are they then interconnected?

One evident reason is body image. This is readily observable in the public gyms of the past few years. All the selfies, the self-filming, the live-streaming, etc. Attention and validation. Broadcasting the body and its subjection to improvement.

There is one direction of our culture that reduces your value to your visually-presented physical condition. Because that is one facet that is presentable and communicable through photography and videography. It is possible to get traction through Instagram or TikTok through the immediate impression of the visual condition of your body. Physical athletics is one the most highly valuated forms of achievement now because it is immediately verifiable. By contrast, the most accomplished writer or mathematician in the world could hardly gain any such traction through such media focal points by the presentation of their accomplishments. The media shapes the message. And in this case the message is the person, i.e. the body. The medium can only convey the physical, and so the motivations of most people become increasingly and more stringently materially driven.

Hence the irony of the prized abdominal six-pack for men. A meretricious moniker of athleticism and strength. Although its achievement depends on self-starvation and often abandonment of muscle mass, cultural aesthetics have deemed it a laurel of strength. It is strange because of how unnatural it is. One need only read the anorexic routines male celebrities undergo to reach this look. And contrast that to the masculinity of older stars such as Bert Reynolds or Sean Connery. Hairy chests, firm guts, and strong men. Bulk often accompanies strength, but bulk is inadmissible in Hollywood imagery for a strongman starting in the mid 90s. (An interesting contrast is Robert De Niro in *Taxi Driver*. His body fat certainly dips sub twelve percent for that role, but his emaciation is presented as freakish rather than as beautiful or glorifiable.)

What it comes down to is that fat and hair are visual deterrents that subtract from conventional photographic appeal. Rather, we are told the most masculine men are those with baby-smooth chests and washboard tummies. Even when those who possess these feature may unfortunately tend to act more like fops or dandies than true masculine types.

(There is of course the female half of the equation, but I feel the point on body image sufficiently made here, the dots are easy to connect.)

In any case, this self-improvement ethos, in its increasing urgency over the years, has extended its reach to fitness, education, finances, real-estate investment, etc. You aren't enough if you aren't constantly improving. How are you convincing the shareholders of your psyche that you will be better next quarter, how you will do more. Convince them of your growth and your earnings.

And nearly universally in these mantras, it is driven purely by material factors.

The purported end goal of self-improvement is greater accessibility to wealth, power, sex, attention, and the other usual suspects which populate the common motivators for a material life.

In fact, this is baked into the very etymology of improvement which stems from the Latin term *prode* which translates as useful or profitable.

Self-improvement is to render yourself more useful for yourself and your goals.

---

That may sound all well and good to most.

But it is a fundamentally nihilist position.

More than just the egoism it entails, self-improvement is soulless.

Some may criticize the oppressive, hostile, enslaving nature of self-improvement culture. I will criticize it for its motives and results.

Self-improvement as a whole, because it is driven by material motives, is fundamentally boring. It produces boring people. Men and women, both.

The exclusive focus on externalities has also led to a neglect, if not outright abandonment, of the interior self.

Hence the general observation that some people use the gym as a replacement for having a personality. And it should not be too controversial to say the same goes for those chasing money, cars, bedroom delights, and other elements of the hedonistic package.

None of these self-improvement tips and tricks point to the cultivation of the soul. The reading of books, spiritual wonder, travel sans tourism, or anything that would make you a deeper, more interesting person. The kind of experinces which would make you capable of having complex emotions to wrestle through.

As a counterpoint, one may see transcendental meditation as a very popular practice which leads to internal cultivation. 

But frankly meditation is better proof of the exact opposite. In its consumerist forms, meditation is rooted in the ablution and destruction of thought. It is a denial of self, and this is not a good thing. By perverting important breathing habits to stifle and silence the thoughts that spark in the quiet stillness. 

Meditation becomes a crutch by which many seek to bypass internal development. To avoid thinking at all costs, even when such self-reflection may be beneficial. This is not internal cultivation, though it may be parried around as such.

Although it is boasted as a practice to root yourself, rid yourself of toxicity, or other slogans, meditation is a repeated practice to blot out and/or silence the inner self. It is directed toward an annihilation of the internal self.

That is not to say meditation cannot be helpful for those who spend too long wrestling in the interior corridors of their consciousness, but for those whose problems and thoughts are no more surreptitious than a child's, then there is an issue. We are meant to be more than blank mirrors, doing nothing more than reflecting what mass culture tells us to buy or look like.

The self-improvement package is based on the external aesthetics of consumerism, spoon-fed by marketing companies and other glitzy media. Tingling your dopamine with those fun sensations which keep you simple, and are purportedly supposed to keep you happy. Surface without depth. You become one of the Eloi.

But the truth is no amount of gym-time, work-time, bed-time, wealth, or even fame can ever stop you from being a thoroughly boring person.

What makes us distinctly human is our interior landscapes, where the mind and heart mesh in curious patterns, and we have thoughts and experiences that deviate from the monolithic norm handed down to us by centralized zeitgeists.

What self-improvement suffocates and leaves entirely untended are precisely these gardening tools of the soul: literature, philosophy, lepidopterology, and other quirky hobbies whether tactile or intellectual. The accumulation of experiences that can redeem your existence on the ledger of time.

The growth of the interior, that which is not reducible to material usefulness, that which is not presentable or communicable through social media, with the rare exception of those who have creatively subverted that medium.


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One should stand against self-improvement in the sense that is foisted on us as some one-size-fits-all *modus operandi* for encountering the world and ourselves.

Physical fitness, nutrition, and hard work all play their role. But they should never come at the cost of the cultivation of the soul. The increasing of wisdom and knowledge, and the development of true character. While our culture may eschew any sort of internal virtue in favor of all that which can be demonstrated externally, the truest people, and the most interesting ones, are those who hold internal convictions and values generated from within, rather than spoon-fed from without.

How boredom and leisure without a panoply of distractions can lead to true internal growth. How releasing the gas pedal of your career and going off into the wilderness by yourself may bring you to a spiritual epiphany that an over-optimized schedule could never otherwise experience?

Perhaps a new injunction is required to force people to be bored more often, to reject consumerist travel, to rejuvenate the life of the mind. A spiritual or intellectual diet as sparse and ascetic as the physical ones some nutritionists force on themselves.

That is one essential step to retrieving meaning in life and rejecting the nihilism that percolates in our cultural moment.

Admittedly, none of what has been said here clearly defines what are soul-cultivating habits versus those that are not. Aside from some blustery gestures to books. That ought be discussed elsewhere. This was merely to open the door, and to understand the ways in which self-improvement can lead to self-annihilation, and the dangers therein.


A new lens for the cultivation of the soul

Against self-improvement

Media supersaturation and a few effects on young folks

Brief thoughts on self-medication

A future is offline

Against self-improvement

Tired before their time