The Return To The Body Will Not Be Gentle
The long arc of reclaiming ourselves
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I once raged so hard and for so long that I terrified our nanny. The kids were away at school and I was doing a virtual rage ritual led by Mia Magik, along with the entire Exposure Therapy community. The topic of the month was “Deep Community” and I booked Mia because I wanted our group to understand exactly what kind of togetherness people were seeking in today’s world.
Rage rituals are special and niche, but if you can do one with a good guide, I guarantee you will locate a well of emotion inside of you that you didn’t know existed. There is nothing more thrilling than discovering a new terrain within yourself, alive and pulsating, wholly untouched by your conscious mind.
No matter how much I warned my nanny, though, nothing could have prepared her for what she heard through the walls of my home office that day. But the least prepared person was me. I felt my body in a way I’ve never felt it before, and once you have that knowing of embodied anger, of fear, of innocence, of pain, of power, your body cannot un-know it.
Rage rituals are just one of the many experiential portals available to us in today’s body culture. Muscle mania, food-ified beauty products, immersive fragrances, calf-first colostrum and glazed skin are all so pleasing to the senses you could eat them. The promise of the mind-gut connection is a new frontier that feels like manifest destiny. The exploration of female sexuality and power through Venus rituals and goddess play is borderline intoxicating.
We are gripping and swallowing and banging ourselves into a new experience of the body.
But just like Venus and her cohort - and most other beautiful things for that matter - body culture has a breathtakingly violent side. And until you understand that violence, you cannot really understand what form of the body we are trying to (re)claim… or what it will take to get there.
People are coming into their bodies at the exact same time as two other phenomena: moral lag and technological acceleration. We lack the new moral frameworks to discern ‘good’ bodies from ‘bad’, and yet the onslaught of body-enhancing/ monitoring/ hacking technologies does not stop. The body is changing so fast and we cannot even say how.
Yes we all want to go back to inhabiting our physical selves, but we are probably only halfway through the long arc of cultural progress that will get us there.
The first half was about waking up.
The second half will be about locking down.
Years Without Our Bodies
Our most common metaphors of the body - machine, vessel, art - often do more to obscure the truth than to reveal it.
The truest metaphor for many is a prison. And our new technologies of the body feel like prisonbreaks.
Women getting HRT and not losing years to the hell of peri/menopause like we watched our mothers suffer through.
GLP-1 users no longer disappearing themselves from photos, gatherings and public life because of the stigma and shame of a nonconforming body.
New psychedelic therapies with the potential to treat people of lifelong anxiety and depression.
When we break out of that prison, we get our time back.
We are about to see the downstream effects of people getting 10+ years of their lives returned to them, not just in lifespan but in healthspan. Huge populations of people are about to reclaim large periods of life that are often lost or hidden. That has to count for something. It will be silent and likely immeasurable, but the impact will still be massive.
I have personally experienced the life-changing nature of all of these therapies, and they have brought me back into a life that I was locked out of before. This is a common refrain in Reddit threads, large scale studies and my team’s own research. Put aside the disclaimers and stigmas cloaked in concern, and you will see that all of these medicines restore a fundamental part of the human experience.
What I've learned in our cultural research over the past decade is that people in our society are systemically severed from their own bodies. We are constantly separated from our physical selves. There is no limit to the ideas and norms that will intermediate our ability to feel ourselves.
Throw a stone into any direction of history and I will show you a system that thrived on separating people from their physical selves. There is nobody spared from that violence, regardless of gender, age, or race. The violence is universal, and it makes us complicit in its perpetuation either on each other or ourselves.
In How To Change Your Mind, a documentary based on Michael Pollan’s research into psychedelics, we see a cancer patient overcome her crippling fear and lovingly accept death for the first time. We see trauma survivors finally be able to sleep at night and others who are cured of their OCD. We see, firsthand, the profound potential of psychedelics to create peace between the body and the mind.
And while Pollan doesn’t overtly point fingers, he does make it clear that psychedelics threaten hierarchical control, religious or otherwise, because they offer a direct line to sacred bodily experiences, unmediated by priests or doctrines. Institutions have not historically reacted kindly to such direct access.
We should remember our own heritage. The rise of monotheism and today’s major Abrahamic religions took centuries-long traditions of somatic spirituality through dance, sex, ritual, trance, and physical sensation - religions that placed us directly in the cyclical cradle of nature - and replaced them with notions of sin and unworthiness. Women’s bodies especially, with their menstruation, childbirth, and sensuality, were demonized. The very nature of the body and our direct experience of it was cast in shadow.
This Abrahamic splitting of the mind and body has cost us more than we can hope to ever measure. Lymphatic massages and red light therapy feel like laughable attempts to recapture the feeling of an ancient body that doesn’t know where it ends and the universe begins.
If history is any guide, perhaps what really threatens today’s dissenters is the fear that people who inhabit their bodies again - whether it be through hormones, weight loss, or mental health - will no longer do the dirty work of repressing themselves. There are a lot of social structures, religions and industries that rely on people keeping themselves small.
Gabor Maté tells us that “the essence of trauma is the disconnection from the self.” To be human, at its most fundamental level, is to have an unmediated connection to the purest experience of ourselves. When we are disconnected from our true selves and emotions, we are plagued with a trauma that kills us from the inside out.
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This is the sickness we are all trying to recover from on some level.
Across ancient cultures, there’s a recurring myth about the reflection that must not be disturbed. Narcissus and the pond. Seven years bad luck for a broken mirror. The undead whose reflections don’t show. When you break that reflection you risk your life, because what these stories and superstitions all tell us is that the soul requires coherence. Self knowledge is sacred and fragile. When you distort that reflection, you lose the innermost part of yourself.
We are remembering an old truth. But this return to the body is unfolding in strange company, alongside a commercial and technological explosion that treats the body less like a home and more like a product.
Birth of the Body
Culture is never simple and none of this is happening in a vacuum. It is happening at the exact moment our bodies are becoming hyper-visible, monitored, and increasingly medicalized. Walk into any Sephora and you will see products for problems you didn’t know existed, from armpit hydration masks to SPF hair mist.
The surface area of our understanding has only blown up in the past 30 years. We went from germ theory in the 1860s, to relatively few discoveries of the body for the next hundred odd years, and then boom! From the late 1990s to today we’ve seen an explosion of discoveries and advancements ranging from diet culture, neutraceuticals and yoga to DNA, sleep science, seed oils and peptides.
In some ways, the body has only just arrived, and we are only beginning to make sense of what it means to us.
The wellness wild west, the warring factions of medicine, the scientific quest to live longer vs. the religious impulse to lionize death... these are not the symptoms of a mature understanding of the body. They are the symptoms of a body culture in its infancy.
And all of this chaos lives within the consumer. The contradictions and opportunities perfectly overlap. Don't mistake this for a sophisticated body culture. It's in fact a very primitive one.
We are waking up to the body for the first time and toying with the idea of making it what we want it to be.
With all of this possibility, however, has come the huge burden of self-surveillance. Dexascans, continuous glucose monitors, sleep trackers - we are constantly scanning our bodies for problems. Problem-solution is literally the floor plan of every Ulta and beauty counter you have frequented. It is the positioning statement of every wellness startup that hasn’t found it PMF yet.
I remember being at a Silicon Valley investor-doctor’s home in Palo Alto about 10 years ago, sitting around his family dinner table, hearing about the imminent revolution that was going to be the quantified self movement. It all felt so inevitable then. Fitbit and Whoop were on the rise and healthtech brands were raising stupid money. If you could track your steps and your blood glucose, and connect your 3pm high-sugar snack to the fight you had with your boyfriend at 5pm, why wouldn’t you totally change your relationship with your body?
And yet somehow the lifelogging revolution still hasn’t materialized. We are more equipped than ever but the body remains ungovernable.
Few topics reveal our cultural contradictions more than our relationship to our bodies, and how or why we might want to change them.
What we forget is that everyone wants to be healthy, but no one thinks being absolutely, immaculately, perfectly healthy is going to improve their life experience. And those that do, don’t really. They do it because they are playing a different game - the kind of game you play after you’ve won the other major games of money and fame. It’s a game you play when there are no other games left.
The best use case for pedometers might still be the ones dairy cows wear, to reassure me the milk I’m buying came from a cow who walked. That actually does make me feel good, and I do buy the milk. And that funny idiosyncracy reveals something we already know.
Futures that separate the body from the mind are likely very limited in their appeal. We can quantify the body to death, but unless it somehow connects us more deeply to the essence of being human, the essence of our true selves that we are trying to reclaim, the essence of feeling good in this world, it may not go as far as hoped.
There’s a dark and predictable humor in the fact that sleep specialists have coined the term orthosomnia. It describes people who become so obsessed with their sleep tracker scores that they lose sleep over it.
Some technologies, like those of the quantified self, feel much like the broken mirror. They fragment our sense of self and turn something embodied into something intellectual. Wearables and CGMs have their value and their place in health no doubt, but the reason why they haven’t taken off in the way that was expected may be because they disturb our reflections. They force a discontinuity of the self.
And that’s also why we’ve started to use AI more and more like a friend than a Google search bar replacement. ChatGPT creates a very strong continuity of the self. It reflects you back to yourself in a way that feels whole and pleasing. Our off-label AI use case is very ancient in nature. It’s a mirror that doesn’t ripple when we reach for it.
If you’re building in this space, it’s worth asking yourself whether your technological contribution to humanity makes your users feel more human or less. Sometimes it’s that simple.
Rule Breakers
New bodies need new care, and the new archetype of a good doctor is now someone who breaks the old rules.
The very essence of medicine has always been tradition, but with every technological and biological innovation now around us, that paradigm is shifting. We aren’t looking for the doctor who will uphold the status quo but instead the doctor who will disrupt it.
Two converging trends will only accelerate this:
As AI presents us with new discoveries, more and more medical experts will be at odds with each other. Old school doctors will be openly fighting with new school practitioners. We'll see more public squabbles, more confusing headlines, more influencers acting like doctors and more doctors acting like influencers.
Any number of medical crises, catastrophes and rebellions that have warped our sense of safety since 2020, take your pick, have shifted the locus of control from the expert to the individual.
Patients are swimming in a new sense of possibility and control that is changing their thresholds for good care. When it comes to the edges of the market, we want our doctors to be breaking barriers on our behalf. We want them to push the limits of human capacity, find new methods of care that upend the old constraints of the body, and see the non-machine parts of us that ‘old’ medicine has ignored.
There will be less medical consensus and more acrimony as the entire field of medicine jumps forward because not all of the people behind it will be moving forward at the same pace.
It makes sense, then, that the most popular and influential doctors out there today don’t live in the hospital. They’re running media platforms, shaping public understanding of health in real-time. And it especially makes sense that people like Andrew Huberman, Dr. Mary Clare Haver, Dr. David Sinclair, Dr. Peter Attia, and even Dr. Gabor Maté are all best known for one thing: how they challenge convention.
They are rule breakers.
The new mythology is that the best doctors are fighting the system. Fighting the system is what makes them good at their job. These doctors aren’t offering resolution, they’re just offering movement, and in a moment of cultural restlessness that’s often enough.
That’s what authority means when it comes to the body today. Not expertise, but a willingness to test the limits, break things, start over, go rogue. All of the things medicine never seemed to be.
Moral Static
We can’t decide whether to worship the body or control it, and that’s probably because we are just starting to ask ourselves what it means to live in a body without being punished by it.
The body is the epicenter of worthiness, and worthiness is the domain of morality. As people begin to reclaim their bodies through science, medicine, and mindset, they collide with a culture still morally unequipped to handle what that freedom means. The chaotic debates about weight-loss drugs, wellness cults, medical conspiracies, menopause… OnlyFans, baby formula, vegan diets, literally any extension or use of the body, is what I call moral static.
Moral static isn’t genuine, nuanced moral discourse. It’s the chaotic buzz of blunt moral objection with no real path to discussion or progress. When new ideas and innovations threaten peoples’ identities, they cling to one-size-fits-all moral arguments even when there is no logical argument left.
Instead of producing a clear conversation about how we can update our models of what is right and wrong, these categories produce static.
But static doesn’t last forever. It’s a sign that a signal is trying to break through.
Reclaiming our bodies is going to feel strangely like betrayal. Betrayal of our upbringings, our doctors, our religions, and our social codes. It will require us to endure backlash, shame, confusion, and even ideological warfare. We don’t give up our norms without a fight, and so many parties are deeply invested in keeping those norms in place. Our bodies will have to disobey,
There are some new rules that immediately show up in this mindset, and they set the tone for every figure, brand, movement or influencer that wants to lock down the new norms that bring us back to our bodies.
Jolt into new terrain.
We think it’s red light therapy or asmr massages, but as delightful as those things are, they’re not what we’re actually seeking. We want to feel something real. The body doesn’t respond to politeness, it responds to intensity. The systems that disconnected us from our bodies were not subtle, and our return to embodiment won’t be either.
It will be primal, disruptive, sometimes uncomfortable. That’s why the brands and figures breaking through right now find ways to shock the system. Rage rituals, anti-establishment doctors, trauma-informed psychedelics, god/dess like sexuality, hormone therapy, weeping uncontrollably in a bikini in the snow with Wim Hof at your side - all of these jolt us into new terrain. If you’re trying to return someone to their body, you can’t just optimize or soothe your way there. You need to create a moment of interruption, an emotional, sensory, or ideological rupture that cuts through the static. Create a felt experience in a world that has trained us to feel nothing.
Bring body and mind together.
The biggest mistake you can make in this space is choosing between the body and the mind. Optimization culture wants to discipline the body through data. Wellness culture wants to spiritualize it through ritual. But the future belongs to the frameworks that fuse science and soul, logic and sensation, intellect and instinct.
The body doesn’t want to be hacked. It wants to be understood. People want to feel whole.
That means recognizing the emotional, existential, even sometimes spiritual implications of how we approach health, beauty, performance, and care. The most resonant voices and products of the next decade will be the ones that reflect us back to ourselves, not just in form, but in meaning.
Make it creative.
Sometimes I think moral static is a flaw in the system, but then I remember it is the system. It’s what happens when new ideas about the body collide with old beliefs about worthiness.
It creates confusion, contradiction, backlash, and noise. But for the right kind of thinker, it also creates possibility. If you’re building anything in this space, whether it’s a product, platform, community, or identity, moral static is your material.
It’s where the signal is trying to break through. It tells you where the culture is alive. The people who thrive in this moment will treat that noise not as something to avoid, but as something to shape. They will build worlds, language, rituals, and symbols for this strange, liminal phase of becoming. This is what cultural authorship looks like, finding the ruptures and fashioning them into something new.
Does it feel uncomfortable to read all of this?
I can tell you it feels uncomfortable to write it. There is no denying the strangeness of where we’re headed, even if we believe it’s a return to something true (or not).
You can’t judge cultural transitions like this while they’re happening because we don’t know where they’ll land, nor how we’ll feel when we get there. If you want to find the signal in the noise as we move into the second half of this long arc of cultural progress, you have to judge the motivations not the outcomes. The motivations are complete, the outcomes never will be.
So much of what we’re seeing, however strange or extreme, is not aimless. It’s the expression of the desire to come home to the body. People want relief and coherence. Proof that their body still belongs to them.
And when you see it that way, the chaos begins to make more sense as the growing pain of a culture remembering what it means to feel. That remembering will be messy. It will be hijacked and moralized and repackaged along the way. But the raw, earnest desire to reconnect with one’s physical self is real.
If you’re trying to make sense of what’s ahead, let that be your wayfinding tool. Don’t judge the weirdness. Look for the want. That’s where the truth lives and it’s where the future is already starting to take shape.
Choosing Sides
Here's what we've been consuming.
The End of Power (The Ruffian by Ian Leslie): “The levers of national power aren’t working anymore. I’m not just talking about America. Britain has choked up five prime ministers in six years, none of whom have wielded power effectively. This isn’t all down to elite incompetence. The conditions under which our leaders govern verge on impossible. Party allegiances have fragmented and loosened; it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a party break 40% again. Voters have splintered into interest groups which share little more than resentment at their plight. Activists whip up online campaigns to stop new initiatives in their tracks. The result is that it’s become much easier to break the things we hate than build the things we need.”
More and more parents around the world prefer girls to boys (The Economist): “Parents around the world used to have a pronounced preference for sons. In many cultures boys traditionally inherit both the family’s name and its wealth. Indeed, sons were considered so much more desirable than daughters that many parents would choose to abort baby girls, leaving whole cohorts of children with far more boys than girls in China and India, among other places. But in recent years that preference for boys has diminished dramatically in developing countries—and signs of a bias in favour of girls are emerging in the rich world. For perhaps the first time in humanity’s long history, in many parts of the world it is boys who are increasingly seen as a burden and girls who are a boon.”
The Next Great Distribution Shift (Brian Balfour): “LinkedIn's platform shift is happening right now, in real-time. It's also the fastest we've seen—from open to closed in less than four years. If you're a business content creator who's noticed your engagement plummeting, you're not imagining it. You're witnessing the playbook in action. For most of its existence, LinkedIn was essentially a digital resume database. Users updated their profiles maybe once a year. Engagement meant accepting connection requests. But there was an internal mandate: transform LinkedIn from a static directory into a daily destination.”
Inside the Complex and Petty Prenups of the Superwealthy (The Wall Street Journal): “Judges may view behavioral clauses like weight requirements as overly invasive or punitive. They can also create endless disputes. Courts also typically won’t honor prenuptial terms that dictate child custody or support. Still, these agreements often reflect an anxiety about losing control. “Every prenuptial agreement is a power play,” says Nancy Chemtob, a New York divorce attorney. “It’s exciting for them to have this control.” The leverage often goes to whoever cares less about the marriage. “If you’re willing to walk away, you hold all the cards,” Kessler says.”
Why the MAGA economy is thriving (The Economist): “America is splitting into two different economies and markets: one conservative, the other liberal. People on each side think about the economy differently; they buy different things and work in increasingly different industries. Not only that, the MAGA economy is doing surprisingly well.”
Posting Less (Culture Study by Anne Helen Petersen): “You don’t disappear, you just disappear from full public view. Your Stories only surface to Actual Close Friends. Your cute or weird pics go to the group chat or Marco Polo. Your publics become smaller, more curated. Millennials are reducing their circles this way, but I see younger generations doing it too: their internalization of the internet’s disciplinary logic began at a much younger age than us; they’re either fatigued by it earlier or rejecting it from the start. (I find it telling that Gen Alpha teens often reject their millennial and Gen-X parents’ attempts to document them online — they get it, even when we do not).”
Your doctor thinks he’s a free agent the same way your Uber driver does.
Both of them think they’re entrepreneurs on the rags to riches pathway, and that changes how they identify, how they find meaning, and how they vote.
Free agents have only proliferated.
How many agency people have gone independent? How many white collar workers are contractors now? How many blue collar workers are now subcontractors?
Even if you have a full-time job today, you know there are no promises. Deep down, you know you’re a free agent, too.
Free agents don’t relate to a story of collective working class because the collective working class is disappearing. They relate to a story of individualism and the gospel of prosperity.
As the brilliant economist Jean-Paul Faguet tells us, “We are all free agents now.”
I have returned to his work over and over again in the past year because it is a fundamental truth that explains so much more than politics. It explains the stories in our media, the narratives that rise to the top of culture, our heroes and villains, our values and even our consumerism.
Every group, no matter where they fall on the spectrum, is sustained by their own chosen mythologies. There are many truths/ mythologies existing at the same time. And when you understand the context of today, these mythologies make perfect sense in our current market.
Btw this is not an American phenomenon. This is global. It is one of the few fundamental truths that will organize the world.
And if you're in the business of changing the world, it's something you should pay attention to.
Yours,
I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
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This was so thought-provoking and well-written. I loved reading it. Thank you.
Yes, very interesting analysis and totally agree from a person-first perspective, but the vastly increased monitoring and digitized health information has such potential to give corporations and government MORE control over our bodies, or at the most innocent, more personal information to leverage to sell us stuff. I foresee lots of new medicines, machines, lotions, serums, supplements, and advisors designed to "fix" all those "problems" we didn't know we had.