We’re Being Forced Back Into Our Bodies, and It’s Changing Everything
What happens when everything is a scam.
It’s hard to overstate just how much of everyday life is experienced as a thinly veiled lie.
Think you get to choose where you eat out tonight? There are roughly 750,000 restaurants in America, and half the industry's food moves through just three distributors1. Your jalapeño poppers in New York are the same jalapeño poppers in Nebraska, and the same ones in Washington. Your choice was an illusion. But deep down, you probably already tasted the illusion without realizing it.
The beloved craft chain store Michaels put out their Halloween line recently, and the sloppification posing as Johanna Parker Design is laughable. Fake AI influencers are mushrooming everywhere and brands are posing as independent creators. Six months ago, we were all patting ourselves on the back for being able to spot fake AI reels, but be honest, how much AI content do you think you’ve scrolled past this week without realizing what it really was?
You can’t buy a car, rent an apartment, look for a job, or do most vital things without having to be unreasonably diligent about not getting scammed:
@rebmasel on Instagram
But everything becoming a lie doesn’t mean we just accept more lies. It’s a common misconception that human needs and desires just disappear when we no longer have the means to attain them.
What usually happens instead is the opposite. We find new places to attain those same needs and desires. In this case, when everything we know becomes a lie, we go searching for new truth.
My career is about finding where those new truths are emerging, and one way to do that is to see the patterns beneath where collective energy is headed:
Professors can’t trust student homework anymore, so they’re starting to require oral exams.
We can’t trust much of what’s online anymore because the dead internet is finally here, so irl events are having a resurgence.
The age of reason left us wanting, and so we are exploring spirituality through more embodied, physical modalities.
As live video can be faked more easily in real time, we’ll find that any high-stakes virtual interaction will have to happen in person. Job interviews, influencer trust, testimonies, closing deals.
Dating apps are drowning in bots and AI profiles so people turn to run clubs, old fashioned matchmaking, and meetups.
It’s getting harder and harder to trust that any kind of online connection is sincere or even coming from a real person, so we are increasingly rethinking third places where bodies can collide like parks, community centers and sports spaces.
Trust is collapsing everywhere at once in the digital layer of life, and leading us straight to one place: our bodies.
When paying more, knowing more, researching more, knowing a guy, or going to a “reputable” place can no longer guarantee we won’t get scammed, when we can’t trust our screens, our leaders, or our brands, the body is the last domain of truth left to us.
We’re literally being forced back into our bodies, and there will be notable downstream effects. In fact, there is one big downstream effect of our shared unreality that we are living through today, and it is the birth of the modern wellness industry.
“Wellness” wasn’t born simply because people suddenly became healthier, millennials reached their 30s, or the d2c revolution had begun. Every generation ages into caring about its health. What’s peculiar is the kind of health this generation chose to focus on. Our parents got Jane Fonda aerobics and vitamin shops. We got nervous system regulation and hypnotherapy.
The conditions for this all started about ten years ago. To understand why, look at what was happening to reality in that same decade - not what people believed about it, but where they were actually spending their lives.
We’re spending more time inside Roblox than visiting Yosemite. A single creator can accumulate more collective attention than centuries of national history. Tens of millions of Americans go to their therapist’s office, but #TherapyTok has billions of views. Which begs that question: what’s more real, the performance or the place?
Social media, political polarization, misinformation, AI, deepfakes, and algorithmic feeds steadily expanded the surface area of reality until we were no longer shared one common experience of the world. Once that shared center weakened, people naturally began looking for something that still felt undeniably real.
And they found it in the body.
The body has become one of the last places people believe can still tell them the truth. That’s why wellness has exploded. It’s less about optimization than it is about direct experience.
Hormones, gut health, nervous systems, breathwork, psychedelics, sleep science and trauma therapy all promise a closer relationship with ourselves in a world that often feels increasingly abstract.
Seen through that lens, the modern wellness landscape, in all of its sideways and strange iterations, becomes easier to understand. Somatic healing, shadow work, The Body Keeps the Score, ancestral diets, cold plunges, meditation, the avalanche of therapy-speak that has invaded the American lexicon are all different expressions of the same desire. People are trying to reconnect with themselves, and the body has become the place where that search is happening because it’s the last real thing we can trust. That is the deeper movement beneath the modern wellness industry.
But while the industry was correct about what people wanted, it was wrong about how to give it to them. Much of what we call wellness today doesn’t really work to return you to your body. It may hand you a dashboard or the same screens that were lying to us in the first place, except now designed to tell us what our bodies are doing. People that wanted a way to feel their bodies instead got sold a way to measure them.
That’s why this is just the beginning. The wellness of today is a preview of what’s to come. As the industry starts to mature, so will our impulses. It’s not lost on me that this is one of the most scam-riddled industries today, but you only get that many liars in a category when people are desperate for a solution. I read the scams as a measure of the hunger.
If the locus of truth has effectively moved to the body, there are many other compounding effects we can expect to see in other domains. The wellness industry was the right industry for the right time. It was profitable and it tapped into a latent desire that nobody had articulated yet.
But what about religion? What about fashion? What about the way our homes are designed or our families are structured? What about the way education evolves?
No domain is exempt from the return to the body. Everyone is seeking truth through more embodied, literal, direct, intuitive, spiritual or physical experiences.
It’s true that plenty of people are running the other way and deeper into the screen, but that isn’t a counterargument, it’s merely the other side. Both are answers to the same collapse in trust, with one of them simply giving you an easier way out (instead of in).
By that logic, you could separate most markets into two camps:
There are the players that stand between a person and their own body. Rules, norms, dashboards, scores, feeds, interfaces. They give you a reading instead of an experience, and the reading is easier to create and sell.
And then there are those players that help people feel deeper into their bodies. It can be through the physical, the spiritual, or the communal. It’s real life in real spaces, and it’s at times messy and gray.
I believe we’re moving into the second camp, but we should be open to the idea that the tools of the first camp can still be used to help us reach the aims of the second. Measurement isn't the problem in and of itself. The question is what it's for. Does it separate you from the body and from the physical, visceral reality that we are moving into, or does it separate you from it?
We’ve gotten really good at measuring and tracking and optimizing. We’ve also gotten really good at assigning status and sophistication to those things, to the point where many might feel like it’s almost naive to go in the opposite direction, but don’t be mistaken. This is how market changes usually start. There is a conflict between what we think we want and what we do not yet realize we want. There is a tension between two truths that needs to be resolved.
And that goes way beyond wellness. I only use that industry as a small example. How we collaborate, learn, build together, interact and buy are all moving toward a more embodied state. And while we may very well want that, let’s not forget that we also have no choice because most forms of ‘virtual’ trust are effectively falling apart.
The more people confront lies and scams and fakeness in their daily lives, the harder and faster we are being forced back into our physical worlds and bodies. Whether you’re a leader or a brand, you need to think about how you move through the real, physical world because that is a much harder layer to fake or optimize.
As I have written before, the return to the body will not be gentle and this will be a hard shift. It requires a form of emotional energy and effort that we haven’t had to deal with for a very long time. But it’s also a natural progression that presents some really interesting opportunities on the horizon
One Last Thought
Can I convince you that being a late bloomer is actually the best?
Believe me, it is. (More here.)
Yours,
Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
My private culture and strategy community Exposure Therapy
My 3-week masterclass on How To Build A Culture Brand
My agency Concept Bureau
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/performance-food-seems-warm-rival-us-foods-play-create-behemoth-2025-10-08/
Only a late bloomer has accumulated enough wisdom to become a true cultural futurist. Returning consciously to that body is harder that it sounds. You must turn off all media, step out from behind screens long enough to rebalance, then be deliberate about you allow back in.
What an incredible opening line.
It may be subtle, but I do feel that your writing comes from an embodied place. I say this, because it offers clarity. Which is an elegant way to model what renewed trust could look and feel like, because clarity communicates safety to our nervous systems.
It’s like a small act of rebellion in an otherwise, as you say, “dead” internet. We must be alive in order to speak clearly and truthfully. Waking up our bodies wakes up our minds.
Anyway, very much appreciate your efforts to be a pioneer in this space. 🫶