Modern Life: A Sad but Funny Look at How We’re Slowly Ruining Ourselves
Here is a very sad, but also funny, look at modern life as we know it.
On Our Anniversary, We Celebrated by Slowly Ruining Ourselves
We woke up on our anniversary feeling refreshed, optimistic and immediately reached for our phones to check notifications from people we barely know.
Nothing says romance quite like blue light at 6 am.
To celebrate our special day, we decided to poison ourselves with alcohol, because apparently that’s what adults do to mark meaningful life events.
A few drinks in, we felt relaxed, disconnected and significantly less capable of making good decisions.
Later that evening, we turned on the TV to “wind down” and were greeted with breaking news about a horrific accident in another country involving people we had never met.
Naturally, we absorbed the emotional weight of the situation as though we were personally involved.
We went to bed stressed, relieved it wasn’t us, yet somehow unable to sleep because it might be us one day.
After lying awake for a while, we took these things called sleeping tablets. They knocked us out, but the quality of our rest wasn’t exactly what nature intended.
After a restless night, we woke up exhausted and fuelled ourselves with a bowl of nutritionally ambitious cardboard flakes because they were “quick”.
There was no time for real food. We had to rush off to work to earn money to pay for things we don’t remember buying.
Work was delightful.
Eight hours of emails, deadlines and low-grade existential dread later, we left completely drained, yet with no real idea what value we had added to anyone’s life.
Back home, we spent two hours scrolling through social media, admiring our friends’ seemingly perfect lives.
Exotic holidays. Smiling couples. Beach sunsets.
Clearly, everyone was thriving except us.
We felt very uninspired and deeply inadequate.
With no time or space to move naturally during the day, we drove to a place called a “gym” to run on a treadmill, a stationary device that looks suspiciously like a hamster wheel and allows us to simulate escaping danger while going absolutely nowhere.
Our ancestors would be impressed.
Dinner? No time.
We heated up a plastic container containing some things that apparently didn’t have much nutritional value in a microwave.
We then compensated for our nutritionally questionable choices by taking a handful of vitamins, hoping they would somehow override the laws of biology.
Before bed, we watched three episodes of a show we didn’t even like, simply because the algorithm suggested it.
Then we lay awake wondering why we felt anxious, tired, disconnected and vaguely unfulfilled.
Anyway, big day tomorrow.
Up early.
Same routine.
What has modern life changed?
This is simply designed to highlight how modern life can slowly erode meaningful connections, health, lifestyle, work-life balance and the choices we make every day.
You may recognise parts of your own lifestyle in this story, or you may see them in the lives of people around you.
The point isn’t to suggest that every aspect of modern life is bad.
It is simply an invitation to look at how we are living and ask whether our daily choices are actually helping us build the kind of life we want.
Modern lifestyles can make it easy to become busy without being productive, connected without having meaningful relationships, entertained without feeling fulfilled and physically comfortable without necessarily being healthy.
Sometimes we need to stop and look at the bigger picture.
Three questions to ask yourself every day
Ask yourself these three questions:
What am I doing to grow into a better person spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically?
What am I doing to improve my relationships and the lives of the people around me, including my family, friends and community?
What am I doing to improve my work, finances and hobbies, while also creating time to relax and recover from work?
Keep asking yourself these three questions every day.
Then take one additional action each week in each of these areas.
You don’t need to completely overhaul your life overnight.
Small, consistent improvements across your personal growth, relationships, health, work, finances and leisure can gradually change the direction of your life.
Modern life will keep moving quickly.
The question is whether we allow it to decide how we live, or whether we become more intentional about the life we create.
