What the hell happened?
Seriously.
It feels like overnight everything became bad for us. (And the healthy foods are constantly recalled!)
You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. You can’t cook. You can’t drive. You can’t even put on lipstick without someone posting a video explaining how it’s secretly trying to kill you.
The food is artificial. Even the “healthy” food may or may not qualify as actual food.
What happened to seeds? Why are tomatoes bred to survive a cross-country road trip instead of tasting like tomatoes? When did convenience become more important than nutrition?
Packaged food has become packaged poison.
So, we decide we’ll eat more salad.
Then we find out the lettuce has been recalled for the third time this month because it might give us explosive diarrhea.
Fine. Frozen vegetables then.
Except they’re sealed in plastic.
Everything is in plastic.
The grass-fed beef is sitting on Styrofoam, wrapped in plastic, covered with another layer of plastic. We don’t buy meat anymore. We buy packaging with a side of protein!
Bring back the butcher.
Back in the day, people would walk to the butcher shop. (They still do in other countries!) Fresh meat cut that day. Wrapped in wax paper. The butcher actually knew your name instead of a barcode.
That suddenly sounds revolutionary.
Then you come home.
The carpet is toxic.
The couch is toxic.
The mattress is toxic.
The curtains are toxic.
Apparently we’ve been marinating ourselves in chemicals while we sleep because did I mention the sheets are also toxic? So, basically we have to sleep standing up and naked because…….
The clothes?
Plastic.
Entire retail chains are selling polyester, acrylic, nylon, and other petroleum products stitched together and labeled as “fashion.” We proudly announce we bought five shirts for twenty bucks, then wonder why they feel like wearing a shower curtain. Hey, but we didn’t have to iron! I guess not. That s*#t will melt! IT’S PLASTIC!
The television is listening.
The phone is listening.
The car is tracking us.
The refrigerator might be a spy!
I don’t know exactly what EMFs are, but apparently they’re everywhere. Every week someone is convinced they’re either harmless or they’re turning our brains into baked potatoes.
The rotary phone never hurt a soul. (Bring it back along with the busy signal! Please! Remember NOT being available?)
Now we carry tiny computers that keep us connected to everyone except the people sitting across the table.
Smartphones have made us incredibly efficient at becoming distracted. (And too stupid to think!)
Scrolling has replaced strolling.
We’ve traded afternoon walks for thumb exercises. (I beg of you. Please get off the leg machine at the gym!)
We’ve created the first addiction where people proudly announce how many hours they spent on their phone yesterday. There isn’t even a rehab center for doom scrolling YET!
Then there’s beauty.
Don’t wear lipstick.
Don’t dye your hair.
Don’t use shampoo with this ingredient.
Or that ingredient.
Or the ingredient they discovered was bad last Tuesday.
Everything absorbs into your skin.
Everything causes something.
By now I’m afraid to use hand lotion without checking if it requires signing a release! It should. It has 9000 thousand ingredients in it. 8,999 of them are harmful.
The water?
Don’t drink tap.
Filter it.
With plastic.
Or buy bottled water…
…that has been sitting in plastic!
Or those giant five-gallon plastic bottles on the office water cooler.
At some point you just stand there staring at the faucet wondering if dehydration is the healthiest option.
Then we microwave our food because we’re too busy to wait five minutes.
Ninety seconds. That’s apparently all the time modern civilization has left for lunch.
We cook in nonstick pans because scrubbing a skillet has become an unbearable hardship.
Don’t use aluminum foil.
Don’t barbecue.
Don’t char your food.
Don’t breathe near your air fryer or stand next to the microwave.
What happened?
Somewhere along the way we confused convenience with progress.
We outsourced cooking.
We outsourced movement.
We outsourced common sense.
And every shortcut came wrapped in another layer of packaging, another chemical coating, another subscription, another warning label.
Convenience isn’t free.
We’re paying for it with our health, our attention, and our independence.
Maybe we don’t need forty acres and a mule.
But we could use a garden.
A few chickens.
A neighborhood butcher.
A farmer’s market.
A walk after dinner.
A meal that takes longer to prepare than it does to microwave.
Most of all, we need to SLOW DOWN.
Read the labels.
Ask questions.
Learn where our food comes from.
Think before buying another gadget that promises to save us thirty seconds. Because those thirty seconds are adding up to a lifetime spent rushing.
And here’s the irony.
The only thing we’re actually hurrying toward…
…is an earlier grave.
Convenience and greed have become a dangerous partnership.
The antidote isn’t perfection. It’s paying attention.
It’s choosing real food more often than fake food.
Walking more than scrolling.
Cooking more than reheating.
Buying less but buying better!
And to end on a positive note, here’s a bit of good news. I haven’t heard of a single recall on wine!