In the same way that ultra-processed food offers the illusion of nourishment while quietly eroding the body and mind, modern life often serves up a highly engineered version of human experience: convenient, addictive, and hollow.
Picture a pack of early human hunters. Let’s place them 20,000 years ago and drop them into the bitter tundra of Northern Europe.
Everyone in this tribe is lean and muscular. The kind of physique any modern fitness guru would love to tout in ‘after’ pics.
But it’s been a while since their last mammoth meal. Plants and fruit are scarce as, heck, it’s the ice age and crop cultivation isn’t a thing yet. So they hunt.
Our bunch of cro-magnons, near identical to modern humans but for their taller height and better teeth, search across the icy wastes for mammoths or deer. Little do they know, something strange is about to happen.
Suddenly, due to one of those glitches in the time-space matrix or something, a box of Frosties (or other deranged consumables) materializes from the future.
I know! Weird, right?
Not only that, but a bunch of frosted donuts have disappeared from a 21st-century Californian baby shower and manifested in a sugary scattering around our tribe of pre-civ buff hunters.
A kind of Walmart version of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Amazed and intrigued, and after a little cursory prodding, one specimen of pre-civilization places a donut in his mouth… but immediately spits it out in disgust. He concludes these objects must contain the worst kind of poison.
Many of the others don’t even try to eat them, because they in no way resemble any food they’ve ever seen in nature. The box of Frosties lies unopened.
In short, they haven’t yet ‘evolved’ to consume ultra-processed food.
Civilization will bring them (well, not them personally) great benefits. Farming, trading, travel, music, art, science, keyhole surgery, cathedrals, and cannulas. But it will also bring mass industrial wars, heart disease, and the Kardashians.
When civilization eventually comes, it will also eventually bring the worst kind of ‘shadow nutrition’ – a dim reflection of actual food.
Killing us softly
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) contain ingredients not used in home cooking. Many are chemicals, colourings, and sweeteners, added to improve the food’s appearance, taste, or texture. They often contain preservatives and emulsifiers. Not ingredients traditionally found in any kitchen! But it gets worse.
Try nibbling on a roll of polystyrene and you’ll notice (as I do whenever I nibble on it) that it’s not overly tasty or compelling. Not so for the edible equivalent. The ultra-processed foods that surround us are manufactured to be extremely palatable and addictive (and have a long shelf life).
Had our mythical tribe begun consuming UPFs, they quickly would have lost their robustness and vitality. They’d soon be looking like the ‘before’ pics of our peddlers of fitness nirvana!
Since the 1980s UPFs have become much more prevalent. UPFs tend to be not just cheap to make but also cheap to buy. In the UK, these foods make up more than half of the average person’s calorie intake, and their prevalence is rising globally.
Ultra-processed foods have been associated with over 30 health issues, including heart disease, certain cancers, and anxiety.1 The huge increase in the so-called ‘diseases of civilization’, including emotional disorders, may, at least in part, be down to the ubiquity of UPFs.2
So far so terrible, and much has been said about the dangers of UPFs, full as they are of addictive, artificially processed, immiserating, life-shortening, ultra-palatable, laboratory-made mush.
But what about the ultra-processed, mass experiences that surround us? The lost human contact of the self-service checkout? The automated voice on the end of a customer ‘service’ experience? Or the mass experience of the highly palatable, dopamine-manipulating social media platforms?
What might this ultra-processed living be doing to us?3
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Ultra-processed people
Just as our bodies struggle to accept (or even tolerate) lab-born ingredients as real sustenance, our minds and hearts falter under the weight of a reality that feels increasingly commodified.
Go to any shopping mall in the Western world, and you could be in any shopping mall in the Western world. Walk into a coffee chain in any major city, and you could be in any coffee chain in any major city. Scroll through a social media feed anywhere, and you could be scrolling through a social media feed everywhere.
Unique experience fades, uniformity pervades.
In the same way that ultra-processed food offers the illusion of nourishment while quietly eroding the body and mind, modern life often serves up a highly engineered version of human experience: convenient, addictive, and hollow.
When every part of life becomes processed for profit, we risk forgetting what it means to live fully, richly, and meaningfully.
Just as UPFs echo real foods and seem to meet the need for sustenance, so too much of current life seems to meet our intrinsic emotional needs but actually doesn’t, or only barely.
For example, research has found that online ‘socializing’ without actually meeting up with people may even increase loneliness and depression, especially among young social media users4 – just as highly palatable ultra-processed foods can increase hunger sensations in those consuming them.5
So just what are the ultra-processed experiences homogenizing humanity out of all individuality?
Curated personas, bite-sized dopamine hits
We consume curated personas on social media, bite-sized dopamine hits through notifications, and streamlined products designed not to fulfil but to keep us coming back for more.
Beneath the gloss of convenience and abundance lies a growing sense of spiritual malnutrition, a hunger for authenticity that can’t be satisfied by the synthetic.
A desperate search for a simulacrum of meaning through vacuous excitement leaves us feeling washed out, empty, and lonely. Like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. We’re in danger of believing something is meaningful only if it stimulates our emotions.
We become empty vessels in which ways of talking and thinking, values and beliefs are increasingly engineered into us as we lie back passively, ever the good consumers. We begin to think the same, in ever less diverse or individualistic ways. We start sounding like all the other processed people in the world.
For the individual, not as a collectivized point on a marketing algorithm but as a living breathing container of consciousness, there’s a kind of gaslighting ; an abusive relationship with the modern world. As the sense of emptiness grows, insidious algorithms manipulate us into feeling that the problem lies not with them, but with us. (Not to sound too paranoid I hope!)
We have to remind ourselves that we are so much more than a point on an algorithm. But – and here I’m sounding paranoid again! – we are targets of modern life in a very real sense.
You ARE the product!
In his excellent book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Tim Wu describes how if you’re not paying for something online then you might well be the product.6
Your data is sold, your searches collated, and your preferences noted as you become, bit by bit, less of a living, breathing human and more of a financial target, ripe for financial and emotional manipulation.
And there’s another danger here.
If we’re surrounded by life as a series of consumables then we may come to regard ourselves through this lens, becoming, in other words, materialistic about ourselves. How do we look? Measure up? In other words: Are we a good and decent ‘product’?
What, then, happens to the man or woman not just as a particle in the great ultra-processed, mass-produced matrix of current humanity, but as a unique, conscious being within the Universe?
We need listen – to ourselves
Ultra-processed experience (UPE) is killing the individual and giving rise to an epidemic of meaninglessness, anomie, and all the emotional problems that come with that.
Combine that with ultra-processed food, and the outlook for the individual starts to look bleak.
But when we listen carefully… when we delve beneath the dopamine, beyond the buttons pushed by others; when we fly below the clamour of commercial pressures… we can hear it.
That little voice inside.
Life is more than this. YOU are more than this.
Maybe we can rescue that timeless part of ourselves. Make a point of getting out in nature, away from the digital glare; reading a book; meeting up with actual, live and present people… or swimming on a Scottish loch and not recording it for followers or even telling anyone you’ve done it. I don’t know… just living!
We can limit our diet of UPE just as we can be wary of UPFs.
And we can be inspired by those who live more holistically.
Be the exception
Of course, there will always be some people who are different, who don’t allow themselves to be moulded by the pressures of capitalist incentive (if I’m sounding like a wild-eyed communist, I’m not!).
There will always be some people who see the uniqueness in life’s variance. People who don’t just go along with the whims of a capricious crowd; or feel that if something wasn’t filmed it didn’t happen; or feel depressed by how few ‘likes’ they’ve got! People who can see beyond the enforced homogenization of human beings.
We can find and reclaim the calm, the voice inside that still resonates with the human tribe living not in nature but as nature – unself-conscious, unprocessed, and full of infinite potential.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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Notes:
- Lane, M. M., Gamage, E., Du, S., Ashtree, D. N., McGuinness, A. J., Gauci, S., Baker, P., Lawrence, M., Rebholz, C. M., Srour, B., Touvier, M., Jacka, F. N., O’Neil, A., Segasby, T., & Marx, W. (2024). Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses. British Medical Journal 2024; 384 :e077310
- Kopp, W. (2019). How Western diet and lifestyle drive the pandemic of obesity and civilization diseases. Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity. 2019 Oct 24;12:2221-2236.
- Check out: Chris van Tulleken (2024). Ultra-Processed People. Penguin.
- Bonsaksen, T., Ruffolo, M., Price, D., Leung, J., Thygesen, H., Lamph, G., Kabelenga, I., & Geirdal, A. (2023). Associations between social media use and loneliness in a cross-national population: Do motives for social media use matter? Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine, 11(1):2158089.
- Fazzino, T. L., Dorling, J. L., Apolzan, J. W., & Martin, C. K. (2021). Meal composition during an ad libitum buffet meal and longitudinal predictions of weight and percent body fat change: The role of hyper-palatable, energy dense, and ultra-processed foods. Appetite, 2021 Dec 1;167:105592.
- Wu, T. (2016). The attention merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
