The Fear of the Body

I spoke with an entrepreneur today who owns a web design agency. He shared how deeply anxiety affected him when he started working for himself.

In an effort to heal himself, he discovered something unexpected: how vital exercise was for his sanity and well-being. Without his daily movement practice, anxiety would creep in and take hold.

His story opened up a question I've been sitting with about remote work: How is it that working in a way where we are completely with ourselves allows us to become isolated from ourselves?

The tools we use shape our internal experience in ways we rarely notice. The screen, in particular, is a peculiar mirror. Instead of reflecting ourselves back to us, it pulls us into its own world.

Michael Sacasas captured this when writing about our excessively emotional age: "Twitter says 'feel this,' we say 'how intensely?' Social media never invites us to step away, to think and reflect, to remain silent."

This happens through immersion, but not the kind that deepens our experience. When we read a book, we bring our past experiences to meet the words on the page. It's a conversation between the author's intention and our interpretation. We create the visuals within.

The screen offers something different – a total sensory takeover that can drown out the subtle messages our body is constantly sending us.

Last year, after giving a talk in New York, a man approached me with a problem. He was a runner who couldn't bear to run without music or podcasts in his ears. The week before, he had attempted a half-marathon with dead AirPods. "It was a disaster," he said. "I couldn't find my groove."

I asked him if he puts ketchup on his food.

He pulled back, surprised by my response. "Yeah, sometimes."

"When do you eat it?" I asked.

"With burgers and fries, things like that," he said.

"Why not with everything?" I asked. "Why not with your steak or vegetables?"

His face looked disgusted at the thought. "Because I want to taste those foods properly."

He knew where ketchup should and shouldn't be used. He knew when it would improve the taste and when it would drown out the taste.

That's the thing about condiments – use them long enough, and the plain food becomes boring. Your taste buds forget how to appreciate subtle flavors.

I understand this more deeply than most. I didn't have a sense of smell for most of my 20s due to a medical condition. When surgery finally restored it at 29, I realized how much context and richness I had been missing.

A place isn't just what you see – it's the subtle fragrance that makes it memorable. A person isn't just their appearance – it's their unique scent that makes them familiar.

There's a whole symphony of sensations pulsating through our bodies at any moment. These aren't just random feelings – they're intelligence. They tell us what we want and don't want, what feels right and what doesn't.

I've been thinking about the term "common sense" lately. We use it casually now, but its origins reveal something profound about human experience. The ancient Greeks had a beautiful way of understanding it – they called it "koinē aisthēsis," meaning the power to bring all our senses together into one clear experience.

When you bite into an apple, you're not separately processing the crunch, the sweetness, the smell, the texture. All of these merge into one seamless moment of "apple." This is what we've lost touch with – not just good judgment, but the art of letting our senses dance together.

But in our screen-mediated world, we get something different. The internal landscape becomes fragmented and confusing. We retreat to the mind's guidance alone – like trying to navigate a city with only a map, never touching the ground or feeling the air.

Over time, this disconnection shows up as tension in the body, constriction in the breathing, chaos in the mind. We call it "anxiety," but perhaps it's really a fear of or inability to be present with ourselves.

Last summer, I trained with Ido Portal. In passing one day, he mentioned how he improved his capacity to smell. He would rub different fragrances on cloth – garlic, pepper, lavender – and practice detecting their subtle differences. By making it harder to notice, he made his sensitivity stronger.

Since practicing this myself, I've noticed how much richer my walks have become. The world has layers of experience I was missing before.

This is what we need to recover in our relationship with ourselves – the ability to detect and trust the subtle signals that make us who we are.

The path back to ourselves isn't about rejecting technology – it's about remembering that beneath all our digital extensions, there's a body waiting to be heard, carrying wisdom that no algorithm can match.