As a society, we have lost the plot.
We’ve traded communal survival for individual performance – and forgotten how to rest, forgive, or belong.
Just before Christmas I did something unkind.
I apologised. Properly. No “sorry if you felt that way”, but a clear “I was wrong, I see why it hurt, here’s what I’ll do differently.”
She refused to forgive me.
One strike and you’re out. No repair. No messy middle. Just cut.
A few days later I sat in a Catholic church on Christmas Day. The priest preached a sermon of which maybe 20% felt alive and timely. The rest felt frozen in time. When I looked around, I saw almost only grey hair. I have my own little grey hairs (I cover them), but my generation was barely in the room.
That’s when a sentence crystallised in my head:
As a society, we have lost the plot.
Not just about religion. About what a healthy life actually looks like.
This is an educational and strategic perspective, not personal medical advice.
We now treat “healthy” as a performance target
Ask an educated professional what it means to live well, and you’ll usually hear some version of the same list:
Eat vegetables.
Go to the gym.
Don’t smoke.
Do your job well.
It’s a performance protocol in wellness clothing.
If your lab results come back “within normal range”, you get a gold star. If your step counter is respectable and your LinkedIn looks busy, you must be doing fine.
Except you’re not.
I see this in my own circle and in the people I think about when designing the operating system I am building, Atlas Cove Health. High-achieving, constantly on, permanently a bit tired, permanently “catching up”. Good salaries, acceptable lab work, lives designed for eventual breakdown.
We’ve shrunk health down to what can be eaten, counted, lifted, and billed. We’ve almost entirely lost the parts that make a life sustainable: real rest, deep relationships, the ability to forgive and be forgiven, a sense of being held by something larger than our own productivity.
If you trace how we got here, the path runs straight through the decline of the institutions that used to teach those things, including the Church that raised me.
What we quietly removed from the week
My parents weren’t church-every-Sunday Catholics. They’re Catholic in the way many Europeans are: they’ll say they are, and that’s almost the extent of it.
I ended up at a Catholic girls’ boarding school because it was the best education within 90 minutes of our home. It happened to be run by nuns. The regime was strict to the point of comedy compared with my friends’ normal households.
Every Sunday at 9 a.m., no matter how hard we had partied, we were in church. Every school day at 8 a.m., before whatever class came next, we prayed. In French, Latin, English, Greek, German. We prayed more than most people today answer Slack messages.
I’m not nostalgic for the control. When I left, I snapped the elastic. I went to London, then Amsterdam. I did not behave like a convent girl. I’m not arguing we should recreate that system.
But buried inside it was something quietly valuable.
You put the common good above your immediate whims.
You repaired relationships because you had to see those people at breakfast.
You rested on Sunday because the entire system shut down around you.
You were not the centre of the universe.
And there was something else that’s easy to miss if you’ve never really been inside it.
When I think back to Mass, what I miss most isn’t the theology. It’s the operating system for being a human among other humans. In a single hour you touch several things our nervous system is built for. You stand and sit and kneel alongside other bodies. You turn to the people next to you, look them in the eye, and say “peace be with you” while you shake their hand. You sing together, which means you breathe together. You sit close to strangers and are expected to be respectful, quiet, present. You hear the name of someone who is ill or who has just died and, even if only a small fraction of the congregation actually knows them, everyone is asked to hold that person in mind.
It is a weekly reminder that we keep each other alive. That survival is a communal project, not just an individual performance.
None of this means everyone experienced church as sanctuary. For many people, church was a source of real harm, and leaving was an act of self-preservation. I’m not asking them to miss it. I’m saying that when we burned down a damaged house, we didn’t keep the few structural elements that actually held the roof up.
Across Europe, that world has largely been dismantled. Weekly Mass used to be normal. Now, in many places, it’s a niche activity. The Church helped cause this decline through its own scandals, hypocrisy, and refusal to change. Trust was burned. People walked.
This is mostly a Western story. In large parts of the world, churches, mosques and temples are still full. But even there, the same attention economy and work patterns are arriving fast. The tension between communal survival and individual optimisation is becoming global.
None of this excuses the Church’s failures. It just makes their consequences even clearer.
In tearing the institution down, we also tore out one of the last places where ordinary people, across classes, practised limits, rest and repair in their bodies, together, every week.
We did not build anything serious to replace that. That is one way a society quietly loses the plot.
The new pastor lives in your pocket
Into that vacuum stepped the smartphone.
The typical social media user now spends hours a day on platforms. For younger generations, these aren’t just entertainment channels. They are where you learn what is normal, desirable, morally acceptable.
Health is a good example. Many people in their teens and twenties now say they get most of their health and wellness advice from social media. A non-trivial number end up worse off after following what they see there. It’s not surprising if you look at the incentives.
The incentives are simple and the opposite of pastoral:
Outrage and purity go viral.
Nuance and repair do not.
Performative self-care sells better than boring, real rest.
So the new catechism sounds like this:
If someone hurts you, they’ve “shown you who they are” — cut them off.
If a relationship is hard, it’s “toxic” — leave.
If you feel empty, you’re “burnt out” — book a retreat, buy a supplement stack.
Some of this is genuinely protective. People have escaped situations that previous generations would have been trapped in.
But as a default, it creates a culture with no tolerance for friction and no skill at repair.
My pre-Christmas conflict with my friend is one small example. I apologised. She walked. That is her right. Scaled up, this pattern erodes our capacity to build any relationship that can survive real life. We end up with networks of shallow ties and almost no one who sees us at our worst and stays.
We’ve quietly shifted from a culture organised around communal survival — “how do we keep each other alive and well?” — to one obsessed with individual survival: my boundaries, my optimisation, my brand of self-care. Our bodies haven’t caught up with that shift. They still expect to be part of a village.
The algorithm isn’t evil in a fairy-tale sense. It’s just doing its job inside an ad-driven attention market: keep you there. It optimises for engagement because that’s what we pay it for, not because it hates your cardiovascular system.
An algorithm optimised for engagement does not care whether you reach old age with a stable blood pressure and three friends you can call at 3 a.m. It cares whether you scroll.
We handed that algorithm the teaching role the parish priest used to hold — but without the constraints, without embodied community, and without responsibility.
It’s another way we, as a society, have lost the plot: we replaced a flawed, physical operating system for communal life with a flawless, digital operating system for attention extraction.
A week that looks like rest and isn’t
Now put this together with how we handle time.
Across Europe, many adults see family or friends at most once a month. Loneliness is common and strongly linked to worse health and higher mortality.
The pandemic poured gasoline on this: more remote work, less casual contact, more time online, even more distrust of institutions. We were already drifting towards isolated, always-on lives; COVID just sped the drift up.
On the work side, irregular schedules and weekend work have crept into normality. When companies push into Sundays and evenings, sickness and absenteeism rise. People’s bodies tell the truth that their calendars deny.
It’s also harder to live sanely when your rent eats half your salary, your boss can message you at any hour, and your “Sunday” depends on a shift rota. We didn’t just become more selfish; we built an economy that treats human bodies like infinitely available infrastructure.
I used to be furious as a teenager that supermarkets in Germany were closed on Sundays. If you forgot to buy food on Saturday, that was it. No emergency dash to the shop.
From a health perspective, I now see that as a feature, not a bug. Sunday rest is literally written into German law. It’s inconvenient for shoppers, but it’s also one of the last structural protections for shared rest, especially for lower-paid workers who can’t negotiate their own schedules.
Most of us now live a patterned week that looks like this:
Work hard.
Commute.
Eat something.
Scroll on the phone until you can’t keep your eyes open.
Sleep too little.
Repeat.
From the outside, this looks like work plus rest. From the inside, physiologically, it is work plus low-grade stimulation.
Your limbs are still, but your brain is running on comparison, envy, outrage, and fear. Your nervous system is bathed in light and emotion. Then you ask it to “switch off” on command.
That is not recovery. It is a nervous system that is always “on”, with brief moments of sedation.
When I look at my high-achieving friends, I can tell you roughly how much they sleep. They run from one thing to the next. They are celebrated for being always available, always responsive. Then they “relax” by staring at a small bright rectangle.
My father lived an analogue version of this. Deeply successful, constantly travelling, dinners, late nights, stories of dangling from chandeliers. Later he had a heart attack and several episodes of atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm.
There is no mystery here. You cannot live in permanent output mode with only cosmetic rest and expect no consequences.
We engineered a world where your body is alone in a room and your nervous system is in a stadium. Then we call that “rest”.
This is what “losing the plot” looks like at the level of a week.
The “soft” things the data won’t let us ignore
In medicine and diagnostics, we like numbers: cholesterol, HbA1c, eGFR. They graph well.
Forgiveness and rest sound airy by comparison. But they show up clearly in the evidence.
On forgiveness, people who are more willing to forgive tend to report better mental health and more satisfying close relationships. In older adults, forgiveness is associated with higher perceived quality of life. In people living with chronic illness, higher forgiveness and lower rumination correlate with lower stress and better self-reported health and happiness. The causal chains are complex, but the mechanism is simple: unresolved conflict is a chronic stressor.
On rest and rhythms, the picture is just as clear. Sleep deprivation and irregular circadian rhythms are strongly associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, mood disorders and immune dysfunction. The old “one day in seven” Sabbath pattern turns out to be a crude but effective way to force regular down-shifts of the nervous system. When work and commerce invade every day, sickness and absenteeism rise. The body insists on a rhythm, whether the labour market agrees or not.
So when I say we have lost the plot, I’m not speaking as a nostalgic Catholic pining for incense. I’m speaking as someone who cares about bodies and systems, noticing that we have stripped away the structures that made real rest and repair unavoidable, and replaced them with structures that make stimulation and cutoff unavoidable.
What we can still do, one life at a time
I’m not interested in being the person who says “everything is broken” and then offers nothing. I’m also not naïve enough to think a single article can fix a culture.
But I know, from health and behaviour change, that real change starts with awareness. You cannot shift a pattern you cannot name. If this piece does anything, I hope it puts words to something you already feel:
From there, a few levers are within reach.
Re-introduce a weekly Sabbath, even if you are secular. Pick one day, or half-day, each week where the rules are clear: no work, no email, no social media, no “catching up” on admin. Do something slow with other humans: walking, cooking, reading, talking. Whenever possible, make this shared. Rest is easier when the people around you are resting too. Real Sabbath is easiest when it’s supported by law and norms; if you don’t have that, you have to fake it at the level of your household or friend group.
Practise repair as a default before cut-off. Before excluding someone from your life, have one hard conversation by default, especially in long-standing relationships. Forgiveness is not the same as accepting abuse. There are times when walking away is the only sane option. But if “one strike and you’re out” becomes your general rule, you end up living in a fragile social world where everything is disposable and nothing is deep.
Choose thick communities over endless content. Most of what we call “community” now is thin: a group chat, a follow, a comment thread. Look for at least one thick community that exists offline, meets regularly, and expects things of you. That might be a parish, a choir, a sports club, a volunteer group, a meditation group, a neighbourhood association. The label matters less than the structure: you are a participant, not just a consumer, and sometimes you are inconvenienced.
Those are the places where you will be forced to rest, to repair, and to accept limits. In other words, the places where you will accidentally practise the parts of healthy living that never show up in your blood work.
How this shapes Atlas Cove Health
I’m not building a church. I’m building an operating system for health: Atlas Cove Health.
I’m not going to prescribe confession or Sunday Mass. I’m going to use diagnostics, clinical judgment and system design. But I am also going to say this, plainly: if we do not rebuild spaces that teach rest, limits and forgiveness, our health systems will keep firefighting damage that never needed to happen.
Your annual check-up will continue to say “within normal range” right up until the moment it doesn’t. The scanners will keep getting better, the drips more expensive, and the basic pattern will stay the same.
In Atlas Cove Health, “base of health” is defined as much by patterns as by numbers:
How many nights a week do you sleep enough?
Do you have three people you could call at 3 a.m. if life fell apart?
Does your week contain any real rest, or just collapse?
Are you living in permanent “one strike and you’re out” mode with everyone around you?
Labs matter. Imaging matters. But they are second-order. If your life is structurally insane, you cannot biohack your way out.
Finding the plot again
At a fundamental level, I do think we have lost the plot as a society.
We’ve convinced ourselves that a healthy life is eating vegetables, going to the gym, not smoking, and performing well at work. That is not a healthy life. It is a performance protocol.
We no longer know what rest really means. Working hard, coming home, and scrolling on your phone is not a yin activity. It is not rest. It is not recovery. Your limbs are still, but your brain is in a negative, agitated spiral. That is not relaxing; it is brain rot.
I am angry with the Church for having damaged its own credibility so badly that it no longer functions as a guide for most people on how to live a sane, healthy life. I am equally wary of a culture that hands that guiding role to algorithms and influencers instead.
The fortunate few are still being taught something deeper at home: what it means to rest, to take responsibility, to forgive and be forgiven. Those parents exist at every income level. This is not about wealth. Some families still carry a living tradition; many do not. There is no judgment in that observation. It is simply the landscape.
Where we go from here is a choice.
We can continue to live inside a story in which health is a checklist and the only real commandment is “be productive”. Or we can start, deliberately, to rebuild the thick, boring, protective structures that any long, sane life requires: shared rest, deep relationships, and the courage to repair instead of constantly starting over.
Your lab report cannot tell you whether you are living a life that makes sense.
For that, we will need better institutions — or we will have to become them ourselves.