Can Eating More Protein Fix Our Digital Malaise?

We live in an era of analog nostalgia. Today’s tech critics, both on the right and the left, worry that the internet, social media, smartphones, and artificial intelligence will, indeed already are, robbing people of their humanity, their essential connection to the physical world.

For most of human history, they say, experience required physical presence. As conservative writer Christine Rosen has noted, you had to be there was a common cultural refrain, practically a cliché, capturing the sense that physical presence in a particular place at a particular time was necessary to appreciate an event’s experiential power. In a world of take-it-for-granted virtual abundance, this sort of thrilling analog scarcity can seem more rare than ever.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat laments the way that “digital life and digital existence” makes “normal, basic modes of cultural transmission” between generations much more difficult. Cultural analysts like Ted Gioia complain about the stultifying, same-ifying effects of artificial intelligence on mass culture, especially music and movies. Writers at The Atlantic worry about the decline of in-person socializing and the resulting “party deficit” while fanning stats to back up their arguments. We live in an “anti-social century.” Rosen’s book-length treatment of this idea, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, argues for a return to embodiment. Author Paul Kingsnorth recently released Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, billed as “a spiritual manual for dissidents in this technological age.”

To some degree, all of these writers have a point: The old familiar forms of popular culture—especially movies, music, and books—have become more dependent on chasing algorithmic success as their fortunes have declined, which reduces variance. People, especially young adults, really are socializing less, and virtual interactions have replaced many older modes of communication and commerce. All of this has had real downstream effects on culture and politics. I have, from time to time, griped about the flattening effects of digital existence myself. If nothing else, it’s clear that the internet, social media, and mobile phones have, in a short time, radically altered how humans interact with each other and with culture.

But to focus entirely on what digitalization has diminished is to miss the countervailing cultural forces that have risen up in response. For what those worried about the disembodying effects of digital technology have tended to overlook are, well, bodies.

Bodies—muscles, bones, skin, and hair, as well as the food and sustenance we feed them with—are the last realm of analog scarcity. And in a digitally mediated world, our physical selves have more cultural prominence than ever. More and more, body culture is culture. 

Movies, music, and books still have their devotees—I am one of them—but live events, workout cults, obnoxiously expensive restaurants, diet-and-nutrition systems, and world travel increasingly consume the mindshare of today’s cultural elite. The analog world, the embodied world of physical scarcity, is still asserting itself—just not in the forms of the past.

Indeed, this began before the internet-and-smartphones digital revolution really took hold. Before Gen Z, before even Millennials, hit the scene, there was a small cadre of workout fanatics who were fit before fitness became mainstream. In 1978, New York profiled “The Physical Elite,” an “intimidating” new generation of activity obsessives who embraced bodily upkeep and transformation through sport and exercise. “They run. They work out. They think they’re better than you are,” the magazine’s cover declared. It’s easy to forget, but as recently as 50 years ago, exercise—the regular, intentional, structured physical activity that we now think of as a basic part of a healthy lifestyle—was a niche pursuit, and mostly the domain of the high-energy young.

Today, the idea of exercise is not nearly so intimidating. If anything, recreational physical activity is more popular than ever, and younger adults have embraced sport and exercise with increasing vigor. More than 50 percent of Gen Xers have joined a gym. More than 70 percent of millennials and Gen Zers have memberships. Data from the American Time Use survey shows that in nearly all age groups, participation in sports has increased. The wellness industry, which includes fitness and other forms of bodily self-care and pampering, has been estimated at $6.8 trillion, more than the gross domestic product of most countries.

People may not be partying or hoarding compact discs. But they’re working out. Indeed, there is some anecdotal evidence suggesting that one is a direct result of the other. Peak hours for restaurant reservations have shifted to earlier in the evening, with younger adults embracing 6 p.m. dinners. Discussion forums exploring the decline in partying invariably include gripes that it’s hard to get friends to stay out late and party because they are all going to sleep early in order to make their morning exercise classes. It’s not just phones keeping young people from partying; it’s pilates.

Food culture, meanwhile, has become a mass phenomenon in a way that resembles, and has likely displaced, old fandoms built around music and movies. There may be fewer cinephiles and High Fidelity–style pop music junkies, but there are more foodies. Restaurant openings are major news events, and elite chefs and restaurateurs are followed with the sort of fannishness that used to mark up-and-coming bands and bestselling literary authors. The same East Coast urban professionals who used to open conversations with “Have you read…?” now start with “Have you eaten at…?”

I write frequently about cocktails, and the same sort of dynamic applies. As recently as the 1990s, there was simply no concept of a “cocktail nerd” with an encyclopedic knowledge and highly opinionated sensibility. Yet music nerds who could rattle off production credits and recording-equipment trivia and who had highly idiosyncratic personal ranking systems were common enough that John Cusack starred in a movie about them.

Today, there are multiple competing rankings of high-end cocktail bars, and the most celebrated establishments sometimes have lines that remind me nothing so much as the lines to get into indie rock shows in my 20s. People still want a meatspace, IRL experience, a sense of being there, in the room, experiencing the art in its most potent, most direct form. Sometimes they even want one where phones and other digital distractions are prohibited. And the most devoted fans have become High Fidelity types, obsessed with amassing knowledge, lore, factual detail, and translating that knowledge into opinionated list making.

One measure of the cultural intensity of these obsessions is the prominence of their critics. Publications are cutting back on traditional reviews of dance, theater, music, and movies, often to shrugs from readers who aren’t highly invested in the arts. But when The New York Times announced two new restaurant critics earlier this year, there was an outpouring of secondary commentary. Meanwhile, the Times‘ Cooking app is, by all accounts, a huge success. Food coverage—whether it’s restaurant reviews or how-to guides or reported essays about the remarkable popularity of the Honey Duece—is more culturally central than ever.

This, in turn, has created new subcultures and new forms of self-definition. In the 1990s, when I went to high school, it was common for young people to define and categorize themselves by their musical tastes. There were punks and goths and hip-hop heads and country gals; they dressed a certain way, espoused certain beliefs about the world, and adopted certain behavioral and attitudinal tics to mark themselves as part of some cultural movement, or some subfaction of it.

Music-based cultural groupings haven’t entirely disappeared. But today’s young adults are more likely than previous generations to define themselves by their bodily habits. You have Rippetoe-d lift bros and pilates girlies, Huberman heads and super-marathoners, challenge course junkies and GoRuck adventurers.

Invariably, these fitness subcultures have a lot of opinions on food, which I am only sort of kidding when I say can mostly be summarized as consume more protein. And that, in turn, has given rise to a new subculture of consumer snacks mavens, some of whom seem just as obsessed with the marketing plans and, it pains me to use these words, brand storytelling of various smoothies and muscle building chocolate bars as with the actual products themselves. Protein snacks are big business, and when major mergers and acquisitions occur, they are covered with feverish, fannish fascination, much like the rock star celebrities of the analog era. Reading coverage of these deals reminds me of reading the comic book bible Wizard or the Hollywood-focused glossy Premiere in the 1990s; the subject is different, but fundamentally, it’s the same desire to praise, criticize, speculate, and pick over every detail.

Speaking of celebrities and bodies, today’s wellness and beauty brands are as or more important to celebrity images and fortunes as their traditional pop culture ventures. Gwyneth Paltrow was once an above-the-line movie star, but she made her fortune, and her legacy, on the health and wellness brand Goop, which helped pave the way for today’s celebrity-influencer brands. Hailey Bieber is a model and the child of actor Stephen Baldwin, who married pop singer Justin Bieber. But her biggest claim to both fame and fortune is the beauty brand Rhode, which was acquired for $1 billion earlier this year.

Men are getting into the action, too: Bryan Johnson made the better part of a $1 billion fortune on a tech venture built around measuring brain waves, but he didn’t become famous until he became a longevity influencer devoted to exploring ways to defy aging. Whether or not he’ll actually live longer is an open question, but there’s no question that he’s undergone a remarkable physical transformation. Harris Dickinson costarred in a well-reviewed movie with Nicole Kidman last Christmas, but he’s been far more visible this year thanks to an ad campaign with Rhode, showing off his unnaturally smooth and dewy forehead. Our cultural milieu may be increasingly inhuman and digital. But everyone wants their very human body to look incredible at the next party they don’t go to.

None of these cultural nexuses fully satisfies critics’ yearning for analog nostalgia. The pop culture world in which today’s grumpy middle-aged writers—and I include myself in that group—grew up has mutated and diminished. And if you’ve been to a gym recently, well, you know that outside the swimming pool, exercise isn’t exactly causing younger generations to log off. I’m only partially kidding when I say I suspect that lifting is becoming more popular because you can check your phone between sets.

But gyms do help people reconnect with their bodies, even if they’re scrolling while they grunt. And as for those who pine for pop culture’s analog past, there’s a small revival underway there too: The best-selling physical media format for music today is the record—to the point where even big box holdovers from the ’90s like Barnes and Noble now have vinyl music sections. Print magazine subscriptions are in decline overall, but there’s a boom in small-run, high-quality special editions for everything from smart-set New York literary Substacks to Conde Nast-backed music-review stalwarts. Movies may be mostly a digital, streaming affair these days, but over the summer, tickets for rare 70mm film showings of Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey sold out almost instantly. The movie doesn’t come out until next year.

Most people buying tickets to Nolan’s analog-awe screenings probably aren’t principled digital dissidents opting out of online life. The marketing campaigns powering these brands, the comments sections roasting food influencers, the cooking explainer videos, the message boards about muscle building—these are all happening online, because that’s where and how people talk about the things they are doing.

But the focus, the prize, the priority, is the scarce analog resource: the body. This is, in its own way, a kind of embodiment. It’s just happening in spaces and places where critics who grew up under a certain cultural hierarchy aren’t looking, because they aren’t familiar.

There’s only one Harris Dickinson forehead. You can’t stream a Honey Deuce. And as long as there are foreheads, and Honey Deuces, and skin and hair and muscles and bodies—messy, physical, analog, human bodies—that we can’t fully escape, there will inevitably be an analog, embodied component to our lives.

If anything, virtual life makes those bodies more obviously valuable, more important, more essential to our particular and individual human experiences. In a digital world, in a digital culture, maybe you don’t “have to be there.” But in your body, well, there’s no choice. You always are.