In the most health-obsessed society ever, all is not well. Health and wellness have become a modern fixation, driving multibillion-dollar industries that bank on people’s ongoing investment—mental, emotional, and financial—in endless quests to eat better, look younger, live longer, or simply suffer fewer symptoms. We encounter would-be bombshells of “breaking health news” on magazine covers, in TV stories, omnipresent advertising, and the daily deluge of viral online content, all pushing this or that mode of self-betterment. People do their best to keep up: taking supplements, joining yoga studios, serially switching diets, shelling out for genetic testing, strategizing to prevent cancer or dementia, and seeking medical advice or alternative therapies for maladies of the body, psyche, and soul.

And yet, our collective health is deteriorating.

What is happening? How are we to understand that in our modern world, at the pinnacle of medical ingenuity and sophistication, we are seeing more and more chronic physical diseases as well as afflictions such as mental illness and addiction? Moreover, how is it that we’re not more alarmed, if we notice at all? And how are we to find our way to preventing and healing the many ailments that assail us, even putting aside acute catastrophes such as the COVID-19 pandemic?

It has become increasingly clear that chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.

The phrase “a toxic culture” may suggest things like environmental pollutants, so prevalent since the dawn of the industrial age and so antagonistic to human health. From asbestos particles to carbon dioxide run amok, there is indeed no shortage of real, physical toxins in our midst. We could also understand “toxic” in its more contemporary, pop-psychological sense, as in the spread of negativity, distrust, hostility, and polarization that, no question, typify the present sociopolitical moment.

We can certainly fold these two meanings into our discussion, but a “toxic culture” can also characterize something even broader and more deeply rooted: the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.

That social life bears upon health is not a new discovery, but the recognition of it has never been more urgent. This is driven by the effects of burgeoning stress, inequality, and climate catastrophe, to name a few salient factors. Our concept of well-being must move from the individual to the global in every sense of that word. That is particularly so in this era of unprecedented change and challenge.

By its very nature, our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways, as they have done with increasing force over the past several decades. Here’s an analogy that might be helpful: In a laboratory, a culture is a biochemical broth custom-made to promote the development of this or that organism. Assuming the microbes in question start out with a clean bill of health and genetic fitness, a suitable and well-maintained culture should allow for their happy, healthy growth and proliferation. If the same organisms begin showing pathologies at unprecedented rates, or fail to thrive, it’s either because the culture has become contaminated or because it was the wrong mixture in the first place. Whichever the case, we could rightly call this a toxic culture—unsuitable for the creatures it is meant to support. Or worse: dangerous to their existence. It is the same with human societies. As the broadcaster, activist, and author Thom Hartmann asserts, “Culture can be healthy or toxic, nurturing or murderous.”

From a wellness perspective, our current culture is not conducive to health. The climate catastrophe already afflicting us has introduced an entirely new health hazard, a magnified version—if that is possible—of the existential threat that nuclear war has posed since Hiroshima. “Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed,” found the authors of a 2021 survey of the attitudes of over ten thousand individuals in forty-two countries. Along with a sense of betrayal and abandonment by governments and adults, such despondence and hopelessness “are chronic stressors which will have significant, long-lasting and incremental negative implications on the mental health of children and young people.”

Casting ourselves as the organisms in the laboratory analogy, these and other metrics indicate unmistakably that ours is a toxic culture. Worse yet, we have become accustomed—or perhaps better to say acculturated—to so much of what plagues us. It has become, for lack of a better word, normal.

In medical practice, the word “normal” denotes, among other things, the state of affairs we aim for, setting the boundaries delineating health from disease. “Normal levels” and “normal functioning” are our goal when we apply treatments or remedies. We also gauge success or failure against “statistical norms”; we reassure worried patients that this symptom or that side effect is completely normal, as in “to be expected.” These are all specific and legitimate uses of the word, enabling us to assess situations realistically so that we can aim our efforts appropriately.

However, “normal” has taken on a more insidious meaning that, far from helping us progress toward a healthier future, cuts such an endeavor off at the pass. For better or worse, humans have a genius for getting used to things, especially when the changes are incremental. The newfangled verb “to normalize” refers to the mechanism by which something previously aberrant becomes normal enough that it passes beneath our radar. On a societal level, then, “normal” often means “nothing to see here”: all systems are functioning as they should, no further inquiry needed.

The truth is quite different.

The late David Foster Wallace, master wordsmith, author, and essayist, once opened a commencement speech with a droll parable that well illustrates the trouble with normality. The story concerns two fish crossing aquatic paths with an elder of their species, who greets them jovially: “‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” The point Wallace wanted to leave his audience pondering was that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones hardest to see and talk about.” On its surface, he allowed, that might sound like “a banal platitude” but “in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.”

Indeed, the lives and deaths of individual human beings—their quality and in many cases their duration—are intimately bound up with the aspects of modern society that are “hardest to see and talk about”; phenomena that are, like water to fish, both too vast and too near to be appreciated. In other words, those features of daily life that appear to us now as normal are the ones crying out the loudest for our scrutiny. Much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural, and meeting modern society’s criteria for normality often means conforming to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our Nature-given needs—which is to say, unhealthy and harmful on the physiological, mental, and even spiritual levels.

By looking soberly at what we have normalized about health and illness, and realizing that it is not, in fact, the way things are meant or fated to be, there arises the possibility of returning to what Nature has always intended for us. Healing—a word that, at its root, means “returning to wholeness”—can begin once we resolve to see clearly how things are. Each of us contains as-yet-unimagined possibilities for wellness, possibilities that reveal themselves only when we face and debunk the misleading myths about normality to which we have become passively accustomed. If that is true for us as individuals, it must also be true for us as a society.

Healing is not guaranteed, but it is available. It is no exaggeration to say at this point in Earth’s history that it is also required. Everything we have seen and learned over the years gives us confidence that we have it in us.