My New Book: Ultra-Processed Life

Here is the book's Introduction.

I completed my new book Ultra-Processed Life, and am offering it to you, my core supporters / subscribers, for $10 for the paperback edition and $5 for the Kindle ebook edition.

These are 30% discounts off the list price ($15 print, $6.95 ebook). This subscriber-only discounts end Sunday night, 6/22/25.

Given the rising cost of living, I'm endeavoring to keep the price of my books as low as possible while still earning a few dollars of royalty.
KINDLE edition
PAPERBACK edition

The Introduction and first chapter are available in PDF format.

Here is the book's Introduction:

Ultra-Processed Life is my term for everything that is analogous to ultra-processed snacks: attractively marketed, instantly alluring, easy to consume, addictive by design, tasty in the moment but harmful over time, its origins a black box of unknown processes, the brightly colored product bearing no resemblance to the real-world ingredients, an idealized form of what is inherently imperfect, untethered from the natural world or the future, disconnected not just from the consequences of our consuming the snack but disconnected from the consequences unleashed by those consequences.

This book recounts my journey of discovery of how our everyday realm has drifted away from the foundations of human life and happiness without our noticing: the everyday realm is the river and we’re the fish oblivious of the water. This book charts my exploration of what’s so normal we don’t even see it for what it is.

Here's an analogy. Some years ago, my wife and I camped in the Rockefeller Grove redwood forest, the largest contiguous stand of old-growth coast redwoods in the world, located in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California. This native forest bears no resemblance to the typical forests one drives through on interstate highways, which are artificial forests planted after the native forest was clearcut.

The native forest is an awe-inspiring, unforgettable experience. The artificial forest is superficially natural but devoid of the magic, grandeur and diverse life of the native forest. If we’ve never experienced the native forest, we’re not even aware of the artificiality of the tree-farm forest.

A tropical forest offers another analogy. The visitor who drives through a jungle in Hawaii is thrilled by the towering trees and climbing vines. But what the visitor doesn’t know is this forest is composed of introduced species that were so successfully invasive that they replaced most of the native species. Little remains of the native jungle.

Since I’ve lived in Hawaii off and on since the age of fifteen, I’ve slowly learned about the native flora. Though visitors don’t realize this, it’s rare to spot a native tree along island highways.

Ultra-Processed Life is an extremely successful invasive, and it’s replaced the native ecosystem of human life so completely that we’re no longer even aware of the change.

If we’re healthy and happy, who cares if the forest is a tree farm? That’s a good question. But are we happy and healthy? No objective observer would say that a society in which half the people are at risk of metabolic disorders is healthy. And if we’re so happy, then why is the happiness and wellness industry—a sector that didn’t exist 25 years ago-- booming? If we were actually happy and healthy, we’d have no need for a wellness industry.

What we observe is dissatisfaction, stress, depression, anxiety, burnout and financial precarity. These are not signs of a happy, healthy high quality of life.

If we’re not happy and fulfilled, the problem is us: this is the assumption. But what if the source of our unhappiness and dis-ease is the river we’re swimming in?

The starting point of any solution is to correctly diagnose the problem, and that’s the purpose of this book.

As with many others, the catalyst for my exploration was a life-threatening medical crisis that did not have a specific cause. But it was clear that diet and stress were risk factors. When my wife and I starting tugging on the diet string, we found it was connected to everything else in our lives. As in an ecosystem, there are no isolated factors: everything’s connected to everything else, and every element is vital to the whole.

This led me to wonder if our entire way of life is like an ultra-processed snack: tasty but not healthy, edible but stripped of the nutrients we need to be healthy, addictive by design.

For what’s disturbingly obvious is the addictive nature of Ultra-Processed Life: it’s captivating by design. Once we taste the snack, pick up the phone, or start scrolling on social media, we’re hooked.

More subtly, the many downsides of Ultra-Processed Life drive us to seek the comfort, relief and escape of Ultra-Processed Life’s perverse circle of mal-adaptation: pressured and drained, we seek the comforts of addictive-by-design distractions.

Even a cursory search reveals a long list of things people report as addictive: not just alcohol, tobacco and drugs, but food, gaming, pornography, dating apps, social media, smartphones, work, the approval of others, working out and even sleeping.

What’s striking is how these are all escapes from intolerable situations or pressures. Equally striking is how Ultra-Processed Life transforms natural activities such as eating, sleeping and romance into profitable addictions—not profitable for the addict, but profitable for the purveyor of the products and services.

Addiction is not happiness, and this raises questions about the nature of Ultra-Processed Life that we must answer.

My second observation was that Ultra-Processed Life and the tangible world (what I call the Real World and Real Life) are not either/or. Ultra-Processed Life seeps into the stitching of our lives so incrementally and so effortlessly that we don’t notice the transformation, just as an aggressive invasive vine takes over a native forest.

Our everyday life continues on seemingly unchanged, but the spaces between our real-world interactions are now filled by Ultra-Processed Life.

We go to the supermarket the same way we’ve done for years, but the aisles and our carts are now filled with ultra-processed foods. We wait in line the same way, but now we’re engrossed in our phone. We get a notification that someone “liked” the photo we posted on social media and feel gratified, for this affirms that we’re worthy of attention in the virtual realm.

The everywhere we go ubiquity of this personal applause and engagement is the source of social media’s overwhelming success, for it activates a profound emotional response—in effect, giving us permission to “like” ourselves.
Our everyday lives are still cycles of the same activities—we go to class or work, eat lunch, go shopping and drive home—but many of our experiences of these activities and the spaces between them are now extraordinarily different in ways we no longer notice because they’re now normal life.

This Ultra-Processed Life has been normalized to the point that many of us have little experience or memory of the pre-processed world. We know of it only as the bits we’re replacing with the conveniences of an Ultra-Processed Life without realizing what’s being traded away.

Why expend all that effort and time making dinner with real ingredients when we can pop an ultra-processed meal in the microwave and be eating dinner in from of a screen in a few minutes?

This constant replacement of real-world tasks with novel conveniences and tedium with stimulating distractions is not just normalized, it’s hyper-normalized: we’ve not just habituated to the feel good now bewitchment of Ultra-Processed Life, we’ve lost our taste for unprocessed life.

In this hyper-normalized state, we know it’s bad for us but we’re still drawn to Ultra-Processed Life like moths to a flame. Our awareness of the downsides doesn’t lessen its bewitchment. Rather, everyone knows it’s not healthy—those keeping the flame glowing brightly and everyone circling it--and this awareness has been normalized, too: we all accept this bewitchment as normal life.

How did Ultra-Processed Life bewitch humanity with such stealth without us noticing? How did it become not just normalized, but hyper-normalized, so we accept it even though we know it’s not healthy for us?

If we step back and observe, one point stands out: human nature hasn’t changed. What changed was technology’s power to exploit the very hard-wired traits that served our survival so successfully for millennia.

The first step in understanding what’s changed is to observe Ultra-Processed Life’s complex machinery of bewitchment.

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CHS NOTE: I understand some readers object to paywalled posts, so please note that my weekday posts are free and I reserve my weekend Musings Report for subscribers. Hopefully this mix makes sense in light of the fact that writing is my only paid work/job. I am grateful for your readership and blessed by your financial support.