Has Modern Man REALLY Become Weak?

On screens, survival, and the fairy tale that freedom is our birthright

Photo by Evgeniy Beloshytskiy on Unsplash

The modern world is weak. People have become addicted to screens. They work far too much while being taxed to the bone. If you try to live as a free and independent man or woman, you will probably be called toxic or difficult at the very least. And you are not supposed to complain. And when you start feeling a little bad about your situation, guess what? There is a pill for that.

— Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen

A lot of people do seem to be addicted to screens, whether it is the television, a computer, or their phone. I’m confronted with that image almost immediately whenever I go outside. People walk down the street with their heads lowered, staring at their phones. When I glance through people’s windows, most of them seem to be sitting on the sofa watching television with a laptop on their lap, or they are staring at their phones as well.

I spend a lot of time looking at screens too. During the day that’s unavoidable because I have an office job, so I can already tick off eight hours. I also have digital hobbies, such as writing and gaming. I play games occasionally, perhaps once or twice a week. Writing, though? I do that every day. I do not write with a pen in a notebook. I use a laptop, so yes, that counts as screen time too.

Would I consider myself addicted?

Addiction is a strong word. I’m no expert on the subject, but when I hear the word “addiction,” I also think of withdrawal symptoms. When I go for a walk, go running, or head to the gym, I cannot say that I begin experiencing withdrawal symptoms within a short period of time. During the summer, I can sit outside in the garden and play a game of cards without feeling uncomfortable. When I’m on holiday, I spend very little time involved in screen-related activities at all. Sometimes I even sit on the sofa and simply get lost in thought or have a long conversation with my wife.

That does not change the fact that screens remain a major source of entertainment for me.

I have an understanding of why Bjorn connects screen time with weakness, although I suspect he is talking less about physical weakness and more about mental weakness. You might assume that more screen time automatically means less physical activity, but someone could just as easily spend the entire evening sitting on the sofa talking to another person or reading a book. I’m therefore careful about making that kind of claim.

You may also be familiar with the saying, “People usually choose the path of least resistance.” We often prefer not doing things over doing them, right? At least when those things do not immediately give us pleasure or gratification.

I also started thinking about how much people consume that contributes very little to their mental wellbeing or inner peace. The news is usually disturbing, people on the internet say all kinds of nonsense, and social media hardly seems to be making us any better. Social media was supposed to connect people, and I understand how it can do that for relatives or friends living abroad, but within our own regions, I think it has created an enormous divide between people. We visit each other less and barely speak because everything can already be followed through social media.

Sometimes I miss the days when you had a physical photo album printed and showed it to people who came to visit. You would personally tell them about your memories. Your stories.

Now people scroll past those same memories, and within seconds they have forgotten them because the next thing has already appeared on their screen. They will never hear the way you told the story. Yet your personality is often the part that stays with someone.

Perhaps this is another example of choosing the path of least resistance. Uploading a few photographs takes almost no effort. You do not even need to write the accompanying story yourself anymore. Give AI a few keywords and it will generate something suitable. Zero effort.

Things are rather different when somebody visits your home. You may have to go to the shop to buy food and drinks. Those things then have to be served. Your house needs to be reasonably tidy, and on top of all that, you are expected to communicate yourself. After an hour or two, you’re mentally exhausted, send your visitors home, and spend the remainder of the day supposedly recovering with the help of screen time because that is considered “relaxing.”

Of course, all of this may simply exist in my imagination. Perhaps none of it applies to you personally, and that’s perfectly fine. Maybe this is part of what Bjorn is referring to, because I think plenty of people genuinely enjoy a good series, film, or something similar. It certainly can be relaxing after receiving visitors or after a day at work or school. Without consciously questioning it, you might assume that it genuinely contributes to your inner peace.

Or is something deeper going on?

Are these secretly just distractions because people cannot bear sitting with themselves or with other people? Are they ways of preventing people from paying attention to themselves? Is this how governments try to tame their citizens, keeping them in a kind of captivity where they never even begin thinking about a freer life, allowing the system to continue to be fed?

“Jesus Wes, you sound like a conspiracy theorist,” my ego says. “Is this supposed to be freedom?”

Well, what is “freedom” anyway?

I’m not even sure whether freedom truly exists. At least not while we live in a society in which we all depend on one another. When the baker does not do his job, you cannot buy bread. When the butcher does not slaughter animals, you cannot buy meat. When farmers stop keeping cows, you cannot buy dairy products. When nobody works in a shop, you cannot buy groceries. When no one maintains the water treatment facilities, no water comes out of the tap (at least here in the Netherlands we can drink water from the tap).

The chain continues almost endlessly.

As long as you cannot live a completely self-sufficient life, you cannot be completely free either. Or is that actually freedom?

The next question is whether you would even want that. Even when you are self-sufficient, you are not truly ‘free’ because you become responsible for providing absolutely everything for yourself. The entire chain that society usually keeps running together would suddenly rest on your shoulders alone.

That sounds impossible to me. At least in this society and with my current knowledge.

And when you become ill, there probably will not be a shaman nearby who can hopefully get you back on your feet with primitive medical knowledge and a handful of herbs. Although we are not completely free within modern society, our chances of living long and healthy lives are considerably greater than those of someone attempting to exist entirely outside the system.

We need one another. As individuals, we are nothing.

To me, freedom is mainly something that takes place within the mind. It’s a way of thinking. A kind of ease. It means worrying less and giving up your resistance to what is.

Bjorn also says:

Life is not supposed to be easy.

Yet collectively, we seem to believe that it should be.

Sometimes I’ve appeared to be so deeply conditioned that I believed life’s supposed to resemble a fairy tale. That we should be walking around free and naked like Adam and Eve, picking both fruit and the day whenever we feel like it. That we are not supposed to survive, but supposed to live.

I think that may be the greatest fairy tale of all: the belief that freedom and having no obligations are our birthright. I have started thinking rather differently about that, dear reader.

I believe the opposite may be true.

Survival is what we do. Living is surviving because life includes everything. All the pleasant things and all the terrible ones. Nature has no fixed rulebook describing how any of this is supposed to be. Nature is simply nature, while we humans use our brains to assign meaning to everything. That is where I think things go “wrong,” although “wrong” is once again a meaning I have assigned myself. Everything we believe about how life should be was invented by us.

That’s why I find it valuable to pause during the moments when life happens to go my way and feel grateful for them. Life itself is merciless and incredibly harsh. It does not favour anyone. It simply happens.

The individual is the only one capable of granting favour.

We can complain about our lives and our governments as much as we like, but I’m still grateful that I can buy groceries, that I have a roof over my head, that I can visit a doctor when I do not feel well, and that I can call emergency services when there’s an emergency. I would add the nuance that we certainly do not need a pill for absolutely everything. Regular exercise, a resilient mind, and paying a little attention to what you eat can already take you a long way.

I do not believe in an independent life because we humans will always depend on something or someone. We did not survive until this point in history by doing everything alone. We survived through cooperation. Together, we created all of this, both the good and the bad.

And we are still here.

It is unfortunate that the world contains so much division. World leaders and governments certainly share responsibility for that and for plenty of other suffering, but we have no control over external circumstances. As the Stoics used to say, you cannot control what happens to you, but you can influence your response and your judgement of it.

That seems like a good place to begin.

After all, this is your experience of being alive.

Would it not be interesting to examine life properly for once? Perhaps the most interesting question is therefore not how we become independent, but what freedom can still mean once we acknowledge that we need one another.

© 2026 Wesley van Peer. All rights reserved.

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