Truth is a Health Practice
Stress is just the name we give it when we can’t say what’s true
Late one night in New York I sat on the bathroom floor of our apartment with the lights off.
Henry was maybe eight months old and fast asleep. I had somewhere around 2-3 drinks in me, which had become my reasonable way to end a Tuesday.
The city was doing what the city does at that hour, a steady buzz outside the window. And I was doing what I had gotten good at. Waiting for the feeling to pass.
I was telling myself I was the healthiest guy I knew. I had a decade of endurance training in my bones. I was hitting the boutique fitness classes hard in the city. I had a pretty stellar diet. And I could drone on about sleep architecture.
And yet I was medicating something I hadn’t named yet, in the dark (literally and figuratively), hoping my newish baby boy wouldn’t wake up and need me to be a person.
I’ve been thinking about those heavy nights a lot lately. Because they are the clearest picture I have of what it looks like when your outer life and your inner life stop talking to each other. When the performance gets so dialed in you stop noticing the gap between what you’re saying and what’s actually true.
I called it stress. I called it transition. I called it the price of building something.
What it was, was a lie I’d been telling myself every day, dressed up in the language of hustle and growth. And the harder I worked to manage the outside, the less I was willing to look at what was happening underneath.
That’s where modern life meets us. Right at that gap.
The world we live in right now is exquisitely, almost artistically, designed to keep us there.
Not because anyone decided that was the goal. But because the attention economy runs on one thing: keeping you in a state just agitated enough to keep scrolling, just stimulated enough to never quite land. The people who build the feeds and the algorithms and the infinite scroll understand dopamine better than most therapists do. They know the precise texture of the gap between what you have and what you think you should have, and they fill it, over and over, with content shaped exactly to your anxieties.
You open the app to kill thirty seconds. Forty minutes later you put the phone down feeling vaguely worse about your life without being able to say why.
That’s not an accident. That’s engineering.
What gets eroded, slowly and imperceptibly, is your access to what’s actually true for you. Your wants get replaced by manufactured ones. Your restlessness gets rerouted into consumption. The quiet that might let you hear something real never quite arrives.
So ask yourself honestly. When you reach for your phone, what are you actually hungry for?
Not the answer you’d give someone at a dinner party. The real one.
My guess is it’s not content. Not news. It’s some version of connection. Some evidence that you’re not alone in this, that what you’re feeling makes sense, that someone out there gets it. And the phone, for all its engineering, cannot give you that. It can simulate it. Likes instead of presence. Followers instead of friends. The structure of belonging with none of the weight.
We know this. We keep choosing it anyway. Because the real thing requires showing up, being uncertain, saying something that might not land. The scroll never rejects you. Real connection might.
The body registers that substitution. It keeps a running tab.
I know because I tried to outsmart it.
I spent years wearing biometric trackers on my wrist, watching my numbers like they were a verdict. Green meant I’d done enough. Red meant I needed to adjust. I built a whole system around those readings, tweaking sleep and training and nutrition like I was tuning an engine.
What my devices couldn’t see was what was actually driving the numbers. The ambient dread about money. The story I was telling myself about being behind. The version of myself I was performing at work, and the cost of holding that all day, and where that cost went when I finally got home.
It went somewhere. It always does.
Which is how you end up being impatient about shoes.
Hawk and Henry are eight and ten now, and there are mornings I hear something sharp come out of my mouth about slow breakfast or the volume of just existing as a kid, and I catch it a beat too late. I know in that moment it isn’t really about the shoes. It’s a leak. Something that needed a different exit and didn’t find one. What I actually needed to say was something about pressure, or fear, or the particular weight of building something you’re not sure is working. But I hadn’t said it, reflected it, or processed.
That’s what unexamined misalignment does. It doesn’t stay where you put it. It comes out messy.
This is what I mean when I say truth is a health practice.
Not a philosophical virtue. Not a therapy assignment. A daily, physical practice of closing the distance between what you’re actually experiencing and the story you’re willing to tell about it. To yourself, first. Before the managed version. Before the framing that makes it all look purposeful.
It’s harder than it sounds in an era built to keep that gap open. Where the incentive is always to perform a slightly better version of your life than the one you’re living. Where the tools in your pocket were designed by people whose business model depends on you never quite feeling settled.
But every time I’ve said the true thing instead of the comfortable one, something in my chest loosens.
That exhale is not small.
It might be the whole point.
