cultural fitness
Modern culture requires a type of fitness we don’t have.
We know how our culture operates by now. The incentives. The algorithms. The business models built on our attention and insecurity. But knowing what’s broken doesn’t protect you from it.
You can understand the feed economy and still doom scroll. You can see the outrage machine clear as day and still feel your nervous system spike when you open the app. You can recognize you’re being manipulated and get pulled in anyway.
Physical fitness prepares you for the gym. Mental fitness prepares you for complex problems. But modern culture demands something neither addresses: the ability to stay grounded inside a system designed to destabilize you.
That’s what I mean by cultural fitness — the capacity to stay steady, principled, and constructive when everything around you is optimized to make you reactive, distracted, or numb.
And here’s why it matters: cultural fitness isn’t self-improvement for its own sake. It’s about contribution.
We’re all part of a system, and the state you operate from ripples outward. Modern culture looks the way it does because so many of us are distracted, burned out, and living on borrowed values. Cultural fitness is about changing what you bring into that system. And when enough people build this capacity, the culture starts to move.
Like any fitness, this requires deliberate practice. Four trainable disciplines:
discernment — what you take seriously
Most of us are living inside other people’s version of the world — reacting to what the algorithm surfaces, caring about what the feed tells us is urgent. Discernment is choosing what actually deserves your attention and emotional energy. It’s protecting your bandwidth from stressors and doom loops. It’s the discipline of knowing what’s yours to care about — and what isn’t.
capacity — what you can handle
Culture runs hot. Family life is demanding. Work is nonstop. If your nervous system isn’t trained for this, you’ll swing between reactivity and total shutdown — and neither is useful. Capacity is your ability to stay regulated when pressure builds. This is body work as much as mind work: breath, movement, rest, etc. You can’t think clearly from fight-or-flight. Steadiness is a prerequisite for everything else.
conviction — what you stand for
Modern culture makes it too easy to rent your moral compass from your feed or your tribe. But borrowed values and perspectives collapse under pressure every time. Conviction means doing the work to know what you actually believe and why – then letting those principles govern how you live. Not performing them. Not making them rigid. Just being clear and grounded in what you believe, and thinking for yourself.
fluency — what you know
You can’t navigate a system you don’t understand. Most people drift through culture reacting to forces they’ve never really examined — media incentives, political dynamics, economic pressures, power structures. Fluency means building a working understanding of how the world actually operates so you’re not continuously blindsided. So you can see the pattern behind the chaos and make smarter choices about where to put your energy.
These disciplines build the foundation that makes real contribution possible — the kind that creates meaning in your life and shifts the culture around you.
No one’s coming to fix the world for you. But you can train yourself to move through it better – grounded and capable.
j