Health is not a political issue, but sadly it has become so, as a way to divide people. Large food and pharmaceutical corporations have co-opted government policy. So much so that grown adults would rather defend seed oils and Ozempic than admit they’ve been sold a slow-motion suicide in a Happy Meal box.
It’s hard to even have conversations with people around health topics without someone getting offended or becoming emotional. Rational thinking and open dialogue surrounding the problems are the only way forward. Obesity is no longer a condition; it’s the default setting. Autoimmune diseases bloom like toxic flowers. Children present with type-2 diabetes that used to be called “adult onset.” Teen depression and anxiety charts climb in perfect lockstep with screen-time charts. We medicate the symptoms and call it progress. I often wonder what the hell happened and why so many fall into the trappings. People would rather defend the status quo than admit they have been duped. Is it a civilizational suicide by comfort?
History teaches us that when a civilization becomes reckless with its leisure time, it will decay from the inside and eventually no longer exist. All of the current problems, we did to ourselves. Willingly. We lined up for it like it was the last chopper out of Afghanistan.
Almost a century ago, in 1932, a physical educator named Jay B. Nash stood up and screamed into the wind. He saw a nation training itself to watch other people move, other people create, other people live. He saw muscles softening, attention spans splintering, civic life atrophying because citizens were too busy being entertained to participate in anything that mattered. In ancient Greece, leisure time was a sacred space where human beings became fully human. The concept of "school" and "leisure time" (Greek: scholē) are actually connected through a fascinating linguistic and cultural twist. The English word "school" comes from the ancient Greek word scholē, but in Greek, scholē originally meant "leisure" or "free time"—specifically, leisure time devoted to learning, discussion, and intellectual pursuits. This free time was considered the ideal condition for education, philosophy, exercise, and self-improvement. So scholē wasn’t laziness — it was leisure used for learning and personal growth.
In ancient Greece:
"I have scholē today" = A place to intentionally train the mind and body, discuss ideas until they catch fire, wrestle with poetry and geometry and the gods until the soul itself feels larger. Leisure was the furnace of excellence.
The linguistic irony is brutal: scholē → school → the place where leisure goes to die. We bend our spines to the shapes of question marks and wonder why the answers never come.
In short, people need to be taught how to use their leisure time and learn that there are positive and negative outcomes based on lifestyle choices.
In the 1950s, Nash published a model outlining appropriate use of leisure time. Leisure time meaning, time not sleeping, eating, or working. In the book “The Philosophy of Recreation and Leisure” he questioned whether Americans could be trusted with leisure time. The rise of industrialization meant more leisure time was created. With AI looming, we will be going through another shift of the work/leisure balance. We haven’t properly adapted to the first wave of industrialization and ways to sabotage our physical and mental health have only intensified.
Here are the levels of Nash’s pyramid.
Level 0 – The leisure of despair. Anti-social or harmful behavior (e.g., delinquency, crime, substance abuse).
Level 1 – Passive escape. “Killing time,” Nash called it. Endless sleep, binge-watching, doom-scrolling. The body inert, the mind on life-support.
Level 2 – Mild emotional spectatorship. You feel a flicker when your team scores, a tear during a movie. But you yourself have done nothing.
Level 3 – Active participation: mild emotional involvement (e.g., socializing, light games, playing the part).
Level 4 – Creative participation, The summit. Your hands shaping clay or digging a garden. Your body sprinting until lungs burn. Your voice singing harmony you invented five minutes ago. (e.g., arts, crafts, music, sports as a participant, building or making things).
Humans are most fulfilled when their bodies and minds are stimulated. It makes sense there would be widespread mental health issues when a large majority of people are spending time doing things that require no critical thought. Nash argued that ideal leisure should move people upward toward creativity and personal fulfillment rather than keeping them at the lower, passive, or destructive levels.
Nash also published a book called “Spectatoritis” in 1932, which was a critique of modern American society's growing tendency toward passive spectatorship rather than active participation, particularly in physical and recreational activities. He argued that the rise of commercialized entertainment, radio, automobiles, and professional sports was turning Americans into a nation of passive observers, leading to physical, mental, and social deterioration.
The book warns that this shift undermines personal health, community life, democratic participation, and character development, as people lose the benefits of direct involvement, creativity, and effort. I’ve read both of Nash’s books extremely slowly because the sentences and words are loaded.
Looking at current trends, it’s easy to see why there has been a decline in physical and mental health. People were not even caught up to how to appropriately use radio and TV, then we throw smart phones and social media into the mix. It’s a diabolical mix that has had consequences on society as a whole. Almost every trend Nash identified in 1932 has accelerated dramatically. We didn’t just become a nation of spectators—we became a planet of them, and the smartphone finished the job that radio and movies started. His diagnosis from 93 years ago reads like a description of 2025.
Fast-forward to 2025 and the prophecy is almost complete. The average American adult now surrenders more than 11 hours a day—roughly 75 % of conscious life—to media consumption. Eleven hours. That’s more waking time than a medieval peasant spent bent over a plow. Children 8–18 clock 7.5 hours outside of schoolwork, often in darkened bedrooms lit only by the cold blue glow of phones.. Their attention fractures into eight-second shards.
Youth sports participation in the U.S. has dropped significantly since the 1990s for most activities except elite/travel-team versions. The hyper specialization of one sport has not been good for kids. Adult recreational leagues have largely been replaced by watching professional leagues or fantasy sports (a perfect metaphor: you “play” by watching others).Influencer culture, where people watch others work out (fitness influencers), cook, travel, renovate houses, even parent. Participation is replaced by vicarious living.
The tragedy is that the solutions are embarrassingly simple and have been known for millennia: move your body vigorously every day until you are painted in sweat, eat food that your great-grandmother would recognize, make something with your hands that wasn’t there yesterday, go to bed when the sun drops and rise with it. But those solutions require admitting we were sold a lie: that passive consumption equals rest, that watching excellence is almost as good as pursuing it, that leisure is something that happens to us instead of something we do.Until we are willing to say that out loud—without defensiveness, without politicizing the human body itself—we will keep sleepwalking into softer, sicker versions of ourselves.
Nash ended Spectatoritis with a warning that still rings like a bell in an empty cathedral:
“A nation of spectators will eventually become a nation of invalids—physically, mentally, and morally.”
Look out the window, the invalids are here, waddlin’ through the food courts of Babylon, scrollin’ through the ruins of Rome on their phones.
It' s a good thing bones remember dancing and blood remembers flowing.
