Junk Food for the Soul

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

How ideology, distraction, and emotional hunger are devouring us from the inside out

We live in the land of plenty, and yet we’re starving, not for food exactly, though our diets are often nutritionally bankrupt, but for meaning, for truth, for something that actually nourishes the soul. Despite unlimited access to information, entertainment, and education, we scroll and scroll, stuffing our psyches with processed outrage and artificial virtue, hoping it will fill the growing void. But it never does. It can’t. Because it was never meant to. Maybe in the beginning it was a place for genuine connection and sharing, but now? It feels more like vast wasteland of ultra processed content; a digital buffet of empty calories dressed up to look fulfilling. It’s like walking into a grocery store and seeing aisle after aisle filled with cartoon mascots plastered on the most chemically engineered slop imaginable, with ingredient lists as long as a CVS receipt you can’t pronounce and enough sugar, and salt to tranquilize a Trojan horse...keep reading, you’ll see.

Meanwhile, the real food, the good stuff, is shoved to the fringes, hidden behind a towering display advertising whatever horror they’ve decided to flavor this week’s snack abomination that seems to mutate in size and flavor combination. If you’ve tried finding a normal Reese’s cup, you know what I’m talking about. Even the produce is soaked in poison designed to preserve appearance and destroy vitality. Most of the cases are filled with food that’s been so distorted and processed, it’s completely void of any nutritional value. You have to hunt for the actual food, and when you finally find it, it’s a sad little corner of overpriced organic fruit tucked beside a freezer full of lies.

Our current diet of distress, salaciousness, and rage bait isn’t remotely nourishing. It fills us with what is essentially junk food for the soul. And it’s everywhere we look. So why do we consume things that make us spiritually sick? Why do we cling so stubbornly, bordering on religious devotion, to what makes us unwell individually & collectively? Because, much like the cheap, easily accessible snacks on every shelf or next to the register that speak to our desire for a little treat, this content is the easiest to find and the fastest to consume, no matter how nutrient deficient it is for the mind, body, and soul. We are seduced by the sugary empty calories of the social media cycle, often rushing to the comments to read the unhinged rants between strangers and bots. And we wonder why we’re sick, angry, and still starving.

That’s why I titled this essay Junk Food for the Soul, a playful and somewhat sarcastic take on the Chicken Soup for the Soul books that were everywhere the ’90s along with Pure Moods and photos of babies in buckets. Same vibe. Only this time, instead of warm spoonfuls of comfort in story form, we’re talking about the sugary, seductive emptiness we keep consuming via our modern hyper-connectivity, hoping it might feed the never ending hunger. We gorge ourselves on gluttonous buffets of ignorance, self-righteousness and outright lies, like semi-feral, soft-parented toddlers gleefully shoveling obscene amounts of sugar into their pre-diabetic mouths. And when someone dares to swap the candy for something nourishing, a carrot, or even sweet summer grapes crisp from the fridge, or in the instance of the ideologically captured, an alternative perspective, a nuanced take, or even abject truth, the child thrashes and howls like a castrated bull, offended by the mere suggestion of losing their beloved diet of sugar, chemicals and saturated fats. They don’t understand you’re trying to help. They act as if you’re trying to kill them, screaming like a deranged choir of banshees. They prefer the high of the unhealthy sugar rush to anything else, and so all too often, we indulge the sugar-laden tantrum.

Did I lose you with my visceral metaphor? I hope not. But if I did, don’t worry, it gets less aggressive and more meaningful and mythical if you keep reading. Part of the reason for painting such a grotesque image is because we’ve become so desensitized that subtlety doesn’t always reach us anymore. Our taste buds, like our ability to discern fact from fiction, is polluted or even destroyed. Just like junk food dulls the tongue, endless digital junk dulls the mind and the spirit. Our senses recalibrate to the artificial, to the overstimulating, to the chemically enhanced. This is why people who eat processed food regularly think real food is bland. Their taste has been altered and they often can’t appreciate the subtle nuance of real, honest flavor. And the same is happening to our minds. To our hearts. To our spiritual appetite. We need more spice, more drama, more noise to feel anything at all, and that’s exactly the trap. The more we consume, the less we notice we’re not actually being fed anything of value.

This is what truth looks like to those addicted to lies. They would rather rot from the inside out than admit they were wrong or mislead. Why is it so hard to admit we are wrong or that we’ve been lied to? I believe the reason so many people refuse to stop consuming junk is because to do so would mean facing the unbearable truth, that what they cling to, what they love, is the very thing destroying them. When the poison tastes better than the cure, it can be hard to walk away or even admit you’ve got a problem. This isn’t to say we have to never consume anything bad for us, but the problem happens when we can’t stop ourselves, when a little taste turns into full blown addiction. And while many of us grew up with Wilford Brimley warning us about diabetes, what we’re facing now is something far more subtle and far more insidious. A kind of psychic rot, a slow-drip self-erasure dressed up in dopamine.

Cassandra mourns the destruction of Troy, by Jan Swart van Groningen

The Greeks understood this pattern. They told stories about it. Cassandra was a prophet, given the gift of foresight by Apollo, who then cursed her when she wouldn’t give in to his, uh, demands. And as I’m sure you may realize by now, the Greek gods were not the biggest fans of being embarrassed, one-upped, or told no. I’m sure we all know people like this in our modern lives, so I’m sure you can understand Cassandra’s plight. But she stuck to her own morality, and for that, she was punished. The curse was profound and prophetic. She would still see the truth, still speak the truth, but no one would believe her. I think a lot of us can understand Cassandra’s and her inevitable frustration of never being listened to, despite her knowing the truth. But the people didn’t want truth any more than a sugar addict wants to trade their candy for cucumbers. Our brains are hard-wired for pleasure because we’re still running on hunter-gatherer hardware despite the never-ending convenience software updates of our modern lives.

Cassandra saw the end of Troy before it came. She warned them that Paris bringing Helen home would bring ruin. She told them the Greeks were lying in wait. She told them not to trust that absurdly large wooden horse left at their gate as a sign of generosity or surrender. She begged them not to bring it in. No one listened. They laughed at this crazy woman for daring to question the accepted narrative, despite it being a lie. They called her unhinged, too emotional, attention-seeking. But of course, she was right. The Trojans foolishly, and in my imagination, gleefully rolled the giant horse - filled with soldiers mind you - inside anyway, threw a party, and passed out drunk. That night, the Greek soldiers hidden inside the horse climbed out, opened the gates, and let the army in. Troy was burned to the ground. Cassandra was dragged off as a war prize. The people who mocked her died.

That was the tragedy. Not that she was wrong, but that the truth was so unbearable, it had to be dismissed by everyone around her and she was labeled a pariah, essentially cancelled for speaking the truth. She wasn’t a madwoman. She was clarity in a culture that preferred delusion. Sound familiar? We are still living that myth, only now the wooden horse is a glowing cell phone where we are presented with endless distractions and cacophonous confusions that makes it almost impossible to tell fact from fiction, and people invite it in because it promises free shipping. I’ll be covering the full myth of Cassandra and her aftermath in an upcoming essay on my blog because when it comes to mythology I can’t help myself. I’m kind of the same way with Diet Coke fountain sodas.

The Greeks had another cautionary tale with similar themes to the myth of Cassandra. This one comes courtesy of Homer and his epic The Odyssey. As you may know, Odysseus and crew engage in all sorts of shenanigans and adventures, one of which is when they landed on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, they encountered people who offered them lotus flowers. These sweet, numbing blossoms made them forget who they were, where they were going, and why they ever left home in the first place. Some of his men ate the flowers and lost all desire to return home. They were content to stay there, disconnected from purpose, floating in a haze of pleasant forgetfulness, happily eating the flowers that made them forget who they were and why they were alive. I think they did a modern take on this in the Percy Jackson movies if you prefer that to reading Homer.

When you read or watch the story of the Lotus Eaters as an outsider, you think you would know better, that you wouldn’t be seduced into forfeiting your autonomy for the fleeting pleasure promised by the lotus blossoms. And they have to keep eating them to stay in that state of blissful nothingness, where they don’t actually live for anything but the poison of their pleasure. How pathetic were those people? It sounds absurd until you realize we’ve become the Lotus Eaters. We’ve replaced the medium but not the effect. We forfeit our reality for the soft glow of the screen, and we wonder how our ancestors accomplished things like writing books or building empires when we find we’re too exhausted to do the bare minimum at work, our attention spans dwindling to that of a fruit fly and always searching, seeking, something to quell the rumbling hunger. The Lotus of Odysseus is now the Social Media Feed, Streaming Service or the ilk of our time, a carefully engineered distraction that dulls the ache just enough to keep us passive, just addicted enough to make us forget we were on a journey at all.

We mistake conviction for clarity and confuse comfort with truth. So we double down, demanding more sugar for the relentless hunger we can’t name, more outrage to numb the gnawing sense that something essential has been lost, or worse, voluntarily abandoned in favor of more delicious junk food of modern social media consumption and outrage anxiety culture. And when that gnawing grows louder, we don’t listen, and we sure as shit don’t change. More often than not, we double down on our commitment to the poison. It’s easier to keep eating what we’re fed than to ask who made the meal, what’s in it, and why we’re still so hungry.

This doesn’t just show up in Greek myth, but in teachings across cultures, showing how universal and timeless the lesson is. The mediums may change, but the message doesn’t. As Lame Deer, a Lakota medicine man, once said, “The white man is good at making things, but he makes so many that people are too busy to enjoy them.” Lame Deer spoke often about the disconnect between modern life and sacred relationship to the Earth. In his 1972 book Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, he critiqued the soulless nature of Western progress, calling out how the rush for more had left people spiritually impoverished. His words, like Cassandra’s, remain ignored but eerily accurate and prescient for our modern dilemma.

And then there’s the wise sage Rumi, who said, “Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you.” Because so much of our indulgence in misery is just deep-seated grief—and we don’t live in a culture that knows how to grieve. We shove it down, rebrand it, spiritualize it, project it. Anything but feel it.

We consume all the crap not because we’re ignorant, but because we’re unhappy. The fleeting indulgence gives us a moment’s relief from something deeper and harder to face. But I think the real work—the whole point—is to learn how to cultivate joy in the ordinary, to build lives that don’t require constant escape. We need to find meaning in the mundane rather than soothe ourselves with dopamine hits that never satisfy.

Think about how often it happens: the end of the day comes, you’re exhausted, and instead of rest, you reach for a snack you don’t need. Not because you’re hungry, but because you’re depleted. It’s always harder to eat well or show restraint at night, when we’ve been exhausted by the events of the day. That’s where the junk creeps in, literally and metaphorically. Shouldn’t we at least try to build a life we don’t need to numb? I think that’s why this is such a long essay, to be honest-as a bit of a test for myself and anyone who decided to click on this essay, to see in real time if our attention spans are too short, if we’ve stuffed ourselves full of empty, short form content that we no longer have an appetite for indulging in real, meaningful content.

As Gabor Maté writes, “Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to a painful experience. They are emotional anesthetics.” Most of what we call addiction isn’t about weakness or lack of willpower. It’s about pain. And pain doesn’t go away just because we pretend we’re fine.

So as you can see, this isn’t just a new concern, it’s just pivoted it’s format, but it is something we need to address before it’s too late. But our modern problem is that we don’t look to history, to the ancestors, to ancient ways of knowing to help us find answers. We think because we are so technologically sophisticated, that the old proverbs, myths, fables and allegories couldn’t possibly apply, but that’s where we’re wrong, and where our modern hubris gets the better of us.

So if we’re feeling miserable from the inside out, maybe the problem isn’t some external curse or invisible enemy. Maybe it’s our own unwillingness to release that white-knuckle grip on our most destructive vice. Maybe the truth is simple, like it is with getting healthy. We all want a magic spell or pill, but the simple fact is change happens in the little moments, where dedication and restraint are applied and we show up for ourselves. We need to put the ultra-processed convenience cupcakes down and show ourselves some actual self-restraint. Some actual self-love. Because it’s not just starving us. It’s poisoning us. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally. It leaves us feeling sick inside and hungry an hour later. It’s not sustenance, it’s substitute, filled with empty calories that fuel our illness rather than help to heal the broken bits.

It’s a snake eating its own tail. And the Ouroboros has its own lesson. It once symbolized sacred cycles, the eternal return, the balance of death and renewal. But when what we consume is poisonous, rotten, destructive, or negative, we subvert the very nature of that cycle. We don’t regenerate, we implode. We spiral not toward rebirth, but toward slow, self-constructed collapse. We mistake the cycle for safety, but what we’re actually caught in is compulsion. We devour ourselves while calling it progress.

The Buddhists call this kind of hunger the realm of the hungry ghosts—beings with enormous bellies and tiny mouths, cursed with insatiable cravings they can never satisfy. Always consuming, never full. It’s not just a metaphor for addiction. It’s a map of what happens when the soul is cut off from nourishment, when we try to fill the emptiness with what was never meant to feed us. And that’s what we’ve become; a culture of hungry ghosts, mistaking volume for value, validation for love, and stimulation for meaning.

We are constantly seeking nourishment but looking in the wrong places for it. And why do we do this? I think it’s different for everyone, but I think it has a lot to do with fear of facing the inner shadow and seeking comfort in the convenient. Nothing is more convenient than our devices at our fingertips, quietly waiting to distract us and fill us with emptiness that only satiates us for a moment but ends up leeching far more from us than it gives.

But we do not have to stay there. We can choose better, can start right now.

The next time you go for a walk, leave your phone in your car,or at the very least, make the intention not to use it. I’ll be honest, one of my biggest pet peeves when I’m out on the trail is listening to someone have a loud conversation on speakerphone or the blaring tinny sound of music when I’m trying to just enjoy the tranquility. Nature isn’t the place for meetings or distractions. It’s the place you go to escape the digital noise, to listen to birdsong or the gentle rumble of a stream or the tall grass rustling in the breeze.

When you’re preparing dinner, try to be present and put joy into what you’re making. Really savor each bite, paying attention to the way flavors unfold and mix. Sit quietly with your cat or dog, feeling the warmth of their fur next to yours, the rhythm of their breath, the trust in their eyes. Play a game with your family, a real game in real life, not just virtually. Yahtzee, Trivial Pursuit, Uno, whatever brings laughter and presence. Grab a drink or a meal with a friend and listen to what they have to say. Really listen,not just to respond, and try to keep your phone away. Connect with your life. Remember who you are without the glow of a screen reflecting back a version of you that never quite feels whole.

We may not all be Cassandra, but most of us already know what we’re refusing to see. And like the Lotus-Eaters, we don’t need more sweetness to forget who we are—we need the strength to remember. To remember our path, our integrity, and the kind of life we actually want to live. Even small choices can shift the spiral. When we raise the standard on what we consume, we raise our vibration. We begin to live like we deserve wholeness, not just cheap pleasure. Not just what feels good in the moment but leaves us aching, empty, and sick.

We don’t have to be perfect. But we do have to care. Swap the late-night chips or cookies for cherries or veggies and hummus. When restlessness creeps in, let’s sit with it. Pick up a book. Doodle or sketch or do something creative and fun. Try a new hobby like knitting, writing, or yoga. Clean up the space around us, declutter, or return to something we’ve been putting off. Let’s do something that feeds the spirit without draining the soul. Choose what nourishes, not just what numbs.

Because we were never meant to be sick, distracted, and starved.

The only way out of this spiritual glut of malnutrition is through conscious, consistent nourishment. Not perfection. Not purity. Just better choices, made one at a time. Choices that restore our taste for truth, reconnect us to what’s real, and reawaken the sacred instinct to feel, to listen, and to become spiritually, emotionally, and mentally healthy again.