November 2025 "Henry Ford Ruined Your Life" by Will Williams

    When Henry Ford released the Model T automobile to the world in 1908, it was initially met with hesitancy by consumers. Seen as a temporary fad that would ultimately never replace more traditional forms of travel (horses, trains, feet), this vehicle struggled to take a foothold in early-20th-century life. This changed in part when the Ford company pushed an advertising campaign introducing the Model T as a tool for connecting isolated rural families, who could reach each other more efficiently and more comfortably than ever before. This marketing strategy worked, and 15 million sales later, the Model T changed our world forever. Rural dirt roads did not satisfy the needs of drivers anymore and were replaced with asphalt. City roads were paved over, too, and new infrastructure was built solely with the driver in mind: wide roads and minimal walking space. The laws changed to criminalize walking down the street that a few years prior had been completely normal.

     As with all technologies, though, there is some level of concern to be had over how rapid technological advancements fundamentally change the human day-to-day experience. There is a concept in social psychology known as the human EEA—the environment of evolutionary adaptation. This, broadly, is the environment to which humans have adapted over the course of millions of years, relatively unchanged until 10,000 years ago, when a sedentary agriculture-based lifestyle emerged from the previous nomadic hunter-gather tribal setting. Since then, unprecedented shifts in human life due to technological advancements have moved us further away from our EEA, from the setting in which we were designed to thrive. As Sebastian Junger puts it in his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, in which he argues that modern life promotes social isolation, “Genetic adaptations take around 25,000 years to appear in humans, so the enormous changes that came with agriculture in the last 10,000 years have hardly begun to affect our gene pool” (17). Cars have been one of the most recent of these progressions away from our EEA, and in tandem with the hostile cities built around them, they make our mental health and well-being suffer.

     Despite being more connected in theory, humans can now more than ever go for long periods of time without ever interacting with anyone they would consider close to them. Even beyond that, someone could hypothetically go days without interacting with a single human, with everything they need for survival and entertainment being within the four walls of their home. This social isolation is more than just a fascination with the dystopian stories of Bradbury and Orwell. It is an ever-present threat to the health and well-being of everybody who lives in a society that values comfort and privacy over camaraderie. Even when one goes outside, they experience a world built around transportation via the comfort and privacy of cars. They witness the massive sprawl of asphalt of the modern world, which feels almost entirely impossible to traverse in ways that humans have adapted to. Mental health under the conditions of isolation has suffered to a great extent due to the antithetical presence of humans in modern life, and to how we have adapted as well. Most notably, the advent of the social phenomenon of suicide (due to poor mental health, i.e., depression, a sense of hopelessness) in a society is closely associated with the moment that society forms urban centers. The effects of the plague of loneliness are evident across all metrics of mental health, not just suicide. With the increased awareness of mental health as an issue, it is important to remember that all someone may need is a group they feel deep belonging and loyalty to, in the manner they would have lived 10,000 years ago.