My current job is customer support — heavily tilted toward digital.
The customers who contact us work digitally too, and of course the inquiries are digital. Looking at my work from above, what I do reduces to two things: chatting with a PC, or talking on the phone through a PC. Nothing physical is produced. And truthfully, neither is anything produced by the people contacting us.
This is an extremely digital job. And the tendency grows stronger each year. Something about the balance of life feels increasingly off.
The seesaw of digital and analog
My previous job was in the automotive industry. A thoroughly analog environment where physical things were assembled before my eyes. At the time, I often wondered “why is so much being manufactured?” — yet in my private life, I was drawn to digital work: video editing, e-book creation.
Looking back, perhaps I was unconsciously balancing analog work with a digital private life.
Now my work has tilted digital. And recently, I’ve noticed myself spending more time on “inefficient” activities. Grinding beans and brewing coffee one cup at a time. Growing vegetables in a small planter. Meeting people with no agenda, just spending time. By any efficiency metric, these are negative-value actions. Yet doing them, something aligns.
Writing this long-form text is probably the same impulse. A quiet operation to bring a digitally-tilted self back to center.
What was seen through me in Barcelona
Last year in Barcelona, I had a session with a Japanese acupuncturist well-known even in Japan. Someone who had treated an enormous number of patients, and who said “I can understand a person just by touching their body.”
The session was an hour and a half, at a steep price. But believing that “no information surpasses experience,” I went.
The first thing said to me was this:
“I’ve never seen someone with cranial pressure this high. What your brain is instinctively seeking, and what your body is doing — they’re too far apart.”
Appearing calm on the outside, but inside, chaos. Thinking too deeply, sometimes raging, yet pressing it all down to function in society — this inner state, read through touch alone.
The practitioner continued. Humans possess a spiritual sensitivity, and some can access dimensions beyond the third — a fourth dimension, perhaps. We evolved from animals, and we remain animals. Accepting that we may have originally possessed such intuitive, sensory capacities isn’t unreasonable. Those with pronounced fifth or sixth senses, the practitioner suggested, access something like a collective unconscious — the Akashic Records — the way a computer accesses the cloud.
Difficult to believe at face value. Yet the calm, matter-of-fact way it was spoken left a strangely lasting impression.
The moment the frequency aligned, in a church
The practitioner knew Barcelona well. When I asked “Is there a place where one might feel such things?”, the answer was: try the Basilica de Santa María del Mar. Best to go after the session, while cranial pressure is lowered.
After the treatment, my body felt remarkably light. Whether it was the bloodletting that drew out bad blood, I walked to the church with the lightness of someone five years younger.
The moment I stepped inside, I felt something from above my head.
It’s hard to put into words, but it resembled the sensation of tuning an analog radio — turning the dial through noise, and hitting a point where the station locks in perfectly. That quality of sound.
Until that point in my life, I’d considered spiritual matters irrelevant to me. But that encounter became an occasion to think about the meaning of living in balance from a slightly different angle.
Chronic stress and precision nutrition
This has gone on long.
What it comes down to, perhaps, is this: there’s no need to keep forcing yourself through something that feels wrong.
Obvious as it sounds, chronic stress is one of the heaviest burdens on health. From a precision nutrition perspective, chronic stress:
- Sustains elevated cortisol
- Lowers insulin sensitivity and disrupts blood sugar control
- Dysregulates the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal)
- Deteriorates gut microbiome, increasing inflammatory cytokines
- Ultimately destabilizes the entire metabolic system
Measurable, quantifiable harm. The reason HbA1c won’t drop, triglycerides won’t move, mornings feel impossible — chronic stress sits behind these more often than people realize.
Of course, short-term constructive stress drives growth. But there’s no reason to drag for years something your intuition says is wrong.
Whether or not you believe in spiritual sensitivity. Whether or not you follow precision nutrition. This probably applies to everyone.
Life is short. Do what you want to do.
This article reflects personal experience and perspective, not medical advice. If you have health concerns, please consult a physician.