How digital life, the promise of control, and our fear of vulnerability shape our relationship with our bodies.
In her book Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, sociologist Eva Illouz observes that the internet revives an old philosophical distinction with remarkable force: the Cartesian separation of mind and body. René Descartes proposed that the thinking self was fundamentally distinct from the physical body, an idea that has influenced Western philosophy, medicine, and cultural understandings of personhood for centuries. What makes Illouz’s observation particularly interesting is that the internet does more than reinforce this philosophical tradition. It provides an environment in which people can experience something resembling that separation in everyday life. We can create identities through language, ideas, relationships, accomplishments, and carefully curated representations of ourselves, participating in social worlds where our physical existence may seem almost incidental. The relationships are real, the emotional experiences are genuine, and the identities can feel deeply authentic. Yet the person experiencing all of this remains a physical being, subject to hunger, fatigue, illness, aging, and eventually death.
I find this distinction particularly relevant to my work as a registered dietitian because so many of the people I encounter seem profoundly disconnected from their bodies. They often approach their physical experiences with apprehension, frustration, or distrust, interpreting hunger, changes in weight, fatigue, and unfamiliar sensations as problems requiring correction. Many carry substantial anxiety about illness and death, along with a persistent fear of losing control over their health. These concerns are not surprising. Physical vulnerability is an unavoidable part of human existence, and uncertainty about our health can be genuinely frightening. What interests me is how our cultural environment shapes the meaning we assign to that vulnerability. Rather than understanding the body as an inseparable aspect of ourselves, we increasingly encounter messages suggesting that it is something we should be able to manage, optimize, and control through sufficient knowledge and effort.
The internet adds an interesting dimension to this relationship. Online, we can experience a version of ourselves that appears less constrained by the realities of physical existence. We can remain socially engaged while physically exhausted, project confidence while experiencing uncertainty, and construct identities around aspirations that our daily circumstances may not permit us to realize. This does not mean that our digital identities are false or that online relationships lack meaning. For many people, digital environments provide opportunities for connection, expression, and belonging that might otherwise be unavailable. The more interesting question is whether spending substantial portions of our lives in environments where identity can appear relatively independent of physical experience reinforces an existing cultural tendency to regard the body as something separate from the self.
That separation becomes consequential when the body fails to cooperate with our expectations. Consider the person who believes they should be able to maintain productivity throughout the day but becomes exhausted before their responsibilities are finished. Or someone who has internalized the belief that disciplined people control their appetites, only to experience hunger at a time they have decided eating is inappropriate. A person may understand themselves as responsible and health-conscious, yet develop an illness, experience unexplained symptoms, or gain weight despite their efforts to prevent it. In each situation, there is a conflict between what the body is experiencing and what the person believes should be happening. The resulting frustration can be directed toward the body itself, as though the body has failed to fulfill its obligations to the person inhabiting it. But perhaps the problem is not that the body has failed. Perhaps the expectations themselves deserve examination.
This is one of the reasons I find conventional descriptions of food noise inadequate. Food noise is commonly described as persistent thoughts about food, but that description tells us very little about where those thoughts come from or why they become so distressing. Eating involves biological needs, learned expectations, cultural meanings, practical demands, and social judgments, all of which can influence a person’s experience of hunger and food decisions. Someone may be hungry while believing they should not need to eat. They may enjoy a meal while simultaneously evaluating its nutritional composition against a set of rules they have internalized. They may experience changes in appetite or body weight while interpreting those changes through cultural expectations about discipline, attractiveness, health, and personal responsibility. These competing messages can produce substantial cognitive dissonance, creating the mental traffic surrounding food that I describe as food noise. The body is communicating information, but that information must compete with an enormous collection of learned beliefs about what the body should be doing and what its experiences supposedly mean.
The commercial implications of this conflict are substantial. When people understand their bodies as unpredictable systems that should nevertheless be controllable, an enormous market emerges for products and services promising to restore that control. Wellness advertising continually introduces new reasons to question ordinary physical experiences, offering tests, supplements, monitoring devices, dietary protocols, and optimization programs as solutions. Some medical interventions and health technologies provide meaningful benefits, and preventive healthcare has an important place in supporting well-being. But the cultural promise frequently extends beyond what evidence can justify. Fatigue becomes a sign that something needs optimizing, hunger becomes a signal to regulate or suppress, aging becomes a process to resist, and uncertainty about health becomes a reason for increasingly intensive surveillance of the body. The marketplace benefits when people believe that enough information, monitoring, and purchasing power can eventually eliminate the uncertainties of physical existence.
What makes this especially troubling is the way responsibility is assigned when those promises fail. If a person continues to experience symptoms, struggles with appetite, develops an illness, or cannot maintain a prescribed routine, the explanation often returns to individual behavior. Perhaps they lacked discipline, selected the wrong intervention, failed to monitor the appropriate variables, or did not follow the recommendations consistently enough. The possibility that the original expectation was unreasonable receives considerably less attention. This is particularly evident in nutrition, where people are exposed to a continuous stream of often contradictory recommendations while being told that their health and body size are largely consequences of personal choices. The environment generates uncertainty, offers products to relieve it, and then assigns responsibility to the individual when certainty remains elusive.
Underlying this arrangement is a deeper problem with the way we understand the relationship between ourselves and our bodies. We speak casually about controlling our bodies, disciplining them, listening to them, or fighting against them, as though there were an independent self directing a separate physical object. These expressions are useful figures of speech, but they can also reinforce a misleading understanding of human experience. Our thoughts, emotions, memories, relationships, and sense of identity do not exist independently of our physical lives. They emerge through embodied processes and experiences. Hunger is not an interruption imposed upon an otherwise independent self, nor is fatigue evidence that the body has failed to support the person’s ambitions. These experiences are part of the physical conditions through which we participate in the world.
The fear of illness and death makes this separation particularly compelling. Our bodies remind us that we are vulnerable, that our capacities are limited, and that some aspects of existence remain outside our control. It is understandable that people would seek ways to reduce that uncertainty, particularly when modern medicine and technology have made extraordinary advances in preventing and treating disease. But there is an important distinction between using available knowledge to improve our circumstances and believing that sufficient knowledge should allow us to escape vulnerability altogether. The first is a reasonable expression of human agency. The second establishes an impossible standard against which ordinary physical existence will inevitably disappoint us. When the pursuit of health becomes an effort to eliminate uncertainty, the body can become a perpetual source of anxiety because no amount of monitoring or intervention can provide an absolute guarantee of safety.
This is not an argument against healthcare, technology, or efforts to improve health. Nor is it a claim that digital life necessarily alienates people from their bodies. Online communities can help people understand unfamiliar symptoms, find support, challenge harmful social expectations, and develop more compassionate relationships with themselves. The relationship between digital identity and body disconnection is also a theoretical question that deserves empirical investigation rather than an established causal explanation. Illouz offers a useful way of thinking about the cultural conditions that make mind-body separation plausible, but the connection to health anxiety, food noise, and clinical experiences requires additional evidence. What the framework provides is an opportunity to question assumptions that have become so familiar that we rarely recognize them as assumptions at all.
There is also a danger in turning reconnection into another individual responsibility. Telling people to listen to their bodies, practice mindfulness, or accept their limitations can become yet another set of expectations imposed upon people who already face unreasonable demands. A person may recognize exhaustion without having the freedom to rest, understand hunger without having reliable access to food, or identify a health concern without being able to obtain timely medical care. Physical experiences do not occur in isolation from work schedules, financial constraints, caregiving responsibilities, social expectations, and access to resources. Awareness can be valuable, but it does not automatically create the conditions necessary to respond to what we notice. Any meaningful discussion of body connection must therefore include the environments in which people are trying to care for themselves.
This is where I locate agency. Agency does not mean achieving mastery over the body or eliminating the constraints of physical existence. It means developing the capacity to recognize what we are experiencing, understand the influences shaping our interpretations, consider the circumstances in which we are making decisions, and respond in ways that are meaningful and possible. Sometimes this involves changing a behavior. Sometimes it involves questioning an expectation that no longer makes sense. Sometimes it requires recognizing that a problem exists beyond the individual’s capacity to solve it. And sometimes it involves tolerating uncertainty without interpreting that uncertainty as evidence that something has gone wrong.
The larger question raised by Illouz’s observation is what happens when a culture increasingly encourages people to imagine themselves as independent of the physical conditions of their existence. We have extraordinary opportunities to construct identities, pursue ambitions, acquire information, and participate in worlds that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Yet none of those possibilities eliminates the realities of being embodied. We still need food, rest, connection, care, and environments that support our physical and psychological well-being. We remain vulnerable to illness, injury, aging, and death, regardless of how successfully we manage our lives.
Perhaps the most important shift is not learning how to exercise greater control over our bodies, but reconsidering why control has become such a central measure of successful living. Caring for ourselves does not require treating the body as an adversary, and accepting physical vulnerability does not mean abandoning efforts to improve our circumstances. We can pursue health while acknowledging uncertainty, respond to bodily needs without interpreting them as weaknesses, and make meaningful choices without demanding mastery over every outcome. The body is not an obstacle standing between us and the lives we want to live. It is through our bodies that we experience those lives in the first place.
Reference: Illouz, E. (2007). Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press.
This article extends Illouz’s sociological analysis into questions of embodied experience, health anxiety, food noise, and commercial wellness culture. These connections are offered as a conceptual interpretation rather than established causal findings.
About the author
Jennifer Nickell, RD
Jennifer Nickell is a registered dietitian and nutrition educator whose work connects nutrition science with human development, adult learning, eating behavior, and real-life conditions.
Educational information only. This article is not individualized medical or nutrition treatment.