“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
It is time to stop swallowing the projections of sickness from a culture built on disconnection—disconnection from the body, from each other, and from the living earth. When a society normalizes sleeplessness as productivity, loneliness as independence, and extraction as progress, “adjustment” is not wellness; it’s compliance.
Health begins where belonging returns. Not the belonging that demands we shrink to fit a harmful mold, but the belonging that roots us again in the more-than-human world: in breath that isn’t scheduled, in soil that doesn’t invoice us for standing barefoot upon it, in waters that remember how to sing. When we reunite with these elemental teachers, we remember that wholeness is relational. We are not machines to be optimized; we are ecosystems to be tended.
The old story says: be efficient, be agreeable, be fine. Smile through the grind, medicate the ache, call it resilience. But the body carries a wiser verdict. Panic in the chest, fog in the mind, a grief that shows up as rage—these are not personal defects to be domesticated. They are honest alarms, sounding against a civilization that treats living beings—human and otherwise—as consumables. Listening to those alarms is not rebellion; it is repair.
So what does true health ask of us? It asks for re-alignment: from speed to presence, from extraction to reciprocity, from performance to truth. It asks us to choose relationships that honor the sacred integrity of each person and place. It asks us to measure success not by what we accumulate but by what we tend—soil fertility, clean water, trustworthy communities, the courage to tell the whole story.
To be “well” in a sick society is to be well enough to heal it. That means saying no, sometimes fiercely, to roles and routines that flatten our aliveness. It means designing our days around sunlight, song, kindness, and useful work. It means making elders of the trees and mentors of the rivers. It means building circles where the vulnerable are safe, the silenced are heard, and the wounded aren’t discarded as inconvenient.
Let the world call this maladjustment. We can call it recovery—a collective one. Because the moment we stop accepting the projections of sickness, we stop reproducing them. And in that refusal, a different measure of health emerges: bodies at ease, neighbors who know our names, children who inherit more life than we borrowed. Not adjusted—attuned. Not compliant—whole.
And from that wholeness, may we become the medicine this ailing world has been asking for all along.
Attribution note. The line “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” is widely attributed to J. Krishnamurti. The Krishnamurti Foundation says they cannot find this exact wording in his works, though he expressed the same idea—e.g., “why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it”—in Commentaries on Living, Series III (1960). The exact phrasing appears to have been popularized when Mark Vonnegut quoted it (without a source) in The Eden Express (1975).