Normality?!

When Lifestyle Is Mistaken for Biology

Normality is a strange standard. It feels objective, but is often just habit. What many people experience every day eventually comes to seem self-evident. Morning tiredness. Pressure in the head after hours spent indoors. Irritability, concentration problems, low mood, shallow sleep, the constant need for coffee. All of this appears normal to us, not because it would be biologically self-evident, but because it affects so many people that hardly anyone still asks whether it should be considered normal at all.

In Dicke Luft, we tell of exactly this disturbance. Not only that we were ill, but that for a long time we did not even recognize much of what was happening to us as a disturbance. States we did not even know were not normal. They were so deeply burned into our daily lives that they seemed like part of our personality, our age, or simply our lives. Only when many things changed after Day Zero did it become visible that for years we had considered something normal that may have been nothing more than the result of our way of living.

When Habit Becomes Truth

Modern human beings live differently today than their bodies knew for most of their history. They spend the overwhelming majority of their lives indoors. They sleep indoors, work indoors, learn indoors, travel in closed vehicles, eat indoors, relax indoors, and often even remain indoors when outside there would actually be space, air, and movement.

That is exactly where the problem lies. What is omnipresent is no longer questioned. If almost everyone is tired, tiredness is considered normal. If almost everyone sleeps badly, bad sleep becomes a side issue. If irritability, brain fog, headaches, or concentration problems are part of everyday life for many people, they eventually seem like an inevitable part of life, not like possible indications that something in our surroundings is wrong.

Our Way of Life Is Not Neutral

In many places, the book shows how deeply modern ways of living have inscribed themselves into our understanding of health.

Especially striking is the idea that air hardly exists for us as an influencing factor, even though it is the most important component of our metabolism. A person breathes in around 20,000 liters of air every day, much more mass and incomparably more volume than what they consume as food. And yet we check our food, read ingredient lists, and discuss sugar, gluten, or protein, while we barely understand the air that constantly surrounds us as a biologically active medium.

Perhaps We Do Not Feel “Normal,” but Merely Adapted

One of the most disturbing thoughts in Dicke Luft is therefore not that air could make us ill. It is that human beings adapt to many things that are not good for them, until that adaptation begins to look like normality. The book describes how complaints develop gradually and precisely for that reason are hardly linked to the environment.

Perhaps what we usually regard as resilience is sometimes only a form of habituation. Perhaps what we interpret as a personal trait is sometimes only a condition. And perhaps what we call normal is not biological normality, but a compromise the body makes with conditions it should never really have had to adapt to.

The Past Was Not Better in Every Way, but Some Things Were More Biological

The book does not romanticize the past. But it shows a contrast. Children used to spend much more time outdoors. Windows were opened as a matter of course. Bedding was aired out. Cleaning product smells were let outside. Air was not considered a luxury, but part of life. In retrospect, this gives rise to an uncomfortable question: with increasing convenience, energy efficiency, and technologization, have we not only gained comfort, but at the same time moved ever further away from conditions that are biologically closer to human beings?

That is exactly why so much of it seems harmless. Not because it is harmless, but because it has become collective. An entire age can get used to unhealthy conditions and for that very reason consider them normal.

Why We Are Writing About This

Dicke Luft is also the story of an error: the error of assuming that what is common must automatically be natural. We show how deeply our way of life has inscribed itself into our understanding of health and how easily one considers its consequences unavoidable simply because almost everyone lives in similar ways. The book therefore asks a simple but uncomfortable question: what if many of our everyday complaints are not expressions of biological normality, but signs of how far we have moved away from it?

Perhaps the Crucial Question Begins Differently

Perhaps what we consider normal today is in many cases nothing more than statistical habituation. Perhaps biological normality is not what we have adapted to in everyday life, but something we have long since lost sight of.

And perhaps, for that very reason, the crucial question begins not only with our symptoms, but with the way of life that has become so self-evident to us that we can no longer distinguish it from health.