Why Chronic Conditions Keep Rising: It’s Not a System Failure. It’s a Perceptual One.

Despite several decades of well-meaning efforts and billions of dollars spent, chronic health conditions are still not declining. In fact, they are proliferating.

Over 75% of American adults now live with at least one long-term illness (1). The standard explanations for this continued rise - aging populations, lifestyle and behavioural issues, environmental strain, inequities - are not wrong. But they are not enough.

Beneath them lies something deeper. Something more foundational: We are facing not just a crisis of health and care, but a crisis of perception.

This crisis begins prior to systems, innovation, prevention, and policies. It begins in how we see. By that, I mean how we frame health, define problems, and decide what matters. From there, everything follows: how we categorise and diagnose, how we measure and manage, and how we innovate and intervene.

Today’s dominant mode of perception is shaped by a kind of spatialised, reductive and linear mode of thought and intelligence. It slices life into objects and variables - symptoms, scores, behaviours, risks - then reassembles them into systems designed to track, predict, and optimise. This is the same logic that underpins AI. It is efficient. It is scalable. But it is also deeply misaligned with how real life unfolds. 

And the more we come to depend on AI, the more distant we become from real life, or what it is to be a human.

Because illness, and especially chronic illness, is not a discrete category. It is not a data point or protocol but a lived intensity. It’s a shifting, entangled, and often inexpressible process. Pain is not a 7/10 but a rhythm that derails time. Menopause is not a cluster of biomarkers but a daily reconstitution of identity. Care is not a clinical service but a relational choreography, felt long before it is recorded.

Yet the systems we’ve built to respond still follow the same grammar of abstraction and reduction. They simplify what is complex, quantify what is qualitative and isolate what is entangled. They build ever more machinery in the form of dashboards, pathways, and models, while overlooking the rupture, grief, disorientation, and quiet acts of becoming that define what we call real lived experience or RLX.

The result? We get smarter systems that still miss the human, we get more data but no deeper understanding and we get AI that promises to solve health but only sees what can be represented, and never what is lived.

Not More Intelligence, Different Perception

The call for “more” is everywhere: More data, more integration, more diagnostics and more AI. But what if this trajectory of more is the wrong path, or at least only a part of the path we need to follow?

What if the problem isn’t insufficient intelligence, but misdirected attention and perception?

The crisis in chronic health and care is not only the failure to compute. It is a failure to perceive. Real life is not waiting to be optimised. It never can be. Rather, it is simply asking to be seen - fully, relationally, attentively.

No amount of predictive infrastructure, data and intelligence can repair what remains unseen. An unnoticed existential breakdown is still a collapse. An unheard voice is still in pain. A reclaiming of life, even if unmapped, is still an act of healing.

This is why we need Real Lived Experience thinking. It’s a perceptual shift, a loose method, and a set of principles rooted in the rhythm and complexity of life as it is truly lived. RLX invites us to dwell with difference, not to diagnose from a distance. It asks us to co-compose from within the flow of qualities, thresholds, and changing meanings, not fix from outside or above. 

The answer to the chronic crisis in health then is not more intelligence, but a deeper kind of perception. One that demands a greater willingness to see what does not fit the frame, and a readiness and patience to dwell with what cannot be abstracted.

It is not smarter systems we lack, but the courage to see again.

Discover the Umio Manifesto for Future Health and Care

If these words resonate, if you too feel the limits of current models and are searching for a more human, attuned approach to care and innovation. then we invite you to explore our Manifesto for RLX in Health and Care. Let’s begin a conversation about how we might see, sense, and design differently.

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(1) In 2023, 76.4% (representing 194 million) of US adults reported 1 or more chronic conditions, including 59.5%, 78.4%, and 93.0% of young, midlife, and older adults, respectively. Trends in Multiple Chronic Conditions Among US Adults, By Life Stage, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2013–2023.  doi: 10.5888/pcd22.240539