We have been sold the idea that health is happiness. If you have health, you have everything.
The idea that “we” ought to be healthy is a recent invention. It co-evolves with the enclosure of the commons, the erosion of lifeways which share in the land as a partner for maintaining flourishing eco-social systems. Public health as a top-down institution arises in the wake of the collapse of community care. Only after the destruction of access to folklore, folk healing, myth, and the knowledge of plants could such a concept as public health come to pass. The Encyclopedia Britannica calls Public health “the story of humanity versus disease.“
If you have your health, you have everything. So much so, that to fail to become healthy is to fail morally and productively. It is to fail to be able, to fail to take care of the family. One cannot be a good worker if one is not healthy.
In self-care culture, the core desire is to feel better than the day before; we rush from one class to the next, from one training, workshop, appointment, certification, therapist, modality to another. It’s a frenzied series of attempts to do what, exactly? To heal? To get better?
You cannot consume your way to healing because consumption is not a creative act. Consumption is not a passive mode of absorption, of swallowing objects; it is a mentality, a series of naturalized gestures and practices. Consumption is a manner of being that is antithetical to healing.
A quantitative view of health reduces the body to information and restricts the human being to an economic view of their potential. Meanwhile, the market for health is rife with magical thinking. Brands vie for attention by splaying symbolic associations. That’s how we come to associate longevity with supplements: the capsules have been infused with affect and gravitas; the vitamin has become the symbol of good health.
No need to convince anyone any longer that supplements are an inherent good; that work is done. The value of the global dietary supplements market is in the hundreds of billions. It is the task of market actors to convince the consumer that this or that brand has the best ones. The brand is a symbolic-engineering operation, rendering possible the association of merchandise with social and cultural values. The brand establishes product differentiation where little to none existed à-priori.
One is taught by endless advertisements and sales pitches that it is possible to find health through calculus, that by tallying up the right fractions of vitamins and minerals, calories, lipids, and carbohydrates, by making sure the right brand of Omega 3-6-9 is in the fridge, taken on the right schedule, the worst of it can be avoided (but of course, food matters. See How I Eat And Why Part 1, and Part 2.).
We’re sold health as the ultimate good because a healthy population makes for good GDP. Healthy people consume. Sick people too, (perhaps even more) in order to find out what will help them feel better. The key, then, is to find the equilibrium where your population is healthy enough to work, and just sick enough, concerned with finding wellness, that you can sell them a subscription model wellness package that keeps them dependent on your pills for life. Health has become shorthand for “medicated without symptoms.”
Health is only paramount when sickness means death, and death means nothing; to die is to enter the meaningless void. Maybe ‘healthcare is free’ where you live, or your drugs are insured. Still, for the average person, being chronically ill to the point of debility doesn’t just mean losing access to doctors. It means losing the capacity to pay rent and buy food. Health is only the greatest good when being devoid of health means falling under the crushing gears of debt peonage to pay bills.
The imperative to Be Healthy is tantamount to saying Don’t Die. If you die, you can’t work, you can’t buy anything, and you can’t keep up with the Joneses. It’s not that the public in North America is not educated about “Health.” Public health messaging runs rampant on all channels, and wellness brands spend billions feeding factoids through influencers to create content for the game of the algorithmic luck-of-the-draw. People “know” they should (or should not) do certain things if they want to “be healthy.”
But this is an extension of self-discipline, the boss in your head, the angry parent. Today, there is such a mania for health that we are constantly monitoring ourselves, erecting internally rigid structures, holding fixed ideas of who we ought to be and how we ought to behave, in order to be Healthy. Each of us willingly installs an internal regime of control, and we do not perceive it as oppressive, for it comes in the name of health.
Health needs to be likeable, pleasurable, and instagrammable. Only soft measures which keep everyone from feeling offended or triggered may be taken, to bring about health. We now outsource the Boss to the algorithm. We confess our symptoms to language models, asking the machine to optimize our biology the way it optimizes our emails. We beg the black box to tell us we are doing it right. Through pervasive and constant disclosure, the solitary seeker-after-health wants only to honor their well-being, to find a way back to their divinely ordained right to the manifestly destined frontier of perfect health. How could they have lost it in the first place?
Nodes of every disjointed present moment are scattered between the points of linear history, in which there are victors and losers. And you don’t want to be a loser. You want to get better; to be a winner, to win the fight against your illness, to conquer your trauma, to show others they can do it too.
It is a mistake to focus on a single person who is supposedly sick. It’s useless to dig into an individual’s isolated symptoms. What about the patterns between the nodes? What needs to be treated is the relationship. Because what matters most is Communication. Not in the modern and political sense, but understood as the sum of interactions within the system. We, you and I, us-two1, we cannot not communicate. I am materially bound up in your existence, as we both depend on the earth to feed us.
Health is a story of relationships. To be healthy (if it is a state) or to have health (if it is a possession) is to interact with the habitat. When longing for health today, one truly longs for a habitat, dasein: a whole, unfractured context.
True Health is being embedded in a reciprocal relationship with the earth/community/web-of-life/planetary ecology. Health is a process akin to tikkun olam, engaging in acts of continual repair. Health is a pattern. “If you can see the relational forces moving and connecting the elements of a system, rather than focusing on the elements themselves, you are able to see a pattern.”2 It requires seeing/feeling the dynamic balance of self and other to respond in real time with the right action, given personal history as well as current time and place.
We’re so focused on the singular vectors of health and disease that we lose our senses. How can we taste the food we eat if we’re concerned with micromanaging our calorie intake? How can we feel the warmth of the sun if we’re calculating how to optimize our vitamin D intake? How can we grieve for the rivers beneath our feet if we’re only worried about the prices of bottled water on supermarket shelves?
- “From ‘us-two’ a plural version of the grammatical first person Yunkaporta uses to replace the clumsy concepts of the English language to communicate the shared bubble he creates between himself the author and myself the reader – far more powerful than ‘we’ imo; to ‘yarn‘ – from Aboriginal English that conveys the complex nature of dialogue and conversation which in itself (…) conveys the action of sensemaking – collaboratively and individually – as well as ‘object’. That is, yarn is at once a verb and a noun, just as it is in English but the meaning has deepened and changed to reflect the Aboriginal process of collective knowledge creation, knowledge-keeping, and its communication.” – Niti Bhan reviewing Sand Talk ↩︎
- Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (pp. 79-80). ↩︎