David exercised, not like a maniac or anything, but swam three times a week. We are well (most of the time), he quit smoking 14 years ago just after we met and his cholesterol was 150 WITHOUT medication. He was diabetic but that was well under control. Yes, he was a big guy but he was a healthy big guy. If you’d like to see some pictures of him (and a couple of me too), they are here:

http://www.mem.com/ViewImages.aspx?ID=2386202

The best we can do is to take care of ourselves (and those that we love). I know that life is really random so live it to its fullest and don’t sweat the small stuff. A lesson I am learning…

Current medicine holds that we can die from these, but not permanently; that our deaths can be averted. Our deaths are averted by medical care and competent doctors and good equipment. They are not averted by ‘exercising right’, or ‘eating right’. Correlation is not causation, etc cetera.

The only thing ‘exercising right’ or ‘eating right’ averts is your doctor’s half-guilty thought of ‘they weren’t taking care of themselves anyway’ in an attempt to comfort themselves as to the reason for your death, the attempts of your friends and family to make you diet your arse off in the hopes of it not happening again under the mistaken belief the size of said arse had something to do with it, and your own sense of having done what you desperately could to stop the reaper from coming for you. The ugliness of these thoughts is not averted by exercising right and eating right, and that is because they are a product of society, not the individual.

The only responsibility we have to ourselves is to live well, whatever that means for the person in question. Saying that we have a duty to struggle futilely against death by ‘exercising right’ and ‘eating right’ because it is the ‘morally right’ thing to do is the same thinking that surrounds dieting: as fat people, it is our moral responsibility not to be fat. And if we can’t do that, then we should at least be trying.

I call bullshit. Mountains erode. Trees fall. Rivers fail. People die. Even if you live to be a thousand, you will still die. Even if you have yourself frozen cryogenically in the belief that one day there will be the technology to revive you, you will still die. Even if you eat all the wheat in the world and can deal with anger in minus three seconds and eat right and exercise right, you will still die.

If you don’t want to do all that, then don’t. Don’t do all that to make yourself miserable in the hopes of being miserable for a few more years. It’s a waste of the time you deem so precious.

Ha!

i thought that this was kind of the point of SM’s awesome post?

You thought right.

occupied only by light too low in frequency to detect. yeah, you’ve been angering enough for me to quibble and say that this isn’t called light.

anyway, i agree with FJ that fearing death is normal, but being consumed and completely motivated by that fear is not a good thing. assigning blame for each person’s death is also something a lot of people do, and it’s understandable because of the overwhelmingness of loss – but it’s ultimately a futile mental exercise. death happens. at best we can put it off for a few decades by a combination of preventative action and dumb luck – but obsessing over the minutae of those possible preventative actions is not helpful or healthy and gets in the way of actually *living* that life in the meantime. i thought that this was kind of the point of SM’s awesome post?

If that geist of zeit doesn’t affect you, if you are shocked there are people who find good health to be more “moral”, then obviously this thread will be meaning free for you.

As will much of our blog.

If that geist of zeit doesn’t affect you, if you are shocked there are people who find good health to be more “moral”, then obviously this thread will be meaning free for you.

And since you were re-introducing the personal, you appeared to be performing a mild version of what Sontag, was challenging:
Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it.
Unwittingly, mind. Like maybe they didn’t power walk and eat enough tofu. Or maybe they were too angry or ate too much wheat.

You appear to be persuing the personal choice side rather aggressively, which is a flip side of the position that Sontag and Sweet Machine were critiquing.

So. If it is abundantly clear to you that illness is not moral, and you wonder why we’re talking about it, then I suggest you consider further how Sontag links personal responsibility and the addition of morality to the discussion of health.

It’s a good essay.

Yes, and the very next thing I said was that there are such people who don’t believe that. The point was that it’s inherently ridiculous that this is the case.

Surely we know that if people around 100 years ago in America accepted the present state of the art, it’d be giving up prematurely, but we only know that in retrospect.

As individuals, the folks of 100 years ago had about as much control as we have now, though: it is medicine and medical research doing most of the heavy lifting in our mortality rates. I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that all the medical research shuts down. (Although I bet a lot of people here would have something to say about it being pried apart from the profit motive, and policed for influences like, oh I don’t know, selling “obesity cures”.)

Preventable deaths are things we can effect, but our entire society – whether mainstream (OMG OBEESITY!) or alternative (OMG ANGER AND WHEAT!!) – has overblown our ability to control these things by such a large degree that we’ve put the onus on the individual. And it’s both not that simple and I think it’s has broken our society’s compassion. Now, when someone suffers high blood pressure, what do we think? We think “tsk hitting the salt too much there?” or diabetes “whoopsy got a problem with the chocolate there do you?”

I think here’s the issue – you express: One is tempted to ask ,”There are people who don’t?”

Just pick up a New York Times, a Cosmo, a health section on anything, and you’ll find hundreds of articles that show us if we’re “good”, for some value of good, we’ll live longer. Your cake is a sin, a devillish treat, you’ll be ‘good’ tomorrow….

And when it comes down to it, on average, we don’t really have that much control. Doing it “right” isn’t a guarantee – more often than not, we are just trying to join a population that has a slight tendancy to live longer, and the causation’s not even really shown or understood – and doing it “wrong”‘s not a death sentence.

But our minds, and the people marketing to us are in collusion to make it seem like we have far more control than we do.