Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

To the tech industry, the great advantage of mindfulness is that it seemed to be based firmly on science; no “hippie bullshit” or other “woo-woo” was involved. Positive thinking had never gained much traction in Silicon Valley, possibly because the tech titans needed no help in believing that they could do (or hack or disrupt) anything they set out

Everything we experience subjectively, every thought and emotion, produces at least transient physiological changes in the brain.

Never mind that poverty, race, and occupation play a huge role in determining one’s health status, the doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment. The objection raised over and over to any proposed expansion of health insurance was, in so many words: Why should

If a medical procedure has no demonstrable effect on a person’s physiology, then how should that procedure be classified? Clearly it is a ritual, which can be defined very generally as a “solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.”1 But rituals can also have intangible psychological effects, so the

One reason for the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit, and this is especially true in the United States, with its heavily private and often for-profit health system. How is a doctor—or hospital or drug company—to make money from essentially healthy patients?

Even General Mills, which dates back to the nineteenth century, has added meditation rooms to its buildings, finding that a seven-week course produces striking results: [Eighty-three] per cent of participants said they were “taking time each day to optimise my personal productivity”—up from 23 per cent before the course. Eighty-two per cent said th

Like twentieth-century Russian workers or nineteenth-century Polynesians, the American working class—or at least the white part of it—which could once hope for steady work at decent pay, has lost much of its way of life.

But there’s a darker, more menacing side to the preoccupation with fitness, and this is the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense, to control anyone else, and in their work lives that is a large part of what typical gym-goers do.

Being old enough to die is an achievement, not a defeat, and the freedom it brings is worth celebrating.