Anti-aging obsession taken to task
Barbara Ehrenreich wants you to know that you are going to die. Get used to it, and get beyond it.
That’s the central message of “Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves To Live Longer.”
The investigative journalist, memoirist and author of 23 books (including “Nickel and Dimed”) mounts an intellectual assault on America’s obsession with youth, anti-aging and the denial of death.
The short book is more a collection of linked essays than a complete work of reportage — a format that creates some problems but doesn’t obscure the final, most pertinent message.
Ehrenreich has an unusual combination of tools at her disposal — she’s a polemicist and a scholar and scientist (with a doctorate in cellular immunology). The polemicist dominates the early chapters, in which she lacerates the contemporary obsession with aging well and delaying death indefinitely.
Targets include unnecessary medical tests, notably annual physical exams.
The fitness craze is an easy mark. Although she is a gym rat, Ehrenreich looks askance at workouts that drain hours from one’s day and, longevity-wise, have a low cost-benefit ratio.
Ever alert to issues of class in America, Ehrenreich writes that “working out is another form of conspicuous consumption: Affluent people do it and, especially if muscular exertion is already part of their job, lower-class people tend to avoid it.”
Ehrenreich is also an inspired science writer — and, in the latter part of the book, she deflates the concept that humans can ever control their biology and their fate.
Her Exhibit A is the macrophage, a cellular entity once viewed as one of the body’s happy warriors, dedicated to cleaning up diseased or broken cells. In recent years, macrophages • “Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves To Live Longer” (Twelve, 256 pages, $27) by Barbara Ehrenreich
have been exposed as biological double agents for their role in cancer and devastating autoimmune diseases.
These cellular activists have a disturbing tendency to go their own way. They were once thought to mass at tumor sites for an assault on the tumor’s growth, but scientists have discovered that, instead, they encourage the cancer cells “to continue on their reproductive rampage.” Macrophages have been implicated in inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and osteoporosis. They upend the premise that the body is a “smooth-running machine in which each part obediently performs its tasks for the common good,” Ehrenreich writes.
“It is at best a confederation of parts — cells, tissues, even thought patterns — that may seek to advance their own agendas, whether or not they are destructive of the whole.”
Ehrenreich’s complex explanation boils down to a simple prescription, even if the medicine is hard to take:
“You can think of death bitterly and with resignation ... and take every possible measure to postpone it,” she writes. “Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and see it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”