How much of your health do you believe is in your control?
There’s an insidious idea popularised by parts of the wellness, health, fitness and beauty industries (should we just call it the bodily control industry and be done with it?), which is that if we just try hard enough, and spend enough time and money, we can achieve perfect health.
This just isn’t true, but we are being taught to believe it is. Being rich absolutely does make people healthier in some very specific ways – wealth tends to buy both access to healthcare and the time for self care – so you can buy health, but only to a certain extent. (And while people like Bryan Johnson expend wild amounts of money and effort on their health and longevity, I don’t look at anyone who is that obsessed with their body and think: healthy.)
Healthy rich people are mainly healthier than the rest of us because there is much less precariousness in the life of a rich person than there is in the average life, and far, far less than in the life of someone who experiences social or economic deprivation every day. That rich people are (sometimes) healthier than the rest of us doesn’t mean, though, that functional foods and expensive lotions and potions are what the rest of us need. Self care is a nice-to-have for all of us, but bubble baths and scented candles will always be a very poor substitute for addressing structural inequalities.
A huge amount of our health is accidental or incidental, and far beyond our control. But many of us – including me, sometimes – believe that staying healthy and living as long as we possibly can while also looking as young as possible, is all about the choices we make right now, and, increasingly, which products we invest in. And although some of our health choices do matter (like smoking, or drinking to excess), the data shows that they don’t all matter nearly as much as we might think.