Reimagining the Meaning of Health

When people talk about health, they often assume it's a straightforward and easily definable concept: either you're healthy or you're not. But the moment you try to explain what health actually is, the idea becomes much less clear. Is it how you feel? Is it how your body performs? Or is it something broader that includes how you live, think, and function in the world?

There is a recognized field called the philosophy of medicine, or the philosophy of health and disease, but there isn't one dominant, universally accepted philosophy of health in the same way there are recognizable schools like Stoicism, utilitarianism, existentialism, or pragmatism. The closest thing we have to an official global definition comes from the World Health Organization, which defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

The WHO definition falls short as a complete philosophy of health and instead acts more like an ideal. It says health is more than “not being sick,” which is important, but it doesn't fully explain how a person should live, what tradeoffs matter, what the body is for, how much responsibility belongs to the individual versus society, or how to judge health when someone has pain, disability, disease, aging, trauma, or chronic stress.

A better way to frame it is this: there are many different ways to think about health, but no single definition or perspective fully captures what it means in practice.

The main reason is that health sits between biology, morality, culture, medicine, politics, economics, and personal meaning. It isn't purely objective, nor is it purely subjective. A blood marker can be objectively abnormal, but whether someone is healthy cannot always be reduced to that marker. A person can have perfect labs and still be miserable, addicted, socially isolated, weak, anxious, and unable to function. Another person can have a chronic condition but live with strength, purpose, connection, resilience, and high function.

This is why philosophers and physicians distinguish between disease, illness, and sickness. Disease can refer to biological dysfunction, illness to the lived experience of being unwell, and sickness to the social role or recognition of being unwell. Those categories overlap, but they are not identical. Someone can have disease without feeling ill. Someone can feel ill before a diagnosis appears. Someone can be treated socially as sick even when their deeper problem is environmental, psychological, relational, or behavioral.

The major split is usually between two views.

One view is the biological view. In this view, health means normal biological functioning. This is associated with thinkers like Christopher Boorse, who treated health as a theoretical biological concept. The strength of this view is that it keeps health grounded in physiology instead of preference, ideology, or vague wellness language. The weakness is that normal function doesn't fully capture pain, meaning, adaptation, environment, social conditions, or human flourishing. You could describe this view as functional, in the sense that it focuses on whether the system is operating as it is supposed to.

This view becomes more complicated when applied to aging, disability, or chronic conditions. If health is defined only by normal biological functioning, then many predictable features of aging or disability can be treated as straightforward defects. But that misses something important: a person may have limitations, adaptations, or medical realities and still possess a high degree of health in the lived sense if they can function, adapt, participate, and pursue a meaningful life.

The other view is the holistic view. In this view, health is about the person’s ability to live well, pursue meaningful goals, participate in life, and adapt to challenges. This includes thinkers like Georges Canguilhem and Lennart Nordenfelt, and it fits better with real life because health isn't only about whether the organism is working, it's also about whether the person can function in the world they inhabit. A useful parallel term here is integrative or adaptive, since this view looks at how different factors come together and balance to make health possible, rather than focusing only on isolated biological function.

That is why more recent definitions have moved toward health as adaptability. A widely cited proposal in the British Medical Journal defines health as “the ability to adapt and to self-manage” in the face of physical, social, and emotional challenges. That gets closer because health isn't a perfect static state — it's dynamic, requiring the capacity to respond.

So if we had to build a generally recognized philosophy of health from the broad consensus, it would probably be something like this:

Health is the cultivated capacity to function, adapt, and pursue a meaningful life through the integration of body, mind, behavior, environment, and community.

Or put more simply: Health is the capacity to live well in reality.

It's not endless optimization, perfect biomarkers, visible leanness, or total control. It also isn't static or universally experienced in the same way across all people, stages of life, or environments. A real philosophy of health would probably rest on a few core principles that account for both its biological realities and its lived complexity.

First, health is functional. The body should support life, not become the entire purpose of life. Strength, mobility, energy, sleep, digestion, cognition, and emotional regulation matter because they increase someone’s ability to act.

Second, health is adaptive. A healthy person is not someone who never experiences stress, illness, pain, or disorder. A healthy system can respond, recover, reorganize, and continue functioning. This is why the ability to adapt and self-manage is such a useful model.

Third, health is multidimensional. Physical, mental, social, and environmental health cannot be fully separated. The WHO definition gets this part right by refusing to define health as merely the absence of disease.

Fourth, health is both personal and collective. Individuals have responsibility for their habits, but people do not choose all of their conditions. Food access, income, stress exposure, education, neighborhood safety, healthcare access, and culture shape health. One criticism of the self-management model is that it can accidentally blame people who have fewer resources or lower capacity to adapt.

Fifth, health isn't the same as morality. Being healthy doesn't make someone virtuous, and being sick doesn’t make someone a failure. This matters because modern wellness culture often turns health into a moral hierarchy.

Sixth, health exists to support a good and meaningful life. The purpose of health is to expand what life allows: to love, work, think, create, endure, contribute, enjoy, and participate.

Part of what makes a philosophy of health so difficult is that health is too broad to belong to one discipline. Medicine wants diagnosis. Biology wants function. Public health wants population outcomes. Psychology wants resilience and behavior. Philosophy wants meaning and value. Fitness wants performance and body composition. Spiritual traditions often want wholeness, discipline, or harmony.

But the closest modern synthesis would be this:

Health centers on capacity rather than perfection. It reflects a person’s ability to meet life with enough physical function, mental clarity, emotional resilience, social connection, and environmental support to pursue a meaningful existence.

That is the most defensible starting point for a philosophy of health, but it still feels incomplete on its own. A philosophy of health cannot stop at defining what health is in theory; it also has to extend into practice. It needs to account for how health is actually built over time, how it's maintained, how it breaks down, and how it can be restored when it is lost.

Health, to me, isn't just the absence of disease, and it isn't something that can be fully understood through lab numbers, body fat percentage, or appearance alone. It is a state of bodily function, movement quality, emotional steadiness, and physiological resilience that gives a person the freedom, confidence, and capacity to live the life they want.

Someone can look fit and still be unwell. Someone can have impressive numbers and still lack energy, stability, strength, clarity, or peace. Real health is when the body works well, adapts well, and supports a high quality of life without constant limitation, discomfort, or dependency.

This is where my view becomes more specific. I believe health is built by living in alignment with what human beings fundamentally need. That includes movement, sunlight, connection, quality food, sleep, stress management, purpose, time in nature, and daily habits that work with our biology rather than against it.

I don't see the body as a machine that simply needs to be medicated whenever symptoms appear. I see it as a living system that needs to be understood, supported, and respected. Symptoms are not random inconveniences to suppress. They are often signals that something deeper may be out of order. That does not mean medicine has no place. It means medicine should not be the only lens. Real health, in my view, comes from addressing causes rather than only managing consequences.

This also means that health cannot be separated from behavior. The body is shaped by what it repeatedly experiences. The food someone eats, the way they move, the sleep they get, the stress they carry, the relationships they maintain, the light they see, the environments they inhabit, and the standards they live by all become information to the body. Over time, those repeated inputs either support function or erode it.

That is why I do not view health as a temporary intervention or a short-term fix. I see it as a way of living. It is built through sustainable habits, standards, and identity, not through quick fixes or temporary bursts of motivation. A diet only matters if it can actually be lived. A training plan only matters if it can be recovered from and repeated over time. A strategy only matters if it helps someone become the kind of person who can carry it forward.

Therefore, health is not just about what a person does once in a while. It is about what they repeatedly choose, what they value, and who they're becoming.

But health should also lead somewhere. It is not the final goal in itself. It is the foundation that gives a person the ability to act, choose, lead, and live with greater purpose. Good health allows someone to be more present, more capable, and more fully themselves. That is part of why confidence in one’s body matters. It reflects freedom, self-respect, and the ability to move through life with strength and agency.

In this sense, health is both biological and philosophical. It is biological because the body has real needs, real limits, and real consequences when those needs are ignored. But it is philosophical because the point of health is not merely to survive, optimize, or avoid disease. The point is to create the capacity for a fuller life.

Health is not perfection. It isn't a number, a look, a supplement stack, or a temporary state of discipline. Health is the cultivated capacity to live well in reality. It is the condition of the body and mind that allows a person to meet life with strength, adaptability, clarity, and purpose.

And if there is a philosophy of health worth building around, I think it's this:

The body is not the destination. It is the foundation. Health is the practice of building that foundation well enough that life can be lived with more freedom, presence, and meaning.

Viruses Are Just Information

Imagine a situation where the human community is confronted with a new toxin.

This toxin can only be neutralized by an enzyme that human beings do not usually make. But one member of the community has a randomly generated mutation that allows her, and only her, to make the toxin-neutralizing enzyme. She does well, while others become sick and some die because this mutation gives her an adaptive advantage.

According to the theory of genetic mutation and natural selection, her genes would slowly spread throughout the population. Over time, the adaptive mutation would become more common because it helps people survive.

But what happens if she is a sixty-year-old postmenopausal woman? What if she is a man who does not have children? In that case, the helpful gene dies out.

If we are lucky, maybe the carrier of the gene is a thirty-year-old man about to get married. He and his wife have six children, and three of them carry the autosomal dominant mutation. One of those three dies in a car crash. Another becomes sterile. The third passes the adaptive gene on to her two children.

In ten thousand years, that adaptive gene may have spread throughout the population through natural selection. Unfortunately, by then, the toxin has either killed everyone off or is long gone, making the mutation useless.

This creates an important question.

Can the theory of natural selection following random mutations fully explain how humans and animals adapt to new situations quickly enough for those mutations to be useful?

If adaptation only happens through random mutation and reproduction across generations, the process may be too slow to explain real-time biological response to rapidly changing environments. Life often has to respond faster than that.

So how do organisms adapt in real time?

One proposed way to think about this is through exosomes. When cells are threatened, they can produce exosomes containing DNA and RNA. These tiny packages of genetic material are involved in communication between cells. They carry information from one part of the body to another and may help coordinate biological responses to changing conditions.

From this perspective, what we call “viruses” may be understood differently. Rather than thinking of viruses only as hostile invaders, this view suggests they may function as physical-resonance forms of genetic material that code for changes happening in the environment.

In that interpretation, viruses are not simply enemies. They are carriers of biological information.

They may represent a system of real-time genetic adaptation. Instead of waiting thousands of years for a useful mutation to spread through reproduction, genetic information could move more quickly between cells, organisms, or populations. This would create a much faster way for life to respond to environmental pressure.

That is the larger idea behind the claim that viruses are information.

Unlike bacteria, which can be grown in a petri dish and are clearly living organisms, viruses are not alive in the same way. They do not independently metabolize. They do not reproduce on their own. They are pieces of genetic material packaged in a protein coat, dependent on cells to replicate.

In simple terms, viruses can be thought of as packets of information.

They carry instructions. They interact with the genome. They may influence which biological switches are turned on or off. In this view, viruses are not merely agents of disease. They are genetic messengers that may participate in how organisms respond to environmental change.

This way of thinking also changes how we interpret sickness.

If someone becomes overtly sick, one possibility is that the body could not handle the “download” of information. Another possibility is that the new biological instructions did not match the person’s internal health, lifestyle, or external environment. In other words, the issue may not only be exposure. It may also be the condition of the terrain receiving the signal.

This does not mean illness is imaginary. It does not mean viruses are harmless. It means there may be more to the story than the idea that viruses are only hostile forces trying to attack us.

The conventional model often treats viruses as dangerous invaders that must be fought. But if viruses also function as carriers of environmental information, then a total war on viruses may reflect a misunderstanding of their role in nature.

A virus may not be alive in the way bacteria are alive. It may be closer to information. A signal. A message. A set of instructions.

The role of viruses in nature, from this perspective, is to help recode genetic material in response to changes happening in the environment. They may provide a mechanism for real-time genetic adaptation.

That is a very different way to understand biology.

Instead of seeing life as a battlefield where organisms defend themselves against endless microbial enemies, this view sees life as a communication system. Cells communicate. Organisms communicate. Genetic information moves. The environment changes, and biology responds.

Viruses may be part of that communication.

The question is whether we are willing to look at them through a wider lens.

If we assume viruses are only hostile and dangerous, then our only response is fear, suppression, and war. But if viruses are also information, then we may need to rethink the relationship between illness, adaptation, genetic expression, environment, and evolution.

Maybe the body is not simply being attacked.

Maybe it is receiving information.

Maybe sickness is sometimes the cost of a system trying to adapt to instructions it is not currently healthy enough to process smoothly.

This idea may sound strange because it challenges the standard story. But the standard story does not always explain how quickly life adapts, how genetic information moves, or why the same exposure can affect different people in different ways.

Viruses may not be the enemy in the way we have been taught to imagine them.

They may be part of the language life uses to communicate with itself.

Questioning Immunology

Most people are introduced to the immune system through a very simple metaphor: the body is a battlefield, germs are the enemies, and the immune system is an army of soldiers fighting off invaders.

That image is easy to understand, which is probably why it has become so common. The problem is that it may also be too simple to explain what is actually happening inside the body.

The immune system is not just a defensive military force. It is an intelligent, adaptive, highly responsive communication system. It reacts to the internal and external environment. It responds to stressors. It coordinates inflammation, repair, tolerance, elimination, and adaptation. It is deeply connected to the gut, the microbiome, the nervous system, the endocrine system, and the condition of the body as a whole.

When immunology is reduced to “soldiers fighting germs,” we risk missing the complexity of the system we are trying to understand.

A major part of modern immunology is also tied to vaccinology, which shapes how many people understand immunity. Vaccines are often discussed through the production of antibodies, and antibodies are frequently treated as synonymous with protection. In the laboratory setting, antibody production is often used as a surrogate marker to suggest that a vaccine “works.”

That raises an important question: does the presence of antibodies always equal true protection?

It is worth asking whether antibodies produced after vaccination consistently bind to and inactivate disease-causing agents in the way the public is often led to believe. It is also worth asking whether antibodies may, in some cases, be part of the body’s broader response to the ingredients or stressors introduced through vaccination, including compounds such as polysorbate 80 or formaldehyde.

These questions are not small. They challenge the way many people have been taught to think about immunity, protection, and disease.

The same kind of questioning can be applied to contagion.

The conventional view says germs travel from one person to another, infect them, and produce disease. That model is treated as obvious, but germs as pathogens is a more complex question than the simple battlefield metaphor allows. Over the past few decades, science has produced an enormous amount of literature on microbes, pathogens, host response, the microbiome, and immune regulation.

The discovery of the microbiome should have changed the way we talk about microbes. Our inner ecology reveals that we do not simply live in opposition to microorganisms. We depend on them. The very microbes that have often been demonized are also involved in digestion, immune regulation, metabolism, barrier function, and overall health.

This does not make every microbe harmless. It does mean the relationship between microbes and the body is more complex than enemy versus defender.

The conversation becomes even more interesting when we consider the virome. Research into human biology suggests that a meaningful percentage of what we call human DNA may be viral in origin. Some estimates place this around 8 percent. This raises deeper questions about how we define viruses, how genetic information moves between living systems, and whether some of the agents we have assigned purely causal roles may also be part of a more complicated biological exchange.

A virus is generally described as nucleic acids in a protein coat that require cells to replicate. In that sense, viruses are often called nonliving agents of genetic information transfer. As we learn more about how genetic information is passed between living entities, we may need to think more carefully about the roles we assign to these vectors.

This also invites a larger question: has every assumption in conventional infectious disease theory been proven as completely as people assume, or are some claims still inferred through models, indirect evidence, and interpretation?

Transmission of effects can take many forms when we step outside the narrowest version of conventional medicine. A yawn can spread through a room without being a pathogen. Fear can spread through a group and create physical symptoms. There are studies in which people became sick after believing they had been exposed to contaminated air, especially after seeing others appear sick from it, even when there was nothing wrong with the air.¹

There are also examples of people developing cold-like symptoms when they already believe themselves to be unwell or vulnerable. These situations raise questions about the relationship between belief, perception, nervous system state, environment, and physical symptoms.

That does not mean pathogens are irrelevant. It means physical pathogens alone may not explain the full picture of illness, susceptibility, symptom expression, and recovery.

Symptoms themselves may also deserve a different interpretation.

Vomiting, diarrhea, sweating, coughing, sneezing, and runny noses all have something in common. They are exudative. They move material out of the body. From this perspective, the symptoms of infection may be evidence that the body knows how to eliminate what it no longer wants to hold.

This way of thinking changes the meaning of symptoms. A symptom is no longer just an inconvenience to suppress. It becomes a message, a process, and possibly a form of elimination.

This may also help explain why some people seem to move through repeated patterns of illness during or after major changes in their health, lifestyle, medication use, or internal toxic burden. One possibility is that the immune system is finally able to mobilize and eliminate stored stressors or toxicants. In that context, symptoms may reflect the body’s attempt to restore order rather than simply evidence of an outside enemy taking control.

This is where curiosity matters.

What other assumptions have we made that remain unproven, incomplete, or open to reinterpretation? What have we accepted because it is familiar rather than because it fully explains what we see? Science can be a beautiful tool for discovery, but only when it is allowed to acknowledge that a more complete picture may be emerging.

Charles Eisenstein wrote in The Ascent of Humanity:

“When we see germs as predators who seek to steal ‘resources’ from us for their own biological interest (survival and reproduction), then a rational response is to deny them those resources, to hide from the predators or fight them off — the fight-or-flight response… If I believe, on the contrary, that there is some reason specific to my own body why the flu has infected me and not you, then the program of control doesn’t make sense anymore.”

That quote points to a very different relationship with the body.

When illness is viewed only as invasion, the response becomes control. Fight harder. Suppress faster. Kill the invader. But when illness is viewed as an interaction between the body, the environment, the immune system, the microbiome, perception, stress, terrain, and resilience, a different set of questions becomes possible.

Why did this person become sick at this time?

Why did another person exposed to the same environment remain well?

What was happening in the body before symptoms appeared?

What does the body need in order to move through this process?

How can the immune system be supported rather than overridden?

This is the deeper question behind symptomology, immunology, and the way we understand disease. The body is not passive. It is not stupid. It is not simply waiting to be attacked by the outside world. It is constantly responding, adapting, communicating, regulating, eliminating, and trying to restore balance.

Sometimes all it takes is a reminder that the body is not the enemy.

When we are aligned with the body, and when we truly make a truce with it, we may access a much greater capacity for healing than we have been taught to believe. That is the reclamation worth paying attention to.

Once we understand that symptoms and illness can have meaning, that they may be sending us a message, and that the body has a capacity to move through them when properly supported, our relationship with health begins to change.

We become less interested in fear and control.

We become more interested in listening, supporting, questioning, and understanding.

That shift alone is revolutionary in a society that has taught people to distrust their bodies, silence their symptoms, and hand over their intuition to systems that may not always see the whole picture.

Every Problem Contains the Need for a Solution

Every disease, challenge, and problem has an equal and opposite force that can counterbalance it. This is a simple matter of polarity, and in many ways, it is one of the foundational patterns of nature.

For the negative to exist, there must also be a positive. There is darkness, and there is light. There is hot, and there is cold. For every yin, there is a yang. Highs cannot exist without lows.

The same idea can be applied to problems.

The moment a problem is created, the universe, or consciousness itself, simultaneously calls the solution into existence as the problem’s polar opposite. Whether we are talking about disease, systemic problems in society, harmful plans, or suppressive people, the problem cannot exist without the possibility of a solution.

The difficulty is that problems are often crafted, executed, and publicized better than solutions are. Problems tend to be louder. They are easier to see. They create fear, urgency, confusion, and emotional reaction. Solutions often require more awareness, patience, courage, and discernment.

That is why it can feel like the problem is more powerful than the answer.

But the presence of the problem does not mean the absence of a solution. It may simply mean the solution has not been recognized, organized, or acted upon yet.

This matters because the way we look at problems changes how we respond to them. If we believe a problem exists without an opposing force, we become passive. We assume the situation is fixed, hopeless, or too large to challenge. But if we understand that every problem contains the need for its opposite, we begin looking for the counterforce.

Disease invites healing.

Darkness reveals the need for light.

Suppression creates the conditions for liberation.

Confusion calls for clarity.

The rule of nature is not that problems disappear on their own. The rule is that every negative force implies the existence of its positive counterpart. The work is learning how to find it, strengthen it, and bring it forward.

Lazy: A Manifesto

By Tim Kreider

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If you live in America in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Crazy Busy." It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: "That's a good problem to have," or "Better than the opposite."

This frantic, self-congratualtory busyness is a distinctly upscale affliction. Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the ICU, taking care of their senescent parents, or holding down three minimum-wage jobs they have to commute to by bus who need to tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they're "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they are addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren't working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with their friends the way 4.0 students make sure to sign up for some extracurricular activities because they look good on college applications. I recently wrote a friend asking if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn't have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. My question was not a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation: This was the invitation. I was hereby asking him to do something with me. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he as shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

I recently learned a neologism that, like political correctness, man cave, and content-provider, I instantly recognized as heralding an ugly new turn in the culture: planshopping. That is, deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that's most likely to be fun/advance your career/have the most girls at it -- in other words, treating people like menu options or products in a catalog.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with enrichment classes, tutorials, and extracurricular activities. At the end of the day they come home as tired as grownups, which seems not just sad but hateful. I was a member of the latchkey generation, and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from scouring The World Book Encyclopedia to making animated movies to convening with friends in the woods in order to chuck dirt clods directly into one another's eyes, all of which afforded me knowledge, skills, and insights that remain valuable to this day.

The busyness is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. I recently Skyped with a friend who had been driven out of New York City by the rents and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the South of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a circle of friends there who all go out to the cafe or watch TV together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone is too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious, and sad — turned out to be a reformative effect of her environment, of the crushing atmospheric pressure of ambition and competitiveness. It’s not as if any of us want to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it’s something we collectively force one another to do. It may not be a problem that’s solvable through any social reform or self-help regimen; maybe it’s just how things are. Zoologist Konrade Lorenz calls “the rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself” and all its attendant afflictions — ulcers, hypertension, neuroses, etc. — an “inexpedient development,” or evolutionary maladaptation, brought on by our ferocious intraspecies competition. He likens us to birds whose alluringly long plumage has rendered them flightless, easy prey.

I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter. I once dated a woman that interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’etre had been obviated when Menu buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. Based on the volume of my email correspondence and the amount of Internet ephemera I am forwarded on a daily basis, I suspect that most people with office jobs are doing as little as I am. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor or a worm in a Tyrollean hat in a Richard Scarry book I’m not convinced it’s necessary. Yes, I know we’re all very busy, but what, exactly, is getting done? Are all those people running late for meetings and yelling on their cell phones stopping the spread of malaria or developing feasible alternatives to fossil fuels or making anything beautiful?

The busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness: Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. All this noise and rush and stress seem contrived to drown out or over up some fear at the center of our lives. I know that after I’ve spent a whole day working or running errands or answering emails or watching movies, keeping my brain busy and distracted, as soon as I lie down to sleep all the niggling quotidian worries and Big Picture questions I’ve successfully kept at bay come crowding into my brain like monsters swarming out of the closet the instant you turn off the nightlight. When you try to meditate, your brain suddenly comes up with a list of a thousand urgent items you should be obsessing about rather than simply sit still. One of my correspondents suggests that what we’re all so afraid of is being left alone with ourselves.

I’ll say it: I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel like 4 or 5 hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and see friends, read or watch a movie in the evening. The very best days of my life are given over to uninterrupted debauchery, but these are, alas, undependable and increasingly difficult to arrange. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, “What time?"

But just recently, I insidiously started, because of professional obligation to become busy. For the first time in my life I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint: It makes you feel important, sought-after, and put-upon. It’s also an unassailable excuse for declining boring invitations, shirking unwelcome projects, and avoiding human interaction. Except that I hated actually being busy. Every morning my inbox was full of emails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I had to solve. It got more and more intolerable, until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stinkbugs, and the stars. I read a lot. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what that might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. I know not everyone has an isolated cabin to flee to. But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items. 

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice: It is an indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often the essence of what we do,” writes Thomas Pynchon in his essay on Sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll and Hyde, the benzine ring: history is full of stories of inspiration that came in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbrickers, and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions, and masterpieces than the hardworking.

"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was in fact Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write Childhood’s End and think up communications satellites. Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income form work, giving each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage, and 8-hour workdays. I know how heretical it sound in America, but there’s really no reason we shouldn’t regard drudgery as an evil to rid the world of if possible, like polio. It was the Puritans who perverted work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment. Now that the old taskmaster is out of office, maybe we could all take a long smoke break.

I suppose the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved like me. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My own life has admittedly been absurdly cushy. But my privileged position outside the hive may have given me a unique perspective on it. It’s like being the designated driver at a bar: When you’re not drinking, ou can see drunkenness more clearly than those actually experiencing it. Unfortunately the only advice I have to offer the Busy is as unwelcome as the advice you’d give to the Drunk. I’m not suggesting everyone quit their jobs — just maybe take the rest of the day off. Go play some see-ball. Fuck in the middle of the afternoon. Take your daughter to a matinee. My role in life is to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once to make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play.

Even though my own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. And I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder, write more, and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night talk with Lauren, one last hard laugh with Harold. Life is too short to be busy. 

Is physical strength a virtue?

Judging by the way so many people revere elite athletes, it seems arguable that physical strength is a virtue in the ancient sense of that word, i.e. a human excellence, or an excellence in a human being who possesses it. Or at least it is commonly regarded that way.

That’s controversial enough, but could it even be an excellence with moral or ethical significance? That sounds like a very strange notion to modern ears, but Aristotle would (arguably) have thought so, and the idea can be developed as part of a sophisticated ethical theory that deals with at least the most obvious objections on the ground of absurdity, etc. This would obviously have consequences for current debates about human enhancement technologies.

In the current issue of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, Kyle Oskvig broaches this tricky subject. He does not offer a full defense of Aristotle, but he does show that an evolved, reconstructed version of Aristotelian ethics can make such ideas seem much less crazy than we moderns are inclined to think. Check it out!