The Whole Truth | Take the moral science out of wellness

It was my fifth anniversary of being cancer-free. I decided to celebrate the old way. The really old way. Gathered some old friends, and braved an all-night bender. A lady who I was meeting for the first time was in a bit of a spot through it all. We were all getting progressively drunk. Finally the lady asked, “This is really bothering me. After cancer you are drinking? What’s wrong with you?” We never became friends, but that’s not the point. The point is, healing, wellness, trying hard to be of sound body and mind are no longer just choices. They are the new aspirational lifestyle templates, the social integrators of our age. And it goes much beyond body size or colour. It is a mindset and way of life resolutely focussed on improving or fixing the self. If you are constantly not trying to eat superfoods, and if you are not brave enough to understand yourself through your shadows and demons — in other words your parents, siblings and childhood, and how irrevocably they damaged you — with a therapist, you are close to being a social pariah.

It is hopeful, perhaps, that we are in this giant positivity sac — going about our lifestyle regimes with purpose and earnestness. Buying the two-litre water bottle with markers for every other gulp you are supposed partake through your day was endorsed with amusing purposefulness by its most interesting character in the Apple TV series Shrinking (2023). The shrink is the new hero and the shrink’s couch our battleground with ourselves and our family constellations. How else will our daughters and sons be free of those proverbial demons? How else will they thrive and be perfectly authentic versions of themselves in everything they do? How long can generational baggage cripple us?

In this heal-yourself pursuit, wellness and health has somehow become disconnected from the state and our communities. The idea that health and wellness are the responsibility of the state for its tax-paying citizens, and that we can’t ignore the interconnectedness of all different kinds of human families, communities and nature has little currency. You can’t heal if your boss is not healed. You can’t be positive if your spouse serially cheats on you. You can’t experience lightness unless the families and communities you are connected to are under siege or gripped by fear. An almost 60-year-old little book of Eastern philosophy, Alan Watts’ The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who We Are, which I read recently, has some great examples of how ignoring the interconnectedness of human life has led to darkness and catastrophe. Watts writes, “At the root of human conflict is our fundamental misunderstanding of who we are. The illusion that we are isolated beings, unconnected to the rest of the universe, has led us to view the ‘outside’ world with hostility, and has fuelled our misuse of technology and our violent and hostile subjugation of the natural world.”

The earlier the wellness world realises this and embraces the idea of collective wellness,  the closer we are to optimum health.