Revisiting the question of “why health?” | The Healthiest Goldfish

We aspire to be healthy so that we can live full lives.

Let’s talk about health.

How we think about health is often wrong. In fact, we often do not think about health at all when we think we are thinking about health. What we think about is disease. We worry if we have a pain somewhere. We wonder if we are maybe diabetic. We brood about the possible causes of a chronic itch. We ask ourselves, “Did I just pull a muscle?” We may believe this constitutes thinking about health. But it does not. We are, in fact, thinking about the absence of health. We are thinking about disease. This mis-think extends to the public conversation. When health is written about in the media, it is more often than not in writing about disease.

I am sometimes asked to comment in the media on issues of consequence for health. Typically, I am asked to look at the world through the lens of disease—of how to avoid or treat sickness. I am asked about a particular new virus, about diseases of the heart or of other organs. This impulse to seek this perspective is understandable. There are few experiences in life more all-consuming than that of disease. When we are sick, our affliction is often all we can think about, and this is the case at both the individual and societal level. When we are in pain, when our body does not work as it should, it can become the central fact of our lives.

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