Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

What is new is that today, in our secular, individualistic nation, an amorphous illness is seen inevitably as an opportunity to uncover the authentic nature of the self and improve it, a project squarely in line with other obsessions of our neoliberal society.

comes to their mental health. How many of them will burn out before they can achieve their dreams due to biological factors? By looking more carefully, we can see that there is an underlying cause triggering these symptoms. I firmly believe we can cure ourselves of this “disease” of elusive well-being. Especially in the United States, we are seeing

I live in a university town, a place that is populated by people who consider themselves called to a “life of the mind,” and yet my friends and I rarely talk about ideas or try to persuade one another of anything. It’s understood that people come to their convictions—are in some sense destined to them—by elusive forces: some combination of hormones

Most of us live out lives that we’ve unconsciously inherited, and we’re mimicking patterns of living that have been passed on to us by family, school, religion, government, economic institutions, and the media. We have lost touch with the rich, subjective life of being in the human body, upon which our entire experience is based. The body, the soma