We pour out time and money and energy to look beautiful, to have pleasure, to feel good about ourselves, to avoid suffering. Every year we spend billions of dollars on diets and gyms and cosmetics and surgeries and prescriptions and leisure crafts and getaways—all in a vain attempt to reverse our outward wasting. Yet the wasting relentlessly presses on, blithely and cruelly indifferent to our defenses. All the while, we wither on the inside, lonely, empty, afraid.
