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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

What could go wrong? Of course, with the introduction of “self-knowledge” and “self-love,” one enters an endless hall of mirrors: How can the self be known to the self, and who is doing the knowing? If we love ourselves, who is doing the loving? This is the inescapable paradox of self-reflection: How can the self be both the knower and the content of what is known, both the subject and the object, the lover and that which is loved? Other people can be annoying, as Sartre famously suggested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self. Many historians have argued that the rise of self-awareness starting in roughly the seventeenth century was associated with the outbreak of an epidemic of “melancholy” in Europe at about the same time, and subjective accounts of that disorder correspond very closely with what we now call “depression.”10 Chronic anxiety, taking the form of “neurasthenia” in the nineteenth century, seems to be another disease of modernism. The self that we love and nurture turns out to be a fragile, untrustworthy thing.