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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Of course most of the young, educated people who started jogging and gym-going in the 1970s and ’80s had never expected, much less worked to bring about, a political and cultural revolution. But they had hoped for stable employment, preferably in jobs they found meaningful and creative, and in an age when the entire sociological map was being redrawn, there was little chance of that. First, the traditional blue-collar working class gave way to “deindustrialization,” meaning plant closings and layoffs. As the downsizing fervor spread to the nonprofit sector, whole sections of the professional middle class crumbled off like calves from a melting iceberg. Human service agencies began to shed their social workers, psychologists, and public-interest lawyers. Universities shuttered departments, like philosophy and foreign languages, that were failing to generate sufficient revenue. An alarming new phenomenon appeared—the taxi-driving PhD, predecessor of today’s avatar of educational disutility, the PhD on food stamps.4 In the face of so much class turmoil, young people rapidly rolled back their expectations to fit the narrowing career possibilities. UCLA’s annual survey of undergraduate attitudes found a sharp decline in “altruism and social concerns,” with a record 73 percent in 1987 reporting that their top goal was “being very well-off financially,” compared with 39 percent in 1970.5 I met them all the time on campuses, students who had started out with an interest in social ...