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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

There is one time-honored salve for the anxiety of approaching self-dissolution, and that is to submerge oneself into something “larger than oneself,” some imagined super-being that will live on without us. The religious martyr dies for God, the soldier for the nation or, if his mind cannot encompass something as large as the nation, at least for the regiment or platoon. War is one of the oldest and most widespread human activities, and warriors are expected to face death willingly in battle, hoping to be memorialized in epics like the Iliad or the Mahabharata or in one of the war monuments that have sprung up since the nineteenth century. For frightened soldiers or, later, their grieving survivors, dying is reconfigured as a “sacrifice”—the “ultimate sacrifice”—with all the ancient religious connotations of an offering to the gods.