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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

A psychological “mutation” of this magnitude cries out for a historic explanation. Here, historians have generally invoked the social and economic changes accompanying the increasing dominance of a market economy. As fixed feudal roles and obligations lost their grip, it became easier for people to imagine themselves as individuals capable of self-initiated change, including upward mobility. You might be an artisan and learn to dress and speak like a merchant, or a merchant who takes on the airs of an aristocrat. Traditional bonds of community and faith loosened, even making it possible to assume the identity of another person, as in the famous case of the sixteenth-century adventurer who managed to convince the inhabitants of a village that he was their missing neighbor Martin Guerre. He took over the family inheritance and moved in with the real Guerre’s wife, at least until the ruse was uncovered three years later.6 If you could move from village to village, from village to city, from one social class to another—and surely the disruptions of intra-European wars played a part in the new mobility—you have to constantly monitor the impression you are making on others. At the same time, those others are becoming less trustworthy; you cannot be sure what true “self” lies behind the façade.