On Two Recent Health Headlines

1. There's a Fat Switch!
2. There's a Test to Predict When YOU WILL DIE!

Between pharmacology for all and everyone, and so-called DNA discoveries, we are right back to the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th century with hawkers of tonics to fix damn near anything that's wrong with us including maybe death. I mean, if you can predict when death is supposed to occur and if there's a drug for everything than surely there's a cocktail to cheat death?

I'm not making this up. Google it...tweet it...go online or watch the evening news and you can't avoid the latest greatest discovery or new drug or new application of an old drug.

I'm not saying it's bad for drug companies to find new uses for theirs drugs. Except when marketing not medicine drives the mission.

Nor am I saying DNA shouldn't be used to decode humans. I am after all more in the Hawkings camp than the Pope's.

I probably shouldn't snark. I need to lose weight. Extra weight has all kinds of negative health consequences. That hasten death.

But there are two wickedly pernicious undercurrents at play here.

The first is the ever present denigration of humanity by advertising designed to make us feel less worthy and in need of a product to make use more acceptable. Playing on people's self doubts - creating and feeding them is the unsurprising consequence of a consumer economy. When spin doctors set out to expand markets by manufacturing want, they have to play on emotional needs. The constant picking on that nerve has led to a want culture. Not just in the sense of materialism but also in the pervasive sense of lack many Americans seem to feel which is inexplicable in some ways since most of us don't lack for the basics or anything else. But psychologically completely understandable.

The second destructive factor at play is the idea that we can predict and therefore possibly cheat that which makes us human: death. The fact that we die and that we are conscious of the fact is arguably the only thing that makes us humane and unlike the other animals (although the jury's out on the latter). If we take that away, we will either:

1. live our best lives possible (like those who have near death experience often report);
2. live the way we are right now (thoughtless, aimless, foolish):
3. or go buck wild in the misapprehension that it doesn't matter because I'm gonna die on X date anyway so I better live it up now.

The good news is those outcomes are exactly the same as life today so no better, no worse. The bad news is, those outcomes are exactly the same...

My point is, a finding like that - that DNA can help predict when a person will die - should do something to elevate and illuminate the meaning of life. The moral, ethical, religious and philosophical considerations (along with the scientific, technological and legal ramifications) should be thoroughly debated.

Everyone who might die (that would be all of us), all of humanity should sit up, take notice, discuss and debate this and determine individually, as the individual owners of our destinies, what we think, want and will do with this knowledge.

Instead, what will probably happen is that advertisers will exploit our fears to sell more products, insurers will find new ways to limit coverage, big brother will manipulate the data to serve its political ends and whole populations will be written off as less than due to shorter life spans in spite of the few hand wringing liberals who will lament the immorality inhumanity of it all.

Most important, in light of clear evidence to the contrary, we still will not face the fact that we are born dying, that death is a central fact of life and that it defines what it is to be human. Knowledge of an expiration date probably won't change a thing.

Perhaps I am wrong. Maybe it's not death that makes us human. Perhaps it's the collective amnesia of stupidity. To quote a famous Homer, duh!

Split Personality

Last night body shaving and putting on make up were described as acts of vanity. We should just present our (natural) (face) selves to the world. It was pointed out that the speaker spends more time than any other at the table in the bathroom in the morning. That in response to another who suggested that good hygiene (grooming) is not the same as vanity.

Later on it occurred to me that we all present different faces of ourselves in different situations. I was thinking specifically of my online personas - the occasional and opinionated blogger, the saucy tweeter, the alternately edgy, outraged and whimsical facebooker and the professional observer of all things marketing and social media on linkedin.  Never mind that the real me - my truly favorite personal interests of writing, reading and jazz and trance music only show up in the privacy of my home or the subway but not online. Sometimes in the office but except for the infrequent book update on linkedin, strictly in the offline world.

Is there any meaning here? I am deliberate in what and how I show up online because I can be. Similarly for me words and music are mostly private inner life experiences. Is this vanity? I think it just is.

Consider another aspect of this: external perspectives of ourselves. People only see slices of other people. Based on what we show, what they want or expect to see and the nature of the interaction. At work colleagues may see the cool, rational self. At home the family may see the bitter, angry, frustrated, tired self. In the grocery store perhaps the gracious self shows up. Behind the wheel the aggressive road warrior. All different aspects of same person. None fully representative.

I think Hannah Arendt said something about the story of one's life cannot be told until her death. After death one might be able to put a life in perspective. Granted there's a lot of biographical and autobiographical evidence to the alternative. Just look at Mark Twain's bio published on his express orders 100 years after his death in order to quell controversy at the time of his death.

Still the who and what we are and our motivations and intents are never fully knowable either internally by our selves or externally by other peoples views of us.

So why the characterization of grooming as vanity? Or I should say more precisely the view of an act as grooming by one yet vanity by another. A mourning for the loss of a child to young adulthood? A disagreement of values? A projection of a perception?

I'm not sure the question is answerable. Each participant saw and heard what they saw and heard just as each presented what they wanted to show. It's never possible to know the full truth of a person.