Health

What is healthy and what is unhealthy?

Is the absence of pain and suffering what makes one healthy? 

But what about the saying “no pain, no gain” or all the other philosophies about pain and suffering and sacrifice leading to future benefit or benefit to other people?

Is health about stability and sustainability? If you are in a state that will naturally continue to replicate this state unless something external changes it? 

But what if this state includes some sort of suffering or pain? Would staying in this state and being able to continually replicate this state be healthy?

​If life is about relationships, if we’re all interconnected, if we’re all One, one being, one body, one spirit in the end, is health about our ability to relate well with others? 

This would encapsulate both physical and mental wellness. 

But what does “well” mean? How do you determine at one exact segment of time, in one specific relationship between two people if there is “wellness” in the relationship?

What do all these questions mean for me right now, for us right now? Do the answers to these questions, whether they are subjective answers or objective answers, have implications to how much time I/we spend thinking and worrying about “health”, about caring for my own health and seeking care for my health and caring for other people’s health and the whole “healthcare” system?

For example is the U.S. actually smarter than Canada by not worrying about health as much on a larger scale, not putting in as many widespread health restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and letting the private market take care of the healthcare of its people rather than making it universally free and available to everyone? 

Or another example, how do I personally know when I am sick, physically or mentally, what constitutes when I should seek treatment, giving up my agency to healthcare “professionals”?

These are all just questions, these are all just hypotheticals but they are also real and impact my daily life and the life of all people. Can philosophy just be an end on it’s own? I don’t think so. Is philosophy as an academic discipline, actually anything real? Is any academic discipline actually anything real and useful?

Action, choices, doing things, is actually living. 

Thinking, writing, asking questions about making choices and doing things are in themselves actions but they are actions that lead nowhere until actual action is taken. That seems unnecessary to me, that seems unhealthy to me.

So why do I spend so much time just thinking and writing and reading about life and why do I spend so much time worrying about whether I’m living a healthy life or taking care of my health? Why do humans in general put so much resources and energy into things like education and media and healthcare?

Rather than thinking and caring about healthy living, I could be, we could be actually living life. 

Why does it matter if we resurrect from the dead, if we are born again, if we have everlasting life or not if when we are living we are not actually living but just thinking about and taking care of life?