Personhood

and other impossible tasks

You have to opt out, consciously and every day. You have to wake up knowing that you choose to opt out, and you have to spend the hours of your life making that choice – daily, hourly, at the forefront of your consciousness. The alternative is to accept an endless waking death, a life without life in it. And you can find the evidence to confirm the wisdom of your choice every day, simply by forcing yourself to watch for it. You’re soaking in it; it surrounds you, in real life and in media.

To consider what our lives are like now, first consider an argument about the importance of faith from someone who didn’t have any. You don’t have to agree with it to see the point.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim, writing in the face of a thorough reshaping of human experience, argued that religion was false but true. Confident that gods and souls and the sacred are nonsense, a perceived reality that seemed “scarcely more than a tissue of lies,” he nonetheless believed that religious faith was basically correct at its root – that it was a misunderstanding of something real:

We can say, in fact, that the worshipper is not deluding himself when he believes in the existence of a higher power from which he derives his best self: that power exists, and it is society… Religion is above all a system of notions by which individuals imagine the society to which they belong and their obscure yet intimate relations with that society. This is its primordial role; and although this representation is metaphorical and symbolic, it is not inaccurate. Quite the contrary, it fully expresses the most essential aspect of the relations between the individual and society. For it is an eternal truth that something exists outside of us that is greater than we are, and with which we commune.

The relentlessly secular son of a rabbi, Durkheim thought religion was both false and necessary. He found in religious practice an affirmation of social meaning, a foundation of human connection, and a tool for structuring a life that would otherwise be an endless round of animal pursuits, eating and shitting and sheltering. He thought we make myth and the forms of worship because we need them to live, and because faith and the structure of ritual give a shape to lives that would otherwise be formless. Gathering for religious ritual, he wrote, people “find mutual comfort in the very act of assembling; they find the remedy because they seek it together.”

We no longer seek many remedies together, and the prevailing versions of that behavior are corrupted and dangerous.

Even before the pandemic that reached the United States early last year, our sense of social connection was imploding. The shorthand for this development, bowling alone, speaks to the social atomization that increasingly defines our lives. Participation in churches and clubs collapsed from the opening of the 21st century. The decline in engagement – in leaving the house and doing things – was already written on our bodies: in obesity rates, in measures of physical fitness like grip strength over time and between generations. We do less, we’re sicker, we’re less connected. Sitting on your ass watching television by yourself is physical, emotional, and intellectual ruin. This gets us all the way into 2019.

Then came the pandemic, and the madness of our response to it. Covering our faces, sheltering in our houses, keeping our children indoors and away from friends, we became fatter, more depressed, more anxious, weaker, and – ironically – less healthy. Take a minute out of your life to review these two studies: First, the study on the rapid increase in childhood obesity rates during lockdowns and school closures; second, the study on the protective value of physical activity during the pandemic. Notice. Take this information on.

Look for this. I challenge you to look for the competing signs of health and unhealthiness on the bodies of people in the supermarket, on the sidewalk, in your family and in public. Walk out of the house and look at people. Look at muscle tone, obesity, gait. I can’t prove it, but I personally see a change in the number of people I see who drag their legs, who shuffle, who take short and uncertain steps. I see fat people in the supermarket, limping and wobble-gaited with poor balance, wearing masks to stay healthy. Interesting.

A year and a half of “stay home, stay safe,” a year and a half in which people have internalized the ruinous message that inactivity is protective, is written on the bodies you pass in the street. It’s a warning to you. Take the warning.

Social connection is purpose, meaning, and structure. Physical activity is protective. And these are the two things government and media have spent a year and a half demanding that you abandon in the name of health. The increasingly cancerous substitute for social connection, social media tribalism – sneering at the other side on Twitter – is a counterfeit system of belonging, the processed food of human engagement. (Durkheim argued that politics could become religion, and he famously described the French Revolution as a religious movement. But it doesn’t work, and more about that later.) You have not, in fact, joined in human connection because you called someone names on the Internet and other people joined in with you.

There’s a war on for your well-being. Fight it. Start by standing up and walking outside.