The Pills of the Unexamined Life

I’ve heard it many times: I just get these pills and I can eat what I want. But when I heard it offered to me as oblique advice it took on a new ring. (I am trying to lower my blood pressure by eliminating some of the excess salt.) Seriously?

Here is what I mind:

1 The expense. I hate to pay for extra things, which in this case involves not only paying regularly to big pharma, the insurance people nodding over it and calculating, and on top of that the routine visits to the doctor that being on the chain of a prescription involve. I have no desire to give them more money than I do, and a great desire to give them less money than they already get. And as you slide further into their grasp, a world of escalating pills as you have the multiplying side-effects.

2 The chemicals. I don’t like the idea of supplements and pills and all that. It is crazy to me what people are willing to ingest. Not even of natural things such as eating cloves of garlic and such moves me. Eat normally, eat with discipline, eat with intelligence, but consuming things without joy even if it is for the purpose of consuming all the rest with joy is for me to live in a disproportion. Consume fewer things. Have fewer things. I might have to become a mountain hermit.

3 The dumbness. Give me Heraclitus. All is fire! All is logos! A world in which the choice is to consider less, to mind less, to be aware of fewer things, to pretend as if thinking is some kind of burden is intolerable. It is Democritus on supplements: chemicals and the void. It is as if people go out of their way to be feckless! It is not a good. It is a world of counterproductivity and inefficiency.

And it is sold to you, all you need is an overweight doctor aided by overweight nurses all theatrically wearing pointless masks while certifiably free of all communicable disease since they are regularly tested for it. How does acquiescence not feel like a farce?

I will probably fail to stave it off. I am too old and cannot keep healthy levels of things when I live in this country. I think it is the unnatural low altitude at which one is forced to live, being a highlander by upbringing. Do I mind enough to become a mountain hermit?

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