Bodies Bodies Bodies

I'd like to stop thinking so much about my body. Is that possible?

Illustration by Ayana H. Muwwakkil.

There’s some stat about the number of thoughts you have in a day. God only knows how they came up with this. It must be like that apocryphal interview question they supposedly asked job applicants at Google, about how many golf balls can fit in a 747… If I have X number of thoughts in a minute and there are Y minutes in a day, then I can assume…etc. etc. But it doesn’t take a Googler to surmise that it’s a lot—of golf balls, of thoughts. At one point, the number that got thrown around was 60K+ thoughts in a day. Then some scientists studied folks with MRIs and published a paper saying it was more like 6,000, which is still a big number. I don’t know the answer about the golf balls. I’m sure you can google it.

I mention all this because I had writer, fitness enthusiast, and guy with a documented six-pack

Chris Gayomali

as the Healings FAQ guest on Sunday, and since then I’ve been reflecting on the fact that I spend an inordinate amount of time each day thinking about my body. Like, if I created a pie graph that showed the different buckets of thoughts I had throughout the day, I suspect “thoughts about my body” would be an embarrassingly high percentage. Actually, I just made the pie graph, and asked Healings art director Ayana to make it look pretty, and she did, and you can see above it’s a very approximate 15%. If we use the scientists’ 6K figure, that means I think about my body 900 times a day. That’s an unbelievable number. Or maybe it’s not. 

For starters, there’s a whole slew of thoughts just related to aging, for example bemoaning the fact that my hamstrings are always tight in the mornings, that my knees hurt after a run, that it takes real effort to move around on the floor with my daughter while she’s playing. Then there’s a bucket for aesthetics: my unremarkable dad bod, my hairline, those persistent bags under my eyes. (Should I do something about those? The dermatologist I see said she has a simple procedure, $750 an eye-bag. I consider it frequently!) I think about food, of course—the various diets I’ve tried (keto) or should try (intermittent fasting). Danielle and I have a long running argument about my attitudes toward skincare (clearly a scam). 

Then there are the bigger, more existential thoughts: How long is this body of mine going to hold up? What should I be doing to extend that time? Which books should I read? What experts should I listen to? 

Add all that up and 900 thoughts a day doesn’t seem out of the question.

I’m obviously not unique in this predicament (if we can call it that), as evidenced by the size and persistence of what I’ll call the mortality industrial complex—that massive agglomeration of multinational corporations and tiny small business, millionaire content creators and good ol’ concerned family members, all united by the simple idea that they think they know what’s best for you. Lately, my contempt for this amorphous and omnipresent group has led to doing stupid and pointless things, like correcting certain Twitter influencers’ grammar in their posts about the benefits of adaptogens, or replying to a recent Bryan Johnson post with, simply, “You make me sad.”

Johnson, for those who are unacquainted, is the poster child for how ugly this can get, and the less said about him the better (he gets enough attention already). But suffice to say: He’s a supposed tech mogul and likely grifter who spends millions a year on various experimental treatments to forestall the aging process, including blood transfusions from his teenage son, and avoiding sunlight. Only in Silicon Valley would someone think to spin “Actual Vampire” into a marketable brand.  

Since first stumbling across this asshole during my cancer treatment, I’ve had persistent and vigorous contempt for Johnson and everything he stands for. Yet as I write this I find my attitudes about him softening every so slightly. The thing about Johnson and so many others like him (in Silicon Valley especially), is he’s just the logically extreme outgrowth of a condition we all share, which is that we’d prefer not to die. Even better, it’d be nice if we could avoid aging altogether—if we could pull all-nighters in our fifties the same way we did in our twenties, eat whatever we wanted now and forever, if we could never have a single “back problem.” And while we’re at it, it’d be nice if our lips were a little fuller, our bellies a little flatter, and on and on and on. Before you know it, we’re ticking up toward 900 again. 

This is usually the part of these essays where I mention Buddhism, and indeed a useful Buddhist idea here is the practice of equanimity, the literal translation of which is “in the middle-ness.” When it comes to thinking about our bodies, neither abject neglect nor total obsession are particularly good looks. Then there’s the doctrine of impermanence: everything changes, including, and especially our bodies. Old age, sickness and death are inevitable, even for Bryan Johnson. 

These are things I just need to keep reminding myself of, in the hopes of maybe reducing that 900 number by, oh, I dunno…20 percent? That’s still 720 thoughts a day, but hey, progress not perfection.

And rather than follow the lead of someone like Palo Alto Dracula, I’d suggest instead the inimitable and decidedly mortal Barbara Ehrenreich, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 81, and whose book Natural Causes is a defiant polemic on the trappings of the mortality industrial complex, and the knots we’ve tied ourselves in trying to outrun our inevitable expiration.

“You can think of death bitterly or with resignation,” Ehrenreich writes, “as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”

Natural Causes book cover illustration by Jarrod Taylor.

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