Scatter My Ashes at Moon Juice

On speeding up, slowing down and what comes next: wellness after quarantine and what we’re really up against.

I used to work but I don’t anymore. I would get emails and texts and solicitations that I didn’t even want, but now I don’t. I used to be an acupuncturist, but my job required me to touch people all day, and a sudden global airborne phlegm-communicable virus with no top-down science-based strategy for management makes it a pretty weird time to do that. Eventually I’ll return to work, I assume, but I don’t want to return to the way things were. For those of us with the privilege to consider the pandemic an “opportunity for self-reflection,” the collective yikes seems to be, “I’m itching for it to be over, but I’m nervous to go back.”

The quarantine has forced many of us to confront how deeply we self-identify with our jobs; how much of our self-esteem and joy is generated by how busy we are, how hard we work, how much we get done, how much money we make, how many people we see, and how many people see us. How capitalist we are. It was always there, of course, but the sudden deceleration really exposed our internalized expectation that every nanosecond of our lives must be endlessly profitable, and without being able to lose ourselves in that, we are fucking wrecks.

In her essay “Always Be Optimizing,” writer Jia Tolentino calls it the “compulsion to optimize,” our urgent, unquestioned mission to constantly be better, in which the endless pressure and expense of self-improvement only feeds the endless pressure and expense of self-improvement—without relief. Optimization backs us into a corner where we either submit to its inhumane expectations and shatter ourselves doing it, or “fail” and be shamed for it.

Because I’m an acupuncturist — or was an acupuncturist, and assume I eventually will be again — today’s multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry — collectively the products and services that promise to improve the mind, body, and spirit — is how I witness the impact of optimization culture, on a daily basis, on an often astonishingly personal level. (As a practitioner in Los Angeles, I’m privy to a particularly extreme version of it.) I don’t have a single patient who isn’t suffering from the effects of late-stage capitalism; it may not be their “chief complaint,” but it is always a part of the larger diagnosis.

I’m over it. But even as I write this, I can feel the world speeding up again, I‘m seeing its elasticity. But despite whatever eagerness to reestablish and rejoin a deeply-flawed normalcy — which, frankly, is more than deeply-flawed, it’s punishing, to some far more than others — we need to stop and examine how we are living. It’s past time to really address the pressure and expense of our velocity; call out the systems, institutions and language which create and reinforce impossible conditions; and figure out how we move forward.

This is the conversation I need to have.

Some context

The most recent iteration of wellness, a movement with decades of history, was born post-Sex and the City, “the minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favor among women,” according to Taffy Brodesser-Akner in her New York Times profile of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop (whose appeal varies depending on your psychographic and how much you value expensive pee). Brodesser-Akner explains that today’s wellness was initially a response to the failure of “too much having it all, too much pursuit, too many boxes that we’d seen our exhausted mothers fall into bed without checking off.” It was a massive shift for women—from trying to improve all of the areas of their lives (unsuccessfully) to improving just one: personal health. It’s an important distinction that wellness as we know it entered the marketplace as a response to hyper-productivity wish-fulfillment failure.

We now “need” apple cider vinegar gummies and high vibrational foods because we are so fucking tired and the air is disgusting. We need body work and stretch studios because we wrong our backs for ten hours a day sitting at desks, and then twist them into junk positions to white-knuckle it through another night of anxiety sleep. We need raw herb decoctions and Siberian chaga mushrooms because we know the pharmaceutical industry is deranged, with its lobbying and profiteering and darkly psychedelic marketing. (I like the one where I’m at a hypersaturated Brooklynese block party but the woman with plaque psoriasis can’t enjoy it, but then she does! While a haunting cover of a Fleetwood Mac song plays. I mean really wtf.) We need meditation because we’re in fucked-up, codependent relationships with pocket computers, which we take into our beds so we can do more work in our one place of rest, and then wonder how we forgot how to relax. We need crystals because they remind us of a time before technology.

Wellness™ is how we try to push the rock back up the hill, knowing full well gravity is infinitely stronger and will drag it right back down. It’s a Band-Aid for the suffering caused by late-stage capitalism, and the way late-stage capitalism has normalized exhaustion, depletion, disconnection, armoring, and numbness.

We have long needed to acknowledge that wellness now works for capitalism, to bypass and excuse the flaws of capitalism, and create a workforce that is “just well enough” to always go back to overexerting and overextending itself for employers and institutions that are likely the reason it’s ill to begin with. But right now, with a lot less immediate pressure to optimize, and the sobering possibility of getting a flu that indiscriminately kills otherwise-healthy people, we may finally be clear enough, motivated enough, riled up enough, and fed up enough, to understand and approach our “wellness” differently.

For the record, I love wellness. I’ve practiced acupuncture for 15 years. I know its effectiveness in triggering the inflammatory response so that blood can properly recirculate through the body. I’ve seen it slow down tachycardia in real time on the table; resolve neuralgia and post-amputation phantom limb pain; treat patellar tendinitis, meniscus tears, and thoracic outlet syndrome; and succeed as adjunct support for chemotherapy and other rigorous western medical regimens.

And for me, there will always be tremendous magic in the beautiful metaphor of literally being pinned down by needles — a deceleration that has been the cornerstone of my practice for years, well before the grand deceleration we are experiencing now.

So while I may be personally aggrieved that the values and outstanding work of generations of practitioners from around the world have been co-opted and obscured by people whose contributions pretty much begin and end at the ability to photograph the fuck out of an açai bowl, I believe in the medicine, across the modalities. And despite my — adorable — crankiness, I’m honored to share this field with so many brilliant minds, whom I admire and study and refer patients to.

Which is not to say that much of the criticism about the current state of wellness isn’t completely valid: it’s too expensive, accessible only to the privileged; it’s too diagnosis-centric; it’s too populated by Caucasians overusing the word “Namaste.” It’s become over-packaged, cheapened, a novelty, like an “immersive pop-up” or an “experiential activation,” a Museum of Ice Cream or a Museum of Fruit, places you take photos for your socials to show people you were there.

And yet, the one critique I don’t hear enough is that “tired and wired” — the well-used shorthand for how we all basically feel — is a product of a system that wants us that way, and wellness practitioners make “tired and wired” just palatable enough. The reality is that most of us are treating patients knowing that their headaches, insomnia, fatigue, bad backs, panic attacks, indigestion, depression and infertility are all worsened, if not entirely caused by, systemic stress—just to release them back into the world, back into the wood chipper.

That’s the part that feels so pressing: the tension that if we are largely Band-Aiding the suffering associated with optimization, are we effectively enabling and codifying it? Are we all helping to hide and erase how capitalism never loses and is designed to ultimately exploit us? Are people like me — healers, ew — just temporarily patching the effects of the machinery so people can stay in the machinery?

I believe that the only way for the wellness industry to move forward is to begin publicly acknowledging that as long as capitalism continues to never lose, the job of wellness will largely be to keep people well enough to go back to what makes them sick. And that when we talk about health, our economic and political system has to be an active part of the conversation, because they have become largely one and the same.

Here are a few ways I’ve been thinking about doing this.

1. Identify and acknowledge optimization whenever and wherever it occurs.

We’re all jacked up on optimization, whether we notice it or not, and it’s making everyone sick. The expectation — or demand — that you should be better today than you were yesterday (and, conversely, worse at the beginning of a hot yoga class than after, when you’re peeling off soaked high-waist “Goddess” leggings) may seem like benign motivation, but it’s also a feedback loop of obsession and self-loathing.

Jia Tolentino’s brilliant Trick Mirror calls out so many of the daily, robotic life-stripping rituals we engage in to be able to “thrive.” However, nothing stabbed me in the heart as deeply as her analysis of the delicious, diabolical, premasticated Sweetgreen chopped salad, the perfect food for optimizing, engineered to be eaten with one hand so as to free the other to scroll an iPhone. It’s for the consumer whose life requires them “to send emails for sixteen hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward off the unhealthfulness of urban professional life…because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular $12 salad in the first place.”

The vocabulary of wellness is similarly optimized, particularly around fitness. “Boot camp” fetishizes drill sergeant instruction as a straight line to a military-grade body. Spin classes “revolve” completely around competition — with other spinners and, worse, with yourself, a constantly retreating horizon that’s the cornerstone of the entire SoulCycle brand. SoulCycle also loves its “rebels” — although I still don’t know how dancing with my available elbows to Kesha on a high-end stationary bike crushes the status quo. And then there are the “warriors,” like at the prominent Los Angeles yoga and meditation center that announces its mission as Align. Center. Conquer. as if it couldn’t find language to quantify its brand of peacefulness that doesn’t invoke colonialism and violence.

So much of our lives is about contending with the iffy narrative that life is so hard you’ll probably fail before you even try but if you don’t try then you definitely fail. (Although if you try Flat Tummy Tea you’ll definitely get pharmaceutical grade diarrhea.) We’re told that we need to push against something in order to grow and that anything “good” must be punishing. “Facebook Challenges” are a particular poo pile for me. They’re fine enough but the implicit message is that in order to get around to “doing” benevolence, we need to be called out and socially coerced; we need an opportunity to publicly perform an instance of charity; and it has to cost us something. It’s almost too on the nose that we arrived at a place where altruism became synonymous with a chain letter and a bucket of ice. (Please, please don’t nominate me for anything! And don’t get me started on any version of #findyoursexy.)

Then there’s the insidious romance of being busy — of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. “Busy” is the dick boyfriend that capitalism wants us to think is sexy. But time is not money, time is just time. Even in isolation, we feel pressure to “make the most of our time”: to create content, to pivot, to capitalize on the moment, to monetize the moment, to monetize the quarantine itself! I need to eat so many Tums to stomach all of the nakedly cynical commercials trying to connect heavily-soundtracked “heartfelt” pandemic messaging to their bottom line: “We’re not in the car business, we’re in the people business. And now when people need it the most, we’re going to do what we’ve always done and take care of people first. Visit your Lexus dealer.” Blech.

God forbid we develop a relationship with time where it is no longer a bully or a thief but rather a generous parent or choreographer who directs us to move carefully, with intention, with breath and, above all, grace.

And what does it say about our “self-improvement” that, by its very definition, it can never be satisified? We need to stop thinking of self-improvement as endless, and start thinking of it as something that can be permitted to plateau.

Optimization needs to be seen for what it is — an external dragon, something that has taken possession of us — so we can recognize that while it animates us, it’s not who we are. We need to call out its rhetoric at every turn and be mindful of using it all — particularly healthcare professionals, because we, of all people, know its damage. I want new words in our mouths.

2. Recognize that the culture of optimization was deliberately created, with very specific goals.

During quarantine, many people have expressed shock at how uncomfortable, depressing and painful “doing nothing” can be. They’re pulling their hair out from being relatively idle; they know it’s deranged but they can’t help it. It’s important we acknowledge that our discomfort with slowing down is by design.

The people who maintain and enforce capitalism (mainly rich cis white men) consider speed, extroversion, expansion and accumulation to be the highest virtues — and those are the virtues they reward. (You don’t get a bonus for quiet walks and stillness.) They need all of us to be deeply dependent on productivity and busy-ness to feel good about ourselves because capitalism succeeds when it convinces us that rest — to even need rest — is for those people. This includes the lazy, the weak, the sick, the unpopular, the irrelevant, the unmotivated, the unsuccessful, and the failing — people with whom we are now, in quarantine, self-identifying.

We are meant to feel wretched and actively self-punish ourselves for not working, not earning, not consuming. Slowing down is supposed to feel like a betrayal so that our internalized shame self-polices us into returning to work. To champion stasis, conservation, hybernation or, god forbid, restoration, points the finger at those who exploit us.

3. Refuse artificial competition and conflict narratives, which have become some of our greatest sources of pain and disease.

In my fifteen years of clinical practice as an acupuncturist, it never fails to surprise me how many of my patients are stressed — physically, emotionally, spiritually — by a single person. And that as soon as that one person is removed from their life, their “chief complaint” — the pain, the disease — recedes almost immediately. I have patients who complain for so long about a co-worker, boss, rival parent or ‘frenemy” that I start to ask about them like they’re my best friend’s other best friend. “What did Rebecca do this week?” “What did Dennis have to say about all that?” “What is it any of Susan’s business?” And then Rebecca gets transferred to another department and suddenly the headaches go away and it’s like she and they never existed.

The error is this: Rebecca is not the source of the stress. Rebecca isn’t the enemy. Rebecca is, more often than not, depending on their circumstances, just another person, struggling to exist like you are, feeling the pressure of systems and institutions like you are. We have become reflexively competitive because capitalism works better when we operate oppositionally under the presumption of scarcity. We are all locked into a stress cycle that maximizes productivity at the expense of equanimity, in order to maintain our highly subjective levels of baseline survival.

To live in an oppositional world denies the possibility of communion, the beauty and texture of that new thing that is created when two suspicious, antagonistic things are placed in loving proximity. Rebecca may be a total bitch. But they’re not exactly out to get you, they’re just looking out for themselves at the expense of you, as they were taught, and as their parents were taught before them. (And then I wonder, what is Rebecca telling their acupuncturist?)

It also needs mentioning that the American system relies heavily on selling itself as a meritocracy, which it isn’t. Sixty percent of the country’s wealth is intergenerational, passed effortlessly down bloodlines, exposing the lie of economic mobility and the supposed rewards for ability and achievement. And we’re about to begin the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. Most people are in a losing competition with the racial and gender wealth gaps and those who have been successfully wealthy for generations and likely always will be.

(Even now, I see people getting angry at people who have lost their jobs and are receiving unemployment, but not getting angry at the government for rejecting guaranteed hazard pay or the corporations who refuse to pay their employees a livable wage during a national health crisis. And then there are the extremists shouting at nurses and blocking them from entering hospitals as part of a larger strategy for forcing the system back online, whatever the cost.)

Can we imagine a different world? As my favorite Rebecca — writer Rebecca Solnit — says, in times of crisis and without fully functioning commerce, “just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.”

I’ve been to paradise. In the panicked week leading up to the Los Angeles stay at home order, I went to buy cleaning supplies and found myself with two women I didn’t know, united by a common shopping list, staring at a wall of empty shelves. Wordlessly, one of the women dropped to her hands and knees and crawled under the lowest shelf until half of her body disappeared. She reemerged with six containers of Clorox Disinfecting Wipes, probably the last in Hollywood. She stood up, faced me and the other woman and, clutching the little plastic tumblers like Adele holding all of her Grammys, said evenly, “We each get two, that’s fair right?”

I almost cried. I could never have expected to experience such noble generosity at the Rock ’n’ Roll Ralphs on Sunset Boulevard where I once saw a woman throw a totally full Starbucks venti iced coffee across the deli area at no one in particular. But I think most of us have experienced similar moments during this nuts pandemic, even the crazy toilet paper part (which was created by social survival competition to attend to a basic bodily need–hygienic pooping.) Consider the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes a parable for the contemporary condition, or as Solnit describes it in the title of her brilliant book, “a paradise built in hell.”

4. Establish and enforce measurements for the “success of health” that exist outside the binary language of optimization.

For some of my patients, to be in “good health” means, “I never experience pain and never have to go to the doctor.” This is not ideal, to say the least. The patient who feels this way is often an able-bodied cis man because the only internal physical sensations most able-bodied cis men expect to regularly experience are gas and brain freeze. (I say this as an able-bodied cis man.) For them, “I feel nothing” is literally the goal of health. They automatically classify anything they might feel beyond “nothing” as pathological, or bad health. (Women, by virtue of the menstrual cycle, don’t share this entitlement and understand that physical discomfort is standard for living in a human body.)

This is an example of why good health versus bad health is a false binary. It’s a construction in which “health” (which is a construction in and of itself) is the baseline normal, the correct state of being, and “disease” is the aberration, a temporary anomaly. This suggests that illness, or what we understand to be illness, is never a part of any state of wellness — they are mutually exclusive, profoundly so.

In this dynamic, if you work hard enough to beat illness, then one glorious day your “healing” will be complete and you will be perfectly “healed” and finally free and that will be over and done with and you can return to being one hundred percent healthy. Which you never were. And no one ever is or ever has been. There is no absolute health.

There are so many problems with this idea that it would be silly if it wasn’t so devastating. For starters, not only does it deny the reality of chronic illness, which by definition is not finite, it also ill-prepares people to handle illness when it inevitably does become chronic, which is the reality of the aging process itself. (If you think your health is something you can constantly self-improve, as optimization would have us believe, have a chat with one person over the age of 50.)

And make no mistake, any “success-failure” health paradigm is certainly relative to a standard that favors caucasian, cis-gendered, able-bodied, privileged men. Its presumption of “normal” is implicitly racist, misogynist, transphobic, ableist and classist, and it ignores body literacy. It has no place in the present conversation, let alone any future conversations.

Another effect of the false health binary is the way it has us convinced that if sickness is the aberration, then so too is care. We have been effectively trained to view care as an imposition, a nuisance, extraneous work waiting for completion, like waiters refilling salt and pepper shakers at the end of a long shift.

To believe the body is only temporarily affected by its vulnerability–instead of defined by it, as it truly is–falsely suggests that all efforts to address vulnerability should be temporary as well. As Johanna Hedva writes in their seminal manifesto “Sick Woman Theory,” which inspired many of the ideas in this essay: “When sickness is temporary, care is not normal. Here’s an exercise: go to the mirror, look yourself in the face, and say out loud: ‘To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily.’ Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time.”

This mentality leads into another garbage binary: “work me” vs. “healthy me.” Wellness marketing loves to exploit this binary, barfing up barfy buzzwords like “self-care” and “me time” which make for cute-irritating magazine cover lines while creating more space between who you aspire to be and who you actually are. Designating separate “me time” begs the question: who the fuck are you the rest of the time? You’re the other thing? The bad thing, the “tired and wired” monster who is only passably human provided you can schedule in a semi-regular bath and a girls’ spa day? In this fun scenario, the “me” I am when it is not “me time”–a.k.a. who I am 99% of my life–is a person I deeply resent, who causes 100% of me to be miserable. Let’s not. Cleaving the self is in perfect opposition to the very definition of “holistic.” And self-loathing is rarely good medicine.

5. Help patients access the liberation that only comes from abandoning hope.

Pema Chödrön explains it best — almost always — that underneath all of the pressure to improve, to perform, to profit, is that which causes us the most suffering: hope. “Without giving up hope–that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be–we will never relax with where we are or who we are.”

She continues, “To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone out there is to blame for our pain — one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking. One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction. Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.” And so long as we seek to have more, to be more, to get it right–we will endlessly suffer as we do.

Chödrön explains that in Tibetan, hope and fear are combined into one expression: re-dok. The insinuation is that they are inseparable twins who cannot exist without the other, and so long as you have one, you have them both. “This is the root of our pain,” she says. The “optimistic” desire of wanting things a certain way is tethered to the fear that nothing will ever be satisfied.

The wellness industry sells a highly-processed kind of hope, an optimization-based hope that promises things like: “You are just out of reach of the eradication of suffering” or “Someday, if only, with enough something, you can get yourself out of whatever you’re in right now.” It’s a pipe dream that you can “thrive” for very long living like a honking clown car with no breaks, running out of gas, barreling down a steep endless road because you mostly don’t eat gluten, get a monthly massage, and repost uplifting quotes in typefaces that are kooky but meticulously kooky. If you’re dying to be mindful of something, be mindful of when your hope is based in optimization.

In this context, hopelessness (an idea which on the surface might naturally elicit grief and despair) is a powerful solvent — “dissolving” toxic equations like “profit and self-improvement yield happiness.” It ends both the fantasy that pain can and should be avoided, and the incessant search for alternatives to the present moment—so that we may finally have a joyful relationship with things exactly as they are. This way of abandoning hope releases the expectation that there is a way to overcome how inconvenient, painful, and confusing the human experience is.

Understanding yourself to be already whole does not indicate passivity and laziness; it’s not a spiritual bypass. I’m not suggesting that we stop trying to improve ourselves or that we’re “fine” or “done.” Chödrön says that starting from a place of wholeness, of self-acceptance and grounded self-possession, that is the beginning of the beginning. It’s a liberating act of self-knowledge; a stronger, more stable and fertile foundation for moving through life — from making personal changes to shaking governments — than the wish of someday, miraculously, becoming wonderful.

The French language actually has two different words that are both commonly translated as “hope” in English. One is “espoir,” the other is “espérance.” The difference in meaning between them is huge. Espoir always has an object, it is hoping for something; it is therefore an attachment to an outcome that one hopes for. Espérance has no object; it describes a detached open-mindedness; it is an invitation to what is and what can be. It’s the difference between hope-based in optimization and hope based in anything else. Only by renouncing hope that physical, emotional, and existential pain can be eradicated will we be able to exist beyond the pressures of optimization and the damning system that maintains it.

6. Break the fourth wall.

If wellness practitioners are going to continue medicating the effects of capitalism — and we are, at least until there’s profound systemic change — then we have to talk about it in wellness spaces.

Whatever your feelings about capitalism, we live the lives we live in the system we live in, and it’s time to stop pretending that we don’t.

We’re perfectly fine using cute smokescreen language like “self-care” and “mindfulness” and “align and conquer,” but we’re terrified to verbalize what those words obscure, what they’re actually talking-not-talking about. Which naturally impedes efforts at lasting, meaningful “healing.” (Which then requires more “self-care” and “mindfulness” and “aligning and conquering.”) And it should go without saying that just because stressors aren’t explicitly discussed doesn’t make them any less destructive.

So talk about it. Talk about well-being relative to capitalism. In whatever ways it can help people. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It’s pretty matter-of fact. Can we really continue to suggest by omission that health and healthcare are not deeply political and deeply capitalist? That health providers — of billowy yoga pant and dulcet whisper voice — dare not muddy our minds and mouths to speak of the world as it is? It’s not unspeakable. It won’t murder your brand. It doesn’t have to be your entire thesis.

But our willing denial to acknowledge and engage it just role-models denial for our patients. When we therapeutically scrub the world, it does damage.

Capitalism will be enmeshed with health for the foreseeable future so say its name. It’s not Voldemort, for god’s sake.

The conversation has changed over the past few months. Or it can and should. If “pre-corona” we were “moving too fast” to question the system, the pandemic made it nearly unavoidable to ignore. From the way it violently devalues, exploits and disproportionately punishes, to the way it coddles just enough to keep the “busy” able to afford the cost of surviving their “busy-ness.”

The system is more starkly exposed than ever. And right now, on almost a pop level, people seem ready to talk more openly about it. Healthcare practitioners should allow and encourage the space and desire for this appetite.

I hope we do not slough off the life-changing lessons of this anomaly. I hope we don’t just recommit to the rituals of hyper-productivity, interminable expectation, and inconsequential things.

As a healthcare practitioner, patients don’t expect me to have a political science degree — which I do not, if it isn’t already apparent — but they do expect me to tell the truth. And while I’m still figuring it all out, too, I believe there is great healing in simply saying, “We struggle under capitalism.”

It’s a discussion we’ll have to navigate as we go, but calling it out, at least for me, means accessing the deepest part of the conversation. My “chief complaint” is this: I am a feeling, caring, sensitive person trying really hard to be humane, facing the daily overwhelming barrage of capitalism. I am a sweet man trying to retain my humanity against institutions that not only devalue sweetness, but actively work to exploit it.

I am a person, like everyone else–born upside-down, headfirst, facing backwards–navigating increasingly dark times and trying to find meaning in them that may be worth the weight of my existence; trying to prioritize the value of benevolence over the value of gold; clinging to the goodness of the life instinct despite all evidence to the contrary; caring for my gentle dog who has a bad leg because he was run over before he came to me, as we all have, in the ways that we all have.

In an episode of the “On Being” podcast, writer and poet Ocean Vuong talks about the power of the words we choose to describe the way we live. He speaks about how growing up in America, as the child of a family that immigrated from Vietnam, he noticed how Americans use the language of violence, constantly, playfully even, in the most casual exchanges: “I’m not saying it’s wrong, per se; I use it, too, being a product of this country. But one has to wonder, what is it about a culture that can only value itself through the lexicon of death? I grew up in New England, and I heard boys talk about pleasure as conquest. ‘I bagged her. She’s in the bag. I owned it. I owned that place. I knocked it out of the park. I went in there, guns blazing. Go knock ’em dead. Drop dead gorgeous. Slay — I slayed them. I slew them. What happens to our imagination when we can only celebrate ourselves through our very vanishing? What does it do to the brain? We know language matters.”’

“And so I think,” he continues, “what happens if we alter our language? Where would our future be? Where will we grow towards if we start to think differently about how the world is?”