Run to Stay Young
In 1977 Jim Fixx published the best-selling book "The Complete Book of Running" which popularized running for sport, and purported to demonstrate its health benefits - including increased longevity.7 years later he died of a heart attack while jogging at the age of 52.His death doesn't mean running is a bad idea - a single anecdote is statistically insignificant - but perhaps it can remind us that nothing we do can guarantee a long and healthy life.All too often we take a mildly correlated statistic, give it a hand-wavy air of "science", and then pronounce it as a set-in-stone moral absolute. How much of the received wisdom about healthy lifestyles that you were taught has been shown to be completely wrong? I don't doubt that in 3 years there will be another New York times article, demonstrating why running is actually terrible for you, and you should never do it no matter what age you are.Growing up in a secular society ancient religions can seem awful strange: why did people worship stone statues and sacrifice to them? Did they really believe all that effort did anything?But perhaps our modern obsession with "healthiness" reflects the same underlying human motivation: incapable of accepting the reality of our own deaths we grasp at anything to try and give ourselves the illusion of control. Is eating an organic strawberry in the hopes of living longer really any different than performing a ritualistic dance in the hopes of bringing rain?