The Length of a Life

for whom do we live?

From Sátántangó (1994)

In 2022, I partook in my first Dry January. I’d avoided it in the past, and skeptically watched from the sidelines for years as the party people among my social media friends documented their month-long abstention only to dive right back into their drinking habits come February 1. I never thought that I needed to take time off from drinking, and the version of it that I noticed online seemed superficial. 

But two winters ago, I realized that I did need a bit of abstention from alcohol and also needed the structure that Dry January provides. The timing was apt, too: as my dad became weaker against the leukemia he’d been trying to remove from his body for two years and following his death toward the end of 2021, I leaned into what was a bit of a nihilistic tendency to say yes to just one more glass of wine in the evening. After all, I was going through the worst thing I’ve yet to experience, I reasoned, so what was the matter with drinking a bit more than one reasonably should? But I also noticed its wear on my body, especially as I was approaching 30. So, I took a much-needed month off from alcohol, my body feeling refreshed after four short weeks without it. Partaking in a sober month helped me to reframe my relationship with and attitude toward drinking; it also helped me realize that I’d almost always been drinking more than one reasonably should since I started drinking as a freshman in college, in a state notorious for its heavy-drinking culture (heavy drinking among grad students is a whole other topic to be explored, a world I dabbled in as an undergrad and a subculture I found myself a part of a few years later). Situationally, geographically, my habits didn’t stand out from my peers’, but I eventually realized that they were unsustainable and misaligned with the lifestyle I wanted. 

Reckoning with my past habits, reflecting on the situations in which they formed — coming of age in Wisconsin, being a young adult in Washington, D.C. (a city that works hard and plays just as intensely) — and being sharply aware of the alcoholism that is part of my family history are constantly with me as I reconstruct my relationship with alcohol. Devin Kate Pope put it perfectly: “Alcoholism is the bird on my shoulder. I keep it close to stay honest with myself and, I hope, to remain able to enjoy booze here and there.” In considering sobriety for myself — as a way to distance myself from my own self-destructive behaviors that drinking fueled and the alcoholism that exists in my family — I, time and again, come back to what I truly, without regret, like about drinking: alcohol’s role in ritual and celebration; its propensity to heighten moods, especially socially; and the way that alcohol can connect us to our land. Alcohol’s origin is as an agricultural byproduct: humans looked to fermentation as a way to ensure that surplus crops would not go to waste. 

Every so often, I notice headlines with health updates regarding alcohol circulating: drinking a glass of wine a day is beneficial to cardiovascular health, no amount of alcohol is beneficial to drink. Last week, alcohol made the news again, this time linked to a study that ties alcohol consumption to rising cancer rates. I cast the same skeptic eye on these news pieces with which I once viewed Dry January. It’s true that excessive drinking wreaks extensive damage on the body and can be enough to kill a person alone — I do not want to ignore or minimize the very real dangers that come with alcohol consumption. Yet, there’s something in these fear-raising headlines that both paints cancer as an individualized problem to avoid and that attaches a sense of morality to what we choose to put into our bodies. If you choose to drink, you’re willfully damaging your body, preventing it from reaching an optimized state; if you develop cancer, it’s because you made poor lifestyle choices. 

What these clickable news pieces tend to either bury or flat-out ignore are the environmental and social factors that influence health. For whom health is strong or weak, and who is predisposed to illness (temporary, chronic, or terminal) is always influenced by race, class, and gender. Living near a factory or an electric plant or an airport means living in closer proximity to pollutants that damage our air and water, that hurt our lungs, that produce stress-inducing noise. Living near sites of pollution also likely means that one does not have the wealth or privilege to live somewhere cleaner, quieter. These are all factors that cause long-term damage to our health, but that the majority of people cannot control. Our society deems it easier to shunt the responsibility to individuals to try to prevent their own cancer from occurring than to take any responsibility itself in providing safe, healthy living conditions for everyone.

Contemporary popular literature on longevity spins the topic into self-help guides (one such book names aging a disease in and of itself). This perspective turns our bodies into an algorithm to hack: if only we can optimize how we exercise, eat, sleep, then maybe we’ll outlive what we thought was possible. There is a strong undercurrent of human-exceptionalism to this, that we can somehow outsmart our own bodies, our own species, our own world. It takes the Enlightenment philosophy of rationalism and human control over and separation from nature to a neoliberal extreme. In thinking about the fraught and limited Eur-American relationship with nature in Out of the Shadow, Rinda West points to “the destructive social and spiritual consequences of the Enlightenment in its exclusive reliance on instrumental reason, seeing it as a kind of ‘disenchantment of the world’ and the ‘extirpation of animism,’ which produces alienation from a nature rendered inanimate.” Rather than seeing ourselves as part of a world in which there are cycles of life and death and in which we are part of something greater than ourselves, neoliberal longevity rhetoric tells us that the best way to exist comes in the form of strength and efficiency, that achieving longevity can be done with the right skillset that we, as individuals, must act on. 

This fixation on longevity equates living well with living long, almost always with an able body. The optimization of the body that modern longevity rhetoric embraces is compatible with aestheticized wellness culture — bright, cheerful, optimistic packaging on the supplements and slurries that promise to keep our bodies high-functioning with minimal effort required from the consumer. The processing required to provide such easy products to consumers distances us from what we’re putting into our bodies. Of course, the longer we’re able to live, the longer our bodies are maintained as able-functioning, the longer we’re able to work, selling our bodies. Under capitalism, the encouragement to lengthen our lives is not for the sake of spending time with our loved ones, but for the sake of profit.

Between both my family health history and the state-sanctioned environmental poisons that fill our air, water, and soil, I am sharply, critically, aware of the limitations to my own longevity. This knowledge has not yet pushed me to drastically change my lifestyle and habits. Rather than feeling as though my nutrition, alcohol consumption, and activity levels might be working against my body’s ability to outlive its potential, they are life-affirming: how I eat, drink, and move my body connects me with others and continually re-enchants me with the world. 

My dad’s death came early, at the age of 63. I don’t know what was the thing (or maybe the web of factors) that triggered his cancer. He was more conscientious than many about how he treated his body, eating organic food when possible, avoiding plastics and tobacco, drinking socially but never too much, and not letting himself fall into a sedentary lifestyle, even (perhaps especially) during treatment. When he chose to stop chemotherapy, it was with acceptance of the fight against the leukemia he had given, an acceptance of the life he’d lived, and a rejection of a lifestyle further dictated by scorch-and-burn drugs. The course of his life was not perfect, but he lived it well.