Newsletter | Getting Beyond the Six-Second Hug
photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Building H arose from a simple perspective: that the modern world makes it hard for people to be healthy. Good health doesn’t naturally flow from going about our everyday business, so we have to be intentional, we have to work at it.
As physical labor became less common and entertainment became screen-based, we shifted to exercise to make up the deficit, and bought gym memberships and Fitbits to stick to our routines. As we've been flooded by cheap, abundant ultraprocessed foods, delivered almost instantly by a few taps on our phones, we’ve had to become more vigilant about watching what we eat, counting our calories, carbs and now protein. And as more and more services can be experienced at home, as more work has become remote, and we retreat into our individualistic world as consumers, we find it hard to spend time with others and to nourish our relationships. Crafting – and following through on – a healthy lifestyle increasingly feels like a job.
We’ve wrestled with this challenge before (see Overthinking Health, from last August), but we recently came across an essay that spoke to the unease of grappling with the ever-growing laundry list of things we’re told we should be doing to maintain our health. Julian Baggini, a British philosopher, writes about the concept of instrumentalization in “The six-second hug,” in Aeon. Instrumentalization, as Baggini explains, is the stripping away of the intrinsic value of things and seeing them, instead, only as in service to some utilitarian function – like better health, happiness or longevity. (The essay’s title comes from Baggini’s horror in reading happiness guru Gretchen Rubin’s explanation that she hugs her husband for at least six seconds because she knows that’s the time required to promote the flow of oxytocin and serotonin.) He goes on to list a number of activities that are now pitched as better for our health: going to an art museum, singing, spending time in nature, going to church — even having sex. Baggini argues that we should pursue all of these and other activities for their own sake, because they enrich us or bring us joy on their terms
“Learning a foreign language is a gateway into another culture that allows you to communicate with members of it and access its literature and media. All these things enrich our lives and broaden our experience, which is valuable even if it doesn’t add a second to your lifespan or delay dementia by a day.”
Baggini ties instrumentalization in with the reductionism that has served science well but that now threatens to take us down the rabbit hole of quantifying and optimizing our behaviors, our ingestion of particular ingredients and our levels of different hormones. In that pursuit, we also risk conflating measures with targets, chasing the attainment of numbers that should only serve as data points reflecting a whole rather than the determinants of that whole themselves. A much simplified example would be that low levels of vitamin D are an indicator that you’re not getting exposure to daylight, not a sign that you need to buy vitamin D supplements. (Don’t ever take medical advice from us here at Building H – we’re not physicians – but you get the idea.) Bryan Vartabedian recently wrote eloquently about this conflation of metrics and targets (known as Goodhart’s Law), which is what introduced us to Baggini’s essay.
We see this reductionism in the debates about ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) and in trends like “functional” beverages. Scientists are trying to determine exactly which ingredients and which processes in the food industry are what makes UPFs so harmful (and by extension, which might be benign and thus able to remain in good standing), but they might be missing the point. One of the key conclusions from last year's Lancet series on UPFs was “that displacement of long-established dietary patterns by ultra-processed foods is a key driver of the escalating global burden of multiple diet-related chronic diseases.” In other words, it’s not about specific ingredients so much as the rise of UPFs actually changed culture. It changed how and what we eat in much more fundamental ways than adding a series of unhealthy ingredients. Likewise when we start to see food as purely nutrition and we ignore the pleasure it can bring, the warmth of the bonds it can foster, the meaning of the rituals it upholds or the culture it preserves, it’s a slippery slope to Soylent.
Baggini is especially harsh – and eloquent – about the movement to frame socializing and the building of social connection in health-utilitarian terms. Science has indeed shown us that social connection is associated with better health, but, in Baggini’s view, that should not be our reason for seeking it:
“But one of the most valuable features of friendship and community is how they take us out of concern for ourselves and make us more aware of the needs of others. To get the most out of socialising we need to do it in the right spirit, choosing to be with other people because we care for them and they for us, because we find them stimulating, because we enjoy being part of a collective experience or endeavour. So if we choose to mingle only for reasons of our personal wellbeing, we are probably not going to get the benefits that socialising usually brings.”
For those of us so focused on health, so committed to a vision of people being able to live healthy lifestyles, “The six-second hug” is something of a challenge. It’s a reminder that health is itself but a means to an end. But it’s a good challenge. It’s a challenge to envision a society where we can maintain health without consciously, directly, relentlessly pursuing it. Where health is not a premium service, like buying extra legroom on the plane. Where instead of providing people information to navigate an unhealthy landscape we have the courage to make the terrain healthy.
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