Wealthy is Healthy

Green tea. Organic vegs. After office gym. Low fat/carbohydrate/calories.

Our life is suffocated by the fear of death. Yet it is ourselves who create that alarming risk.

We infest ourselves with neverending, burdensome goals. And in our course of pursuing them, we give away our body and mind to be eaten by our own egomaniac desire. Unnecessary night shifts unleash gallons of caffeine flooding into our nerve. We swarm the street to go to one appointment after another, creating and ingesting hazardous exhaust fumes. We've got stuck in front of our screen while our hands unconsciously reach another slice of pizza. When the bucks do flow into our vault, the first thing comes into our mind is pampering our guilty pleasures and fulfilling all the superficial expectations of our peers.

Indeed, we find ourselves on top of the pyramid. At the same time, we find it quite similar to a knife's edge.

We are horrified when finding out that all our toils cut a couple years of our expiry date. Hence we launch a panic search to find the elixir of life in any form necessary. And, yes, we have the power to do it: money.

When the discoveries of antioxidant in any slimy shrub from some Godforsaken wasteland are announced, we chase them to the four corners of the earth, despite those claims are still scientifically unverified. We pay for and gulp down natural juices or extracts of New Guinea red fruit to South American Acai berries. Cafés start to serve green tea frappes to ease our guilty feeling while we guzzle the fatty milk. Vegetarian cuisines are promoted by animal-loving, tree-hugging, anti-carbohydrate celebrities, which help to crank up the price tags in salad bars. Exclusive supermarkets display vegetables free of insecticides and chemical fertilizers for the haves to savor. Frozen yogurt is a common dessert in US since 1980s, yet when we find it to be non-fat, topped with fruits, and sold at 'exclusive' retailers in shopping malls, we leave unhealthy ice cream roadside stalls and hunt the yogurt down to the last drop.

Not enough with constraints on delicacy, we chisel our muscular fibers to keep up with our reputation. As if to balance our frenzy for weekdays' business and Saturday night party, we spend after office nights in gyms with artificial machineries and yoga on weekend's day before having fun all night long. My friends who go to work on their ordinary bikes are ordinary employees, but lots of self-appointed decision makers buy the most sophisticated, unreasonably expensive bikes as if they were smokeless limousines. After stuffed with carbon dioxide, caffeine, ethanol and other free radicals, we immerse our body in a detoxifying aromatherapy bath in a 'natural' spa: a grandeur edifice which has whacked some trees in the forest in order to be built in harmony with nature.

Well, the market only responds. If the demands are high, the price is skyrocketing. And, of course, constant portrayal of exclusivity ensures constant cashflow despite astronomical price.

We want to go 'back to nature', but we create toll gates to reach it.

What is wrong with ordinary meal with rice, potatoes, bread, wheat or any carbohydrate source of this world accompanied by your own ordinary cuisines? You have enough meat, fish, vegetables and fruits in a normal amount to consume everyday. You drink enough water to fresh up your body, enough milk to keep your spirit bright, enough snacks, ice creams or other desserts to cheer up your day and enjoy beer responsibly on certain weekends. Given a chance, you can go for a culinary adventure or a simple yet romantic dinner with your loved ones. Why have we left these things behind? Do those minuscule traces of fats and free radicals scare you to death, or are they just less exclusive than green tea, low-carbohydrate diets and wheatgrass juice?

What is so difficult with playing basketball or soccer with your old schoolmates, hiking or fishing with your family, or riding your good old bike just for occasional fun? Are they less effective than our gym workouts, pilates and rocketry-engineering bikes? Do they give you less peace of mind compared to yoga meditation or aromatherapy bath in some platinum card spas?

No. But, unfortunately, the key is moderation. A sense of contentment, which is often sarcastically despised as lack of ambitions or mediocrity. You have good enough career, family and health, but enough is not enough. If you go the extra miles, you'll get extra bucks, but also extra gallons of poison in your bowels, yet you can afford extravagant health care so you may get some extra life.

It is not enough to do your best for your surroundings and enough for yourself. You have to do more, more, more and more, until you bleed and your nerve jumbled like hell. But then, and only then you will able to create your own Philosopher's Stone to change everything into gold, so you can extract the elixir of life to extend the expiry date of your train wreck of a body.

Yet, who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? (Jesus, as recorded in Matthew 6: 27)