Sick.

This was a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal last week. 

Here we have a huge pharmaceutical company – one of the ten most valuable companies in the world with a market cap of more than $800 Billion – telling us that WE ARE GOING TO GET SICK.  In fact, if we live much longer at all, we should count ourselves lucky.

There’s no love lost between me and Big Pharma, but this feels like a new low.  I don’t even know the right word to use for it – what’s worse than propaganda but not quite domestic psyops?

Governments and Military organizations use strategies like these to “win hearts and minds” in enemy territory – the goal being to create a psychological need or dependency in the population so they’ll make less noise while they’re being conquered.  Tell us often enough that we are lucky to be alive and that we are going to be sick sooner or later, and chances are pretty good that we will line up for whatever they’re trying to sell us.

I’m not buying.  You have agency when it comes to your health, and it is not at all a foregone conclusion that you will be sick.  Sure, there is some amount of luck involved, but the bigger variable by far turns out to be the choices you make on a day-to-day basis.

Don’t let yourself be manipulated into thinking that you are nothing more than a bystander in your own life – the clock is ticking, and your survival depends on some benevolent corporation giving you a magic pill so you may live another day.

They need you a lot more than you need them.