“Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why are we so eager to improve ourselves?”

Some excerpts from an interview in De Tijd with writer Marian Donner.

An interesting alternative perspective on our current obsession with “healthy living”.

Donner: “The central premise of the neoliberal project is that individuals exist independently of their environment and upbringing. You have to make your own way in life. You have to create your own happiness. And it is your responsibility to become the best version of yourself.

“That ‘best version’ is actually very boring, because it is the same for everyone: productive and positive-minded, with an orderly mind in a healthy body, eating healthily and neither smoking nor drinking. Ultimately, this produces a robot-like individual who is expected to absorb the blows of a highly unstable world.”

Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why are we so eager to improve ourselves?

Donner: “I think it stems from a sense of powerlessness. Many people feel they have little influence over what is happening in the world. They have no control over the financial markets, Gaza, Ukraine, dishonest politicians or climate change. But they do feel they can work on themselves. That gives them some sense of strength and stability, and I think it also gives them hope.

“Because the idea that your life is shaped by forces far greater than yourself is difficult to bear. The influence of upbringing, family and chance is immense, but that raises uncomfortable questions. My God, imagine that your circumstances were determined by chance. How absurd—suddenly everything becomes very precarious. (laughs) That is why people prefer to reach for control, and that is where the popularity of self-help comes from. It fits seamlessly with the ideology of the individual.”

Donner: “More than that: the individual has become a product that can be endlessly improved and must constantly be put on display. Whether on Tinder or LinkedIn, you try to market yourself as effectively as possible.

“This showroom society is also an extremely transparent society in which everything must be thoroughly positive, so that nothing can catch or cause any disturbance. Occasionally, you see a counter-reaction, such as: ‘Let’s post pictures of ourselves crying on Instagram.’ But it doesn’t work, because those crying pictures are also intended to market the self.”

Donner: “Yes, you could call it that. I am trying to show that another way is also possible within society. We need to break free from the ‘one-dimensional man’, a term coined by the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s. The one-dimensional person is someone who is no longer capable of thinking outside the capitalist framework.

“Ideally, that framework would be opened up again, allowing multiple dimensions to emerge—but that is, of course, a long-term undertaking. New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a fantastic example. He shows that it is possible to think differently and to look beyond gross domestic product when assessing how the world is doing.

“I sometimes call it the dictatorship of numbers—or the dictatorship of glucose monitors and wearables, which reduce health to numerical data. We also saw this during the coronavirus pandemic, when everything was expressed in numbers: the number of beds available, the number of deaths and the number of people in intensive care. Far less attention was paid to how people actually felt or to the impact on mental health. Whatever cannot be measured no longer seems to count.”

Donner: “It is perfectly normal to want to live as healthily and for as long as possible, but the question is: what exactly is health? Many people derive enormous pleasure from smoking and drinking. Yet this automatically comes with feelings of guilt, because you are made to feel that you are letting yourself down.

“If you spend the next day in bed with a hangover and feel that you have wasted an entire day, you quickly think: damn it. Because the ideology of self-improvement tells us that every day must be an investment in the future.

“I had not expected it at all, but I discovered that an enormous number of people suffer from these feelings of guilt. Once, a 75-year-old woman approached me after hearing me on the radio. She told me that, for the first time in twenty years, she had bought a packet of cigarettes and poured herself a glass of wine. ‘Because why not?’ she said. Did she really have to deny herself everything just so she might live to 95? And who knows—perhaps she will reach 95 anyway!

“Health encompasses far more than can be expressed in numbers. Health also means spending time with other people, enjoying life, feeling love and wonder, being able to look at yourself without shame, discovering and learning new things, and so on.”

Do you sometimes receive negative reactions from oncologists or from people who believe you are spreading the wrong message?

Donner: “Certainly. I even take part in joint interviews with them—and I always win. (laughs) I simply believe that, as a society, we are hypocritical about this.

“Health policy is always directed at the individual: ‘You should drink and smoke a little less!’ Yet the government could also confront the tobacco industry and demand that it put fewer toxic substances into cigarettes.

“We choose to place the blame on the individual because that is easier. If policymakers were genuinely concerned about people’s health, they would address the greatest cause of illness of all: stress. Doctors acknowledge this too.

“And why are people stressed? Because social safety nets are disappearing. Because of loneliness, insecure and precarious employment, and the steadily rising cost of living—not to mention a future that looks increasingly bleak.

“We have constructed such a narrow definition of health that every individual is expected to solve the problem alone. If you are stressed, you are told to take a mindfulness course or something similar. Yet the conviviality of sharing a cigarette with a stranger, or exchanging stories over a pint in the pub, can also do a great deal of good for both body and mind.”