Healthcare services always say that good health comes from making ‘healthier lifestyle choices’. It’s peculiar how we think, isn’t it? So very very peculiar. We have such very strange notions – you’d wonder why we have to approach everything in such a tortuously oblique fashion. It makes such a farce of everything and then the next thing is that we have to take the farce seriously as if we believe that it’s actually going to work. Sound familiar? It sure as hell sounds familiar to me. It’s what we human beings do isn’t it – we turn everything into a farce and then we make it impossible – through peer pressure – for anyone to see that it’s a farce. Although we might of course suspect as much. All that ever happens then however is that we are placed at odds with our own intuition because we can’t ever admit it to ourselves. If we do then the head-programmer will have to come and reprogramme our heads. That will get rid of all that unpleasant cognitive dissidence for us. Lay it to rest for a while before it starts to raise its ugly head again and we start doubting again. It’s rather like doubting God isn’t it? We doubt the thing we mustn’t ever doubt. Doubting God is like the ultimate ungrateful act – God creates you (and He really didn’t need to at all) and then you go ahead and doubt him! You start suspecting that maybe He doesn’t exist at all – even though you know very well that it’s a sin to think this way. It won’t earn you any brownie points in heaven – that’s for sure. Or on Earth, when the big bad head-programmer finds out. I know I’m going off the point but what I’m trying to say is that we are not allowed to doubt that healthier lifestyle choices are the way to good health. It spoils everything to think like this – it makes a mockery of the whole system. Which it is anyway. Anyway if it were true then the healthiest people around would be the people who are the ‘good choice makers’, obviously the rest of us wallow in states of poor health, or not so good health, or indifferent health, because we repeatedly fail to make good choices. We repeatedly made the ill-advised choices. Unaccountably, we opt out of the healthy lifestyle. As if there is any actual ‘opting’ or ‘choosing’ going on! As if anyone ever actually ‘chose’ anything… Could we really be foolish enough to imagine that life is all a matter of making the right choices? Choice A followed by Choice B followed by Choice C, etc. No wonder we are so judgemental if this is what we think! If it’s choices that count then everything becomes a matter of providing information –all the healthcare services have to do is provide us with all the relevant information. How very simple! How delightfully bloody simple! Off you go now and choose a healthy lifestyle! Off you toddle. Off you go and choose to do the things that make you feel good rather than bad, the things that make you well rather than unwell. Why didn’t I ever think of that? Does anyone actually think that it works like this, by the way? Are we really that abysmally simple-minded? Are we really such terrible terrible fools? If we only took the time to observe our own lives than surely we would see that life isn’t about making ‘choices’ but passively responding to mechanical pressure. We are all responding to mechanical pressure one way or another – it’s just that no one wants to see it. No one wants to see that we’re merely ‘mechanical reflex machines’. We have a reflex reaction not to see that…