Week Five SOC 490

“The only thing you can really control is how you react to things out of your control.” – Bassam Tarazi

One does not always get to choose what happens in life. There are plenty of things that happen that are simply what we consider to be out of our control. For example, being born with a terminal or chronic illness, learning habits or ideas from our parents, getting into a terrible car accident, how we meet someone new, or becoming the victim of a crime. Some people may refer to these things as being the result of fate, or destiny, or occurring simply by chance. Certainly we all have our own free will which means we are able to respond to any situation however we want, but there are just certain things over which we cannot possibly have complete control. And while out health might not be fate per say, we do certainly do not have control over every aspect of it.

Similar to Tarazi’s quote though, one aspect we can control about our health is how we react or respond to it. We do have control over things such as what we choose to do to prevent some health problems, and in turn, what we do to cause certain health problems. Things in our control related to our health include things like getting enough exercise, making healthy eating decisions, and avoiding habits that are bad for us. Other things in our control include making poor health decisions that might cause things like hypertension, diabetes, or cancers. Goodman writes about these kinds of decisions when he talks about the variation in life expectancy. He argues that these choices are the reason for the variations, “These differences are thought to reflect such lifestyle choices such as diet, exercise, and smoking.” But there is only so much that can be done as a response to a health problem. While someone who was born “healthy” could make choices to harm that health, they also have the chance of contracting a disease that is out of their control. For someone who was born with a life-long illness or disability-related disease, getting that illness was out of his or her control, and regardless to how he or she responds to it, they will have it forever. They had no choice in preventing it or causing it, they did not have control.

Along the same lines, it is written in Gaudium that, “While a few enjoy very great power of choice, the majority are deprived of almost all possibility of action on their own initiative and responsibility.” Even though Gaudium writes on economics, this idea can be applied to our health as well. Similar to the way Gaudium argues that many are deprived of their power when it comes to money, it is not very different when it comes to power over our health. Whether it is a predetermined path, a life-long disease or disability, or a hereditary illness, there are many components to our health that we do not and cannot choose. There are very few, if any of us, who actually have complete control over our health.