Why we're all now too busy to get ill
Who can afford to be ill? At the first tickle of the throat, sniffle of the nose, rumble of the tummy, the fear strikes. Not fear of illness itself, but fear of the sheer admin being ill involves.
Time was, we could just retire to bed. It was unpleasant for a day but then there would be a little convalescence, which involved tea and watching Steel Magnolias, to make sure we were ‘over it’.
But in these grown-up times, who is going to get all the jobs done? Because every job now involves multiple jobs. And those multiple jobs are all constantly birthing little baby jobs of their own. Jobs. Like gremlins. All over the sodding carpet. Where’s the catch-up time? There isn’t any. We are operating at capacity.
So we rest as little as possible and then we are back on it, and at it, and all over it, to make up for that mini-morning spent in bed. Which means we don’t really get well. Not efficiently. Not properly. Perhaps not ever. And who can reap the flat-stomached upside of norovirus when we have to eat endless biscuits just to find the energy to stay upright for the next four weeks?
We can’t strategise around illness because we don’t know it’s coming until we’re hanging over the loo with the phone and computer pinging away unsympathetically. And it’s not as if they go silent at 6pm. As a result we have become madly neurotic about keeping illness at bay.
We thoroughly disapprove of ourselves for this weediness but we will put our hands up and admit it; hands that are raw from all the washing and antibacterial gel. Our pee is perma-neon from the pints of Berocca we ingest and we’d rather not shake hands, thanks all the same, and if you so much as cough down the phone at us we may hang up.
Our hands are raw from all the washing and antibacterial gel. Our pee is perma-neon from the pints of Berocca we ingest
We have evolved into ruthless diagnosticians who can detect a sickening at 1,000 paces. We know we are in plentiful and varied company. Someone just has to sniff on a train carriage for all the assembled company collectively to shudder in panic, and check their mental diaries to see if getting ill this week will be a bore, a disaster or a full-on catastrophe.
And so when we see someone in the office who is clearly, bravely, soldiering on through a cold, we tell them to go home. We are not being sympathetic. We just want the diseased creature out of our shared air.
When someone says, ‘I might be better in time to have dinner tonight,’ and we beg them to go easy on themselves, it is not because we are overflowing with the milk of human kindness; it is because we find them foul with malady.
We exist merely one step away from a full-blown sterile-bubble existence, treading that skein-thin line between tired and unwell. Because we don’t have the natural vim needed to bounce back on nothing more than an aspirin and affirmation. Where has all the energy gone?
