I’ve written before about how eugenics doesn’t always look like the disappearing or killing of certain groups of people. It can also look like the reformation of certain groups of people. This reformation has looked like health campaigns—family planning, re-education, “curing” queerness or neurodivergence.

The idea of health is really just an idea. I have a specific image of it. You work out with machines, you eat a lot of salad, you drink water or at least keep around you it in an eco friendly bottle, you don’t get too heavily invested in any relationship but you’re also not alone, you read books and you consume only sex positive porn. You might have an image of health too and your idea of health might be similar to mine or different.

Sometimes, this image of health can motivate us to do things. We move our bodies. We eat some fruit. We drink a cup of water instead of soda. That’s great! Images can give us a lot of energy. However, an image is not a destination. Growing up doesn’t mean that we become our images of adulthood in the same way that healing doesn’t mean that we become our images of health. We are not supposed to become an image. We are supposed to remain human.

There is an industry around the image of health and that industry does want us to remain trapped by the image. They make more money if we do. There are a whole range of products that are supposed to make us healthy.

I’ve never been very interested in helping anyone achieve health. I know that sounds crass but bear with me here. To me, the goal of living life isn’t to become healthy. The goal of living life is to be a person. Astrology, to me, has always had to do with accepting our humanity. It has to do with creativity. It’s not made to help you arrive at health because health isn’t a destination.

This is hard. Striving for health is sometimes layered with feelings of moral goodness. More importantly, healthy shapes allow us to fit into the world easier. Eugenics is a practice of describing some bodies as normal and other bodies as deformed. Aristotle once even said that women are deformed men. A lot of us are used to being pathologized.

The image of health is really an image of what it can look like to fit into and function smoothly in this world. But life doesn’t always look for ease. Life can be very dissatisfied with ease because it understands there is injustice and that awareness of this injustice isn’t easy.

Health is not great to answering this call for injustice. The image of health was manufactured to distort the yearning for justice and freedom.

I’m not trying to scold anyone who finds it helpful to pursue health. Maybe it gets you out of bed or has given you more energy. Maybe the image of healthy conflict has helped you in that fight you had with a friend. Again, that’s great. You might have noticed that a lot of things can start to feel easier when you try to be healthy.

I ask that you appreciate this ease to be not an inherent aspect of health, to know that health is not essentially morally good or that the betterment that health provides isn’t necessarily a story of good conquering evil. Sometimes we pursue health to win at life but the point of life isn’t to always win. There are some things that we have already lost.

The point of life is not to be healthy. It is not to be good or to cure yourself of your pathology. The point of life is to live. There are times when life itself is unhealthy.