The Right To Cry, The Right To Die, And The Right To Try- Why Innovation Without Community Engagement Is Fatal
How Bourdain and breaking bread in a broken world helped me understand the Crypto-Community
The Right To Cry- Even For Someone You Never Met
I never met Anthony Bourdain, but I felt I knew him well. His inquisitive mind, insatiable palate and boundless love of food and people everywhere, reminded me that we are what we eat and we are who we eat it with.
I cried when I read that he took his life and like many, I still do not understand why.
Like Bourdain, I too have broken bread in a broken world and saw the healing power of food. Not the kind where the fetish for uber-healthy, anti-aging, nutri-genomic ‘right kind of food’ prevails (that is an eating disorder called Orthorexia). I’m speaking about the epicurean healing that comes with the joy of sitting around the table and bonding with loved ones over the aromas of childhood memories.
As a Professor in Pain Medicine, I saw depression and despair, suffering and stigma and came to realize that the opposite of health is not disease, but isolation and only through connectedness the journey to wellness begins.
The fact that the post mortem toxicology report found no opioids in Anthony Bourdain’s blood brings me no solace. On the contrary, it proves that Tony’s suicide was thought through, lucid, deliberate and intentional.
The Right To Die — The Epidemic Of White Middle Aged Men Suicides
Two days before Bourdain’s suicide, the CDC published it’s Suicide Trend Report that showed that between 1999–2016, suicide rates in the US increased in 49 of 50 states and in half of the states the increase was between 30%-58%(!). Suprisingly, over 50% of the cases were not associated with prior mental health conditions and that relationship loss, substance abuse, health, job or financial problems were the contributing circumstances.
The largest absolute rate increase in suicide rate were among male (76.8%) non-Hispanic white (83.6%) adults aged 45–64, using firearms (55.3%), followed by hanging (26.9%) and poisoning (10.4%). More so, this group of men had triple the odds of perpetrating homicide before committing suicide (aOR = 2.9, 95% CI = 2.2–3.8).
These ‘deaths of despair’ are partially driven by opioid overdoses (I previously published about this here) and reflect a complex interplay between over- medication (40% of over 200 prescription medications have depression as a potential side effect) and social stressors like financial insecurity (aka ‘Post-Brokeness Stress Disorder’) and political discord.
The Right To Try- Hope For Hopeless or Cash For Companies?
As every 12 minutes an American ends their life of despair, Congress recently passed the Right-to Try Act of 2017, which allows doctors to treat patients with another type of despair, those fighting for their life.
However noble this may seem, the law is flawed. It circumvents and weakens the FDA by allowing patients to work directly with drug companies for access to experimental, unsafe drugs that expose them and their families to financial and emotional exploitation.
Furthermore, these unproven treatments increase overall drug prices and encourage ineffective drug development, while simultaneously increasing drug company margins (below).
Who Eats Alone- Dies Alone And Why We Need A Community
I don’t know what happend on June 8th to Anthony Bourdain, or to any of the 45,000 who suicided this year (I use suicide as a verb, because it is an intentional act). However I support their right to die.
I also understand that many people believe that only God should determine the time of death and others want every additional minute of life that medical science can give them. I support their right to try.
But as a white middle-aged man facing a world of rapid change and innovation, I wonder if this is not at least partially, about being left out. An existential fear to be in an unrecognizable future with no past and no community.
Anthony Bourdain was fighting to better our world, “one barbecue at a time” and through his travel he built his community. I cannot escape the feeling that my journey in Crypto is the same, trying to promote the work of a compassionate community to eradicate injustice, inequality and predatory practices of centralized organizations in a new decentralized world, “one post at a time”.
This better world David Brooks describes in “The Fourth Great Awakeneing” is a world of compassionate, not competitve virtues. It is not the mythical world of Athens (or Marvel) where Gods and demi-Gods pit man against man with challenges of strength, toughness, prowness and righteous indignation. But rather the world of Moses or Jesus in Jerusalem. It is a world of
“ humility, love, faithfulness, grace, mercy, forgiveness, answering a hard word with a gentle response”.
The end of a life is extremely personal and I know that when my time comes I want to break bread in a fixed, not a broken world, with my Crypto- friends and community.
Because the one who eats alone- dies alone.
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