The Culture Code (11 page)

The Code for health and wellness in America is
MOVEMENT
.

If we put on the new glasses provided by this Code, certain behaviors in our culture stand out. Why do we fill up our free time? Why do retirees begin second careers? Why are we so devastated when, as we become elderly, we lose our driver’s licenses or find ourselves relegated to wheelchairs?

The answer is in the Code. Though we might have a stressful job, a demanding family life, and a bevy of obligations, we still take up golf, learn to knit, join a gym, or even start a book group. These acts involve various forms of movement, and movement makes us feel healthy, confirms that we are alive.

This is why retirees, after long, intensely active careers, feel lost when they give up their jobs. It is a very reptilian response. They can
intellectually accept
the notion that they’ve worked long enough and saved a sufficient amount to remain comfortable. They can
feel
a sense of relief when they realize they no longer need an early alarm clock. Their reptilian brains tell them something else, though: things have slowed down—maybe too much. Many of them suddenly find themselves with much less to do—with much less movement in their lives—and the prospect is frightening. Some seek comfort and health-affirming movement in hobbies or organizations. Some plunge into hypochondria and depression, feeling that the lack of movement in their lives suggests that their health is failing. Others take the most active path to solving this problem: they unretire. A second career restores a sense of movement and therefore returns their sense of good health.

The Code also explains why the loss of movement is so devastating to us. Seniors will battle mightily to avoid life in a wheelchair, often struggling for years with a walker before acceding. Similarly, they will make every effort to retain their driver’s licenses, giving them up only when they prove to be a danger to themselves or others. Why? Because this loss of movement makes a very dramatic statement about one’s health, and this permanent change toward a less mobile state suggests that health will never return.

In other cultures, the concept of health takes on a different dimension. For the Chinese, health means being in harmony with nature. Chinese medicine has been around for five thousand years and has always taken into consideration the human being’s place in the natural world—curing illness using plants and herbs, astrology, and even the phases of the moon. The Chinese believe that they live in permanent connection with the natural elements and that good health is related to being at peace with nature.

The Japanese, on the other hand, see good health as an obligation. If you are healthy, you are committed to contributing to your culture, your community, and your family. The Japanese are obsessive about remaining healthy, and they feel a powerful sense of guilt if they fall ill. Unlike our culture, in which children will fake fevers (via the old thermometer-to-the-lamp trick) or stomachaches to get out of school, Japanese children will apologize to their parents for getting sick, for they know illness may cause them to fall behind. In this culture, you don’t just wash your hands to stay clean, but also out of a sense of duty to yourself as a servant of the culture and to prevent someone else from getting sick because of you.

DOCTORS
,
NURSES
,
AND
THE
MEAT
GRINDER

The Code for health sheds interesting light on some related Codes. Doctors and nurses are charged with keeping us healthy. Given the strength of our reptilian instincts, it is unsurprising that we have very positive Codes for both.

The stories told during discovery sessions for the American Code for doctors projected images of rescue, of being saved from danger, of being spared a horrible fate. Most Americans were imprinted with the notion that doctors save lives and can recall a time when a doctor saved a family member, or maybe even a time when a doctor saved them personally. The Code for doctors in America is
HERO
.

Our feelings about nurses are even more positive. A recent Gallup poll identified nursing as the most ethical and honest profession in America for the fifth time in six years (it ranked second to firefighting in 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11). We perceive nurses as caretakers, as the professionals who spend more time with us when we are sick than our doctors do, and who
always
have our best interests at heart. Discovery stories included phrases such as “made me feel better,” “came in and sat with me,” and “I wanted to believe her.” Americans feel safe and loved with nurses at such a high level that there is really only one comparable relationship. The Code for nurse in America is
MOTHER
.

We think of doctors as heroes and nurses as mothers. Therefore, we must have a positive impression of every component of the medical field, right? Actually, no. The Code for hospitals is starkly (and darkly) different. Few places in the world evoke more reptilian feelings than hospitals. We are born there, we die there, and our futures often depend on the tests and procedures that take place there. Hospitals inspire a sense of foreboding by filling their halls and rooms with scary-looking equipment, a sterile, impersonal environment, and air that smells antiseptic and artificial. Discovery participants told stories worthy of Poe in our sessions. Words like “probe” and “impersonal” came up regularly, and we read phrases like “being rushed to the operating room to die” and “some carcass they were experimenting on.” The unconscious connection we make with hospitals is that when we are there, we are not people, but rather products. The Code for hospital in America is
PROCESSING
PLANT
.

The hospital Code seems shocking in light of the Codes for doctors and nurses—but not when we remember that the Code for health is movement. Hospitals inhibit movement. We need to stay in bed. We have tubes and machines connected to us that keep us from getting around. When we’re allowed to walk at all, we have to do so slowly, attached to an IV pole. And if we’re lucky enough to get out of there, they don’t even let us leave under our own power, instead insisting that we be wheeled to the curb.

Movement is the key to our attitudes about all of these. Doctors and nurses get us moving again and we love them for it. Hospitals keep us pinned down and we think terrible, terrible things about them.

KEEP
ON MOVING

From a business standpoint, the new glasses provided by the Code offer essential insight to any company seeking to market health or a healthy lifestyle. Positioning a product in this arena as something that promotes movement, mobility, or action is right on Code. A good example is
GMAC
auto insurance. When one calls
GMAC
after an accident, the representative’s first question is “Can you move?” This acknowledges the unconscious connection between movement and health and, if the caller
can
move, it reassures him that he’s probably not too badly injured. Interestingly, the next two questions from
GMAC
address the other parts of the brain. The first is “How do you feel?” The next is “Can you give me the details of the accident?” The questions follow the hierarchy from reptilian to limbic to cortex.

Any product that suggests constraints on movement is off Code. A national retail chain recently launched an ad campaign using the tagline “Contain yourself.” I cringed. While the store sold products that every American home could use, their message was completely wrong for the American unconscious. We
never
want to be contained. We might want to contain our clutter, our old “stuff,” or our off-season clothing, but containing
ourselves
has no appeal at all.

THE
YOUTH
OF
AMERICA
IS
THEIR
OLDEST
TRADITION
. IT
HAS
BEEN
GOING
ON
NOW
FOR
THREE
HUNDRED
YEARS
.
—
OSCAR
WILDE

The Code for health in America sends a very optimistic message about the way we perceive our personal futures. We believe that if we live active, engaged lives, we will stay healthy. As long as we have something to do, we will remain strong. Interestingly, though, the discovery sessions for youth in America revealed a darker message, one created by the collision between our reptilian instincts and our cultural adolescence, that leads adults to play a sometimes unhealthy game of dress-up.

Our reptilian brains program us for survival. People in every culture want to survive. In the American culture, however, we not only want to survive, we want to remain at the peak of our powers. It is not nearly enough to be an active old person in America. We want to retain the illusion of invincibility that every teenager has. Americans are fascinated with youth and the fanciful notion of staying young forever.
Time
magazine dedicated the cover and a significant portion of its October 17, 2005, issue to the topic of aging well and remaining young. Bob Dylan offers us his wish that we stay “Forever Young,” while Frank Sinatra tells us “fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.” A hugely popular film like
Cocoon
fantasizes an alien force that can turn the elderly young again, while
Logan’s Run
imagines a “utopian” world where one is not allowed to live past the age of thirty.

As we saw in chapter 2, Americans are eternal adolescents. We look at Europe as the old world and America as the new. Yet in many ways, America is one of the oldest of the world’s nations. The French Revolution began in 1789, more than a decade after our own revolution. Modern Italy became a nation-state in 1861. The German empire was founded in 1871. Our
culture
isn’t nearly as old as the French, Italian, and German cultures (all of which existed long before the current nations of France, Italy, and Germany), but we have existed in our present form longer. We have the oldest written constitution in effect on the entire planet.

So why are we so fascinated with youth? One reason is certainly that we are a culture filled with immigrants. Immigrants come here and leave the past behind. They start over in America. They are reborn here, often with new careers and new (American) dreams. Since we continue to receive immigrants in large numbers, this sense of renewal and reinvention is a living thing in our culture. In itself, this keeps us young.

In addition, because we are an adolescent culture, we tend to think like adolescents, even when we are in our sixties. We don’t want to have to grow up. We don’t want to settle into adulthood. We regard electronics equipment and automobiles as “toys,” and we have coffee dates with our “girlfriends” even when those “girls” are grandmothers.

Since youth in America is as much a state of mind as it is an age, the sessions to discover the Code for youth in this culture included people of all ages. Despite the varied nature of the groups, however, the third-hour stories had very similar structures:

Staying young is critical in my office. My boss is only twenty-nine and he’s always talking in sports metaphors and referring to our competition as “graybeards.” A few months ago, I joined a gym for the first time in ten years so I could drop some pounds and chisel a few muscles. I put in an hour and a half four times a week. I feel like I’m training for a marathon, but if I want to stay in the game, I have to have the look.

—a forty-four-year-old man

My husband and I came home from my birthday dinner and I discovered my first gray hair. Within a week, I found dozens more. Then some wrinkles that I know weren’t there before. I always told myself that I would keep a “natural look”—as little makeup as possible and no hair dye. I couldn’t keep that promise, though. The thought of watching myself get old in the mirror scared the heck out of me. I bought some Clairol and got a makeover at Macy’s. It might be fake, but it makes me feel better.

—a thirty-two-year-old woman

My teenaged grandson loves the fact that I played drums in rock bands in the late fifties and early sixties. My son never thought this was a very big deal, but his son wants to be a drummer too and he asks me all kinds of questions. I started listening to some of Greg’s music and I found I really liked it. I even listen to it in the car and I find myself pounding away on the steering wheel. Rock and roll always made me feel young and this new music gives me that feeling all over again.

—a sixty-year-old man

I had my first child when I was in my early twenties. When my daughter was a teenager, it tickled me when people would refer to us as sisters. I was a very cool mom and I went out of my way to keep up with what my daughter was interested in and the hottest trends. Last year, my daughter had a baby and people started calling me grandma. I am
so
not a grandma! I love that little boy and would do anything for him, but grandmas are gray and puffy and overweight. I told my husband recently that I was thinking of having my grandson call me Joan rather than grandma. He laughed at me. I still might do it, though.

—a forty-nine-year-old woman

For years, people greatly underestimated my age. People in management referred to me as “kid” when I was nearly forty. A couple of years ago, I had some medical problems and I wound up in the hospital for a month. When I came out, I couldn’t get around as fast as I once did, and the weight I lost made me look gaunt and older. I don’t know if it’s just my imagination, but all of a sudden, people around the office started calling me sir. As soon as my doctor cleared me to do so, I went on an all-out program to get myself back into shape. People still don’t call me “kid,” but they will again someday.

—a forty-seven-year-old man