Last Friday morning I heard the buzz of a tiny circular saw as it sliced through the top of a cornea. Then I smelled the lower part of it burn under a laser.
It was a crappy ten minutes. But a minute afterwards, I could see better than ever in my life. And a few hours later, my vision was 20/20.
Lasik is a generation old. But it still wows people – such as my stunned friends. Because despite the tremendous power of modern (or even 1980s) body hacking, most of us don’t realize – that is, fully, personally realize – that it exists.
We can fix eyes, grow ears and bladders, rebuild shattered joints, cure chronic seizures, and perform (or at least receive) dozens of other miracles.
All this is happening alongside a growing back-to-nature movement. Locally grown food (including eggs from chickens in Brooklyn yards), the five-ingredient rule, community supported agriculture (CSA).
How do we square the two?
Some would say they are opposites. I think they are aspects of the same thing: Technology that allows us to live better and longer.
The slow food and natural food movements are technology. It’s not simply a matter of rejecting today’s laboratory-pruduced foods, but also of using our greater knowledge of biology and nutrition to grow foods optimally and pick the right ones for our diets.
Humans have been eating red meat since before the appearance of the Homo sapien species. It’s as traditional as eating gets. But now we know that it’s not entirely healthy, and that we have to moderate or eliminate it.
That’s not harkening to the past. It’s looking to the future.
I remember a conversation not too long ago with a friend who was confronting 40 (as I did, the same week). She was concerned about things like wrinkles and loss of elasticity in her skin.
I suggested she try Retina-A for the wrinkles and, if it really bothers her, plastic surgery options for (what she considered) a saggy face.
She told me she didn’t want to resort to technology, but that she should age naturally.
I reminded her that if she really were aging naturally, she’d probably be dead. Forty years is a long time for a hominid to survive on the African plains. It was even a feat during the Middle Ages.
And a generation or two ago, the idea of a fit, sexy, late-40s woman would be unthinkable. Sarah Jessica and Mary-Louise Parker would have been impossible.
Why has that changed? Technology. Sanitation, immunizations, antibiotics, diet, radiology, etc.
We’re already the product of technological manipulation. Lasik has been going on for 20 years. But in some form or another, body hacking has been around for tens of thousands.
