I WENT TO A HIGH SCHOOL with perhaps fifty different extracurricular clubs that, whatever their other shortcomings, at least let one know one’s exact social standing. Status under this arrangement was as finely calibrated as any I have since encountered. Athletes, good guys, ladies’ men, genial screw-offs, the quietly out of it, even the hopelessly d class , each had a club of their own. I don’t yearn to return to my adolescence, even though mine — luck of the draw — was an amusing one, but I have until recently suffered some confusion about what group or category I belong to today. I’m not even sure of my social class, except to say that it’s somewhere in the large and squishy middle. I’m certain that I am (pace William H. Whyte) no Organization Man; nor (pace David Reisman) inner- or other- or tradition-directed. I’ve never been the man in the grey flannel suit. I haven’t a kitchen or bathrooms — or bankroll — big enough to qualify as one of David Brooks’s Bobos. I’m too young to have been formed by the Depression, and too old to be a Baby Boomer. During the Me Decade, I lived chiefly for others. During the supposedly greedy 1980s, I managed to show a loss. With no children at home, I suppose I am an empty nester, but there’s not a lot of distinction in that. As the line from the song says, “I just don’t see me anywhere.” Or at least I didn’t until the other day, when I first heard the phrase “the worried well.” Flash: Floodlights went on everywhere, and I felt I had found my place at last. The worried well, I grasped at once, that’s me and my fellow closet hypochondriacs. Except that there are so many of us worried well that I’m not sure the word hypochondriac quite applies. Where everyone is mad, after all, the word psychotic loses some of its punch. The worried well constitute those vast numbers who are, from the standpoint of health, just fine but don’t believe it is going to last. And of course we are right, for the mortality rate in this country, when last checked, was still rounding off neatly at 100 percent. What has swelled the ranks of the worried well in recent decades has been that nasty little endeavor known as health or medical journalism. I speak of those wretched jaspers whose job it is to scour each issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) and every National Institutes of Health report for news of fresh disease, depressing health trends, and rising rates of one or another kind of human decomposition. We, the worried well, thumbing through our daily papers or tuned in to local and national news channels, read and listen to it all, and tensely sit, waiting for the other flu to fall. What’s new, pussycat? A new strain of leukemia has been discovered, previous cholesterol numbers need to be adjusted downward, osteoporosis isn’t a serious problem only for small, light-boned women. Three new miracle drugs have been developed whose side effects are just slightly more horrendous than the diseases they set out to cure. A study at Stanford finds that all allergies will be conquered by mid-century; unfortunately, another study at Penn State has found that allergies generally are on the rise. We sleep tonight, badly — medical journalism stands guard. Bumps, blemishes, bruises slow to heal, the least deviation from perfection — worrisome all to the worried well. We go to physicians the way other people go to an IRS audit, sure that we aren’t going to come out smiling. What sort of hepatitis, arthritis, meningitis lurks within our cells, bones, genes? We don’t, ever, feel quite right. “When was the last time you felt really good?” a radio commercial for a local health club asks. “1950,” I answer, “when I was thirteen.” We worried well, bounced around by all the conflicting medical news, have peculiar habits. We go for weeks at a time without eating red meat. We take various — and, no doubt, counteracting — vitamins. Many of us jog; others regularly go off on lengthy walks, arms swinging vigorously, looks of grim determination on our faces. Except when the endorphins kick in, we tend to seem mildly depressed. We’re well, thank you for asking, but worried, very worried. We follow the health news the way others follow the stock market. “New hope, new options for breast cancer,” Tom Brokaw reports. But then Peter Jennings tells us that there is altogether too much lead in the atmosphere. New medicine is available to lower the incidence of strokes. But then, wouldn’t you know it, the diabetes rate has risen nationwide. Like the Dow and the Nasdaq, up one day, down the next. We’re the worried well, for whom life is hell. Which does not mean we are ready to depart it. None of us feels, as did Noel Coward, that “life and love and fame and fortune can all be disappointing, but not dear old oblivion. Hurray for eternity!” We’d like just one more salad, please, and perhaps a cup of green tea before we go.
