(Answer: by paying attention to older people, but there's a reason they say that youth is wasted on the young.)
I struggled a bit with whether regular bowel movements constitute op-ed page material. The struggle is symptomatic of the point I'm making, which is: among the more foolish of contemporary taboos is the one around bodily frailty. "Being professional" pokes "being human" in the ribs with ever-sharper elbows. Modern life, in particular working life, and especially white-collar working life, increasingly makes no concessions for physical vulnerability. Frankly, my dear, professionals don't get gas.
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Everyone seems to hate the fact that we live and work in bodies that have non-professional compulsions. Got a headache? Take a pill. Jet lagged? Show up to work anyway. Sleep-deprived? Drink 10 cups of coffee. Acidity? Pop a pill, or grin and bear it. Tummy shot? Pop a pill and grin and bear it. Mental fatigue? Fake it, fudge it, wing it, keep going. Running a fever? Pop a pill. Got a cold? Pop a pill. Back problems from sitting all day? What are you, a crybaby? Sit back down at your desk for seven hours through the night and finish writing the article on the new thing that's killing us, what scientists now informally call "sitting disease". The cafetiere is right over there. What do you mean, you can't think because you're constip-shh! Just, shh.
The same applies socially. Early dinner? No alcohol on an empty stomach - or, worse, no alcohol at all? In bed by midnight? Not one of the 10 sumptuous deep-fried dishes we cooked for you? What do you mean, you've got indiges-shh! Just, shh. What kind of ungracious, regimented, boring loser are you? Oh right - a 40-year-old ungracious, regimented, boring loser. God, stop being so … old.
It's plain old denial. People worship most devoutly at the altar of youth when it starts slipping away. That's when you dye your hair, join a gym, plump up your lips and insist on playing squash with 25-year-old opponents. You party harder than ever now that your bank balance can finally afford it, even though your body no longer can. Get off the plane at 4 a m, get to work at 7.30 a m, leave at 9 p m, party until 1 a m, rinse and repeat.
Addressing the less glamorous bodily effects of age, occupation and habit marks you out as a contemptible wimp, or as an uncouth yob, or as social kryptonite. So people go about working desk jobs for 12 hours a day, eating junk on the fly, sleeping for four hours - and privately suffering haemorrhoids and heartburn, high blood pressure and depression. You end up developing a shadowy parallel life that centres on bodily damage control, even as you refuse to change your ways.
Men are famously less inclined to talk about these things than women. That's what gets them killed earlier - the refusal to even admit to a problem, let alone make a doctor's appointment and keep it. They're socially conditioned to project physical strength and independence, not whine about haemorrhoids. (You can have no idea, at 20, of the havoc that a haemorrhoid can wreak in your life. If you did, you would get enough fibre; drink plenty of water; get enough exercise; not sit so long or strain so hard. But youth is wasted on the young.) Women tend to talk more, to each other and to doctors, about their health, thus catching incipient illness earlier. They're socially conditioned not to mind being perceived as more delicate or vulnerable.
The enteric nervous system, embedded in the digestive tract, is known as the body's second brain. It's an insanely complex, danger-sensing, life-preserving, 500-million-neuron system that is so integral to bodily function that some theorise that it may have been the original invertebrate brain, and that the brain in the skull evolved later. Some doctors think that degenerative diseases of the brain, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, might have more to do with the gut than previously thought, in terms of both pathology and therapy. Messing up your gut has consequences.
Is it any wonder that one day soon - much, much sooner than you think - the most important thing to you in the whole wide world will be a regular bowel movement?