Grown ups or ‘groan ups’

Somewhere between your first salary and your first involuntary “ooowww” while rising from the sofa, you make a  choice. Most people never notice they’re making it, which is precisely the point. You get to decide what kind of  person you want to be when you grow up, and contrary to the greeting-card version, that decision isn’t made once at  eighteen. It’s made every single unglamorous morning after. 

Here’s the arithmetic nobody prints on a motivational poster: the harder you work on yourself when you’re young, the  more indecently the returns compound when you’re old. The person who built discipline in their teens isn’t “lucky” at  fifty-five; they’re simply collecting interest on a deposit you declined to make. Compounding behaves in your arteries  exactly as it does in your bank account: quietly, relentlessly, and with no sympathy whatsoever for your excuses.

The  only difference is that the bank sends statements. Your arteries and organs do not. They just keep a ledger and present  the bill all at once, usually in a cath lab or during a sudden hospital stay. 

The house is already on fire. You’re smoking in it. 

Let’s be honest about the starting conditions. The environment has already filed its lawsuit against you. Climate  change, air you can practically chew, pandemics that arrive like unwanted relatives with luggage, and a baseline of  daily stress that would have alarmed your grandparents, all of it constitutes a passive environment of harm. You don’t  have to do anything wrong to be damaged. You merely have to exist near a traffic signal and breathe. 

So, the question becomes almost embarrassingly simple: if the world is already doing this much harm for free, and  you also actively forget to look after yourself, what exactly did you expect the outcome to be? You will grow up either  way. Time handles that part without your consent. But whether you become a grown-up or a groan-up, the creaking,  sighing, “at my age, beta” edition of yourself- that part is entirely, inconveniently, yours. 

Everyone’s an expert. Nobody’s a patient. 

Of course, the modern groan up has an alibi ready: the information is so confusing. And, in fairness, it is. We live in  the golden age of the WhatsApp storyteller, the uncle who forwarded himself into a nutrition degree, the influencer  whose entire laboratory is a ring light. Everybody, and I mean everybody, has something urgent to tell you about  protein. About creatine. About strength training. Innumerable online courses, innumerable money-back guarantees to  melt your fat and “stack” your muscle, all of them contradicting each other, and most of them contradicting  physiology itself. 

And the supplement carousel spins on schedule. Every year, a new saviour. Once upon a time, the holy trinity was  vitamin D, calcium, and B12; take these three, and immortality was practically an administrative formality. Then came  the era of magnesium, omega-3, creatine, protein. Melatonin was quietly promoted from occasional sleep aid to full  lifestyle identity. And now, now we’ve graduated to the serious stuff. Resveratrol. NAD boosters. Quercetin.  Spermidine. And, most telling of all, metformin, a perfectly respectable diabetes drug being swallowed by people with  entirely normal blood sugar, purely on the rumour that it might, possibly, in some organism somewhere, add a few  months. Which raises a question I can’t “unask” as a doctor: Are we quietly turning ourselves into guinea pigs? 

Because that’s what’s happening. We are so desperate to stop aging, to erase a single line from a forehead, to appear  twenty years younger than the birth certificate insists, that we are volunteering, unsupervised and unconsented, for  experiments that haven’t finished running. There is a name for a person who takes an unproven compound in an  uncontrolled dose, hoping for an unmeasured benefit. In my profession, we call that person a subject. We usually pay  them. 

We chased “younger” and forgot “well.” 

Here is the part that genuinely worries me, sarcasm switched off for a moment. In the frantic pursuit of a wrinkle-free  face and a “biological age” lower than our shoe size, we have quietly forgotten the essence of the thing. Health was  never a single number on a device. Health is a four-legged stool: physical, mental, spiritual, and financial, and a stool  with one leg does not stand, no matter how beautifully you’ve polished that one leg. 

You can have the resting heart rate of an Olympian and the inner life of a pressure cooker. You can have flawless skin  stretched over a mind that hasn’t slept peacefully in a decade. You can biohack your mitochondria to gleaming  perfection while your finances quietly metastasise, or your relationships atrophy from disuse like a limb left in a cast.  That is not health. That is a very well-moisturised imbalance.

Think of it the way I’m forced to think about a patient: I can hand you a spotless lipid panel, but if you’re financially  terrified, chronically lonely, and spiritually running on fumes, I have not made you well. I have merely made one lab  value flatter. The body keeps the score, yes, but so do the bank account, the marriage, and the soul. You cannot  supplement your way out of a life that isn’t working. There is no capsule for meaning. Believe me, if there were,  someone would already be selling it on Instagram with a discount code. You are not the healthiest, happiest version of  yourself on the day your supplements or skincare arrives in the post. You earn that title only when all four legs of the  stool bear weight at once. 

The one supplement nobody stocks: “Motivation”. 

We keep trying to fix all of this with education and awareness, more infographics, more jargon, more content shouted  into more feeds. And education matters; I’ve built a career on it. But here’s the diagnosis nobody wants written on  their chart: the deficiency isn’t informational. It’s motivational. Motivation is the one thing I cannot prescribe. There’s  no loading dose, no once-weekly injectable, no algae-derived version for the vegetarians. You can’t outsource it to an  app, and your smartwatch can only nag; it cannot want things on your behalf. It buzzes; it does not care. 

Meanwhile, ignore your cholesterol and your arteries will do the paperwork of clogging themselves without any  encouragement from you, a process that, cheerfully, can begin in childhood, long before anyone’s complained of chest  pain. The plaque doesn’t care that you were busy. It doesn’t care that the information was confusing or that the  influencer contradicted the cardiologist. It doesn’t read forwards. It simply accumulates, one deferred decision at a  time, compounding in silence, until the day someone in a white coat teaches you vocabulary you had spent your whole  life hoping to avoid. 

Choose your groan wisely! 

So, here’s the choice, stripped of every last bit of jargon: You can be a grown-up, someone who treats the body as the  single asset they can never resign from, who lifts heavy things, grips things tightly and sleeps on purpose, who checks  the four or five numbers that actually matter and cheerfully ignores the supplement-of-the-month club. Someone  tending all four legs of the stool, not buffing one to a mirror shine while the other three quietly rot. Or you can be a  groan up, fluent in the dialect of aches, on affectionate first-name terms with your heating pad, narrating your own  decline as though it were the monsoon. Something that happened to you, rather than something you RSVP’d to, one  skipped workout and one panicked wonder-pill at a time. 

The world will do its worst regardless. That part was never on the table. The only question on the form and I’m afraid  it’s compulsory, no exemptions, no “not applicable,” is what you intend to do about it. 

Growing up is inevitable. Groaning up is a choice. 

So, choose. Preferably out loud. And ideally not while getting off the sofa.

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