Health Begins with Responsibility
On the difference between control and responsibility — and why a good life needs more than optimization.
The dangerous illusion of control
Anyone who has been severely ill loses an illusion many people carry for a long time: the illusion that health is completely controllable. You can eat well, move, sleep, take supplements, reduce stress, measure blood values — and still become ill. This truth is uncomfortable. It is also liberating.
When I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, there was no simple moral explanation. Illness is not always a message. It is not always the result of wrong decisions. Sometimes it breaks into a life like weather no one ordered.
Responsibility is not control
Control says: I can prevent everything if I only do everything right. Responsibility says: I cannot determine everything, but I can participate. I can take my body seriously. I can learn. I can create better conditions. I can seek help. I can become honest.
During treatment, I could force nothing. I could not command my bone marrow to work faster. I could not improve blood values through willpower. The body had its own pace. This changed my relationship to health. I became more humble — not passive, but humble.
The body as partner
Before severe illness, it is easy to treat the body as a tool. It is supposed to function, perform, look good, and remain available. Only when the body stops functioning do we understand that it was never just a tool. It was a partner all along.
Health is therefore not merely private. Through the body we love, work, walk, write, embrace our children, see light, and feel closeness. Health is the foundation of our participation in life.
Biohacking without grandiosity
Biohacking can be valuable when understood correctly. It can help us read the body better, stabilize energy, improve sleep, detect deficiencies, and build health-supporting routines. But it becomes problematic when it treats the human being as a device that only needs the right settings.
After my illness, I am not interested in the fantasy of an invincible body. I am interested in a more conscious body — a body one listens to, supports, and works with instead of constantly overburdening.
Responsibility without blame
Responsibility is not blame. This distinction matters. In the health world, sick people are too often made to feel as if they have failed. Eat better. Stress less. Move more. Think more positively. As if every illness were a simple equation.
That attitude is cruel. My illness taught me to be careful when judging another person’s life. No one knows the whole story of a body. Responsibility means acting where action is possible, while respecting what remains unavailable.
The second life
After a severe illness, the word “later” changes. Later is no longer guaranteed. It is a gift. I no longer understand health as self-optimization, but as respect: respect for the body, for time, for the people who love us, and for the fact that life is finite.
Health begins with responsibility because responsibility is gratitude made practical. Whoever is grateful treats life differently — not fearfully, not obsessively, but more awake, more carefully, and more truthfully.