A Collection of Blackpills in no particular order: 1. the Generational Health/Wealth Gap

 It's pretty well known, even by non millennials, that millennials , and probably each subsequent generation, are substantially poorer than the Boomers and Gen x.  It's not worth another essay, and I cant do anything about the phenomenon anyway, other than reiterate it.  But I want to argue that theres another insidious thing that got taken from us... our vitality, our strength, our health. 

 But first, think about what these charts mean in context of mold avoidance and the financial means to pursue this treatment.  Or any medical treatment for that matter.  We are talking about  a generation that on average has ten times less wealth than Baby Boomers

But that may just be the start of the raw deal people born into this world recently are getting.   While generational differences --in terms of hard dividing lines between generations, different aesthetics ,  etc.--may be psyops to divide people with a common goal and prevent them from talking about class or oligarchs or the class of oligarchs poisoning us, there is no denying that there are stark differences in wealth between those born before a certain point--1960, but maybe even 1970, and those born after 1985 or so.   Extremely stark differences.  Basically, millenials' asset ownership and total wealth makes them peasants in comparison to older generations, especially boomers.  millenials, even if healthy, can for the most part look forward only to debt bondage and working for the rest of their life .

But they're not healthy!

Now I'd like to talk about a less tangible gap.   The health gap.  This isn't studied as thoroughly as the wealth gap and not quite as quantifiable, but its there.  I will provide many citations , but also will include them only as what I think is the tip of an iceberg of heretofore in studied and unverified anecdotes of my generations health failing.  

I think that while both someone of my generation and a boomer with this illness could become as sick, and may be getting sick in the same world that is just as toxic, the cumulative general health--from inherited conventional genetic to epigenetic effects that constitute this health gap I believe in, make the boomer possibly quicker to recover , ironically despite the increased age, which is classically associated with resilience.

I think that my generation has inherited not just a world of increased social precarity and downward class mobility , and student debt and low homeownership.   I think we have inherited a plethora of toxins and various things that bring illness , maladaptive epigenetic mutations, dysfunctional and less diverse microbiomes both inside us and in our childhood homes and neighborhoods.   We are inheriting deserts.  No, I dont like that metaphor,  bc a desert is now to me an arid ecosystem teeming with microbial diversity (see cyanobacteria that comprise desert crusts in colorado plateau), plant and animal diversity, and general healing potential.  We are inheriting parking lots, we are inheriting desertified and soon to be vacant exurbs, we are inheriting the Superfund sites that started as the Boomer tech-gurus' dreams of individualistic hedonic pleasure and inward centered revolutions in thinking.  How did we get from Steve Jobs' LSD trips, the wheatfields unfurling while Bach played in the background, to the techno poptimism of the aughts and now plumes of whatever crap grew in the sewers everywhere that computer chips were washed with solvents like TCE, whatever extremophile was left in that hostile environment, making people have bad trips every day in the cities that were the center of those tech revolutions--the greater silicon valley, or the silicon corridor in Oregon? (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silicon-valley-full-superfund-sites/598531/)

The idea that we have an epidemic of chronic disease currently, a lot of it environmental, is not necessarily novel or considered outlandish by scientists. 

For example, Lawrence Afrin, a prominent Mast Cell Activation Disease researcher/immunologist, has discussed how MCAS is causing an epidemic of chronic disease, as it affects multiple organ systems, from connective tissue, to the gut, to causing neuroinflammation and heart issues. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1931524416000220)

 All I'm really adding here is the idea of breaking it down by generation and adding the idea that the wealth gap makes it harder to deal with this ill health.

If you think I'm just whining and want an excuse to not try, you don't know me very well.  

Anyway, I'm in a lot of pain , and its hard to write this post.  It will blossom Into something even better once I have the requisite data to support my argument. 

According to Robert Naviaux, a leading researcher in the field of mitochondrial diseases,  autism,  and other disorders: "In 1985, 5-10% of children born in the US lived with a chronic disease.  Today, just thirty years later, 40% of children live with chronic disease.  Many diseases have increased 2-10 times from 1985 to 2015 (Figure 1). " (source: https://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/the-28th-amendment-project/)

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-gen-millennials-worse-health-prior.html

Health is more important than wealth to me, but this is a feedback loop that reinforced itself.  It takes money to deal with health problems, especially those that involve changing ones housing.  Far too much money.  We are competing for dwellings and land in a West that has quickly become exurbanized and more crowded than it was before.  Since there is no precedent in public land management for using it as a refuge for the sick and especially environmentally ill, no wildlife refuges for humans, we often compete for private land in some of the most beautiful and sought after areas of the country, in which many landowners are there for the view, or to be in proximity to skiing or hiking or other recreation. 

An interlude with some relevant numbers to think about: 

1.  The cost of a year in a medium level hotel (eg not the fanciest, but not cheap motels that are likely to be moldy... decent chains like fairfield inn and suites, etc): about $35,000. I write this knowing that some of my readers have the context of being mold avoiders and understanding the lifestyle, while some don't. To explain why this would even be a necessity, rather than a luxury, here are some facts: in longer term rentals, the landlord has an inordinate amount of power over the tenant, and if the tenant becomes sensitive to the place, they cannot simply leave without losing out on a lot of money and breaking a lease. This can happen over and over again as the average rental housing stock is usually moldier than a sensitive person can tolerate. Obviously hotels aren't perfect either, but medium-tier new chains often have good rooms, which combined with the flexibility can mean risking less money in the long term.  Nobody knows exactly why, but it seems like many commercial buildings, including but not limited to hotels, are better than the average residential ones.   This includes warehouses and hospitals as well as hotels.    Maybe it has to do with industrial grade filtration systems, and some of them are built with different materials than residential buildings, but hotels tend to be a better bet than airbnb, or rentals.   (If there were many pure adobe buildings or stone huts or traditional log cabins in existence to rent, those might be a better alternative, but those dont seem common, and this is a digression.)

2. The cost of the smallest cheapest Freedom express RV model, one of the ones used by one of the most successful recent mold avoiders:  $22,000. This is the lowest, but it could be over $50,000 especially if one has a family. A Casita trailer which would be good for a single person or couple, would be between $14,000 - $25,000.

3.  The average cost of a minivan rental for a year (car rentals are often recommended by some experienced avoiders as a way to be able to change out cars and avoid long term purchases that can involve big financial commitments): $19,000. Cost of decent used vehicle suitable for mold avoidance: $5,000 - 15,000.

4.  $7,200: the amount I get from SSI per year for being disabled, rounded up.  Despite being totally unable to work, I dont get the highest amount of money that one can get from SSI, which is still paltry, $794/month.  

Actually, this little known (to abled people) aspect of disability payments and the difference between SSI/SSDI is a great example of how millenials who get sick are even more screwed than their boomer counterparts.  SSDI is another type of disability income, but one that inherently discriminates against young people who got sick before they were able to amass any significant amount of work hours in their life. SSDI, if one is able to access it, is far more generous than SSI, averaging $1,300 a month and topping out at a maximum of around $3,000 a month. 

In short, if you are young and get sick in college or high school, before you enter the work force, like I and a number of peers of  mine, you get extremely paltry benefits, not even enough to live on even if you discount the extra costs of specialist doctors and special housing for mold avoidance. So even disabled, poor people from an older generation may be more financially resilient and well equipped to do mold avoidance (as well as physically resilient, but that's a separate argument that the rest of the piece deals with). 

5. $5,000: "A survey by Insider and Morning Consult found that while 70% of millennials have a savings account, 58% have a balance under $5,000."

6. Cost of the leading ME/CFS specialist visits. Initial visit with lab work adds up to around $3,000 - $5,000. Follow ups can be expensive depending on how often you have appointments.

7. Cost, as cited by his parents, of caring for Whitney Dafoe, a severely ill ME/CFS patient per year: $100,000. This is with insurance coverage. I mention this as this is a possible endpoint for people that can't or don't or won't do the costly and experimental treatments such as mold avoidance or CCI surgery or in some cases even things like IVIG. Thus, I mention the above costs like hotel rooms or RVs not as frivolities, or to scoff at the necessity of them, but in the context of them being both necessary and unattainable for many people. Especially the youth.

Intuitively, my sense of a lot of older people, especially those that have lived a remote or rural existence, is that many of them have had more vitality than my 23 year old self, despite us breathing the same air and drinking same water in current year.  And that vitality could come from one of two places: the beneficial things they were exposed to (think diverse microbial communities that have been decimated in the past 60 years or so by industrial ag and various types of techno industrial development), or the detrimental things they weren't exposed to (penitrem a, possibly, or trichloroethylene plumes, or organophosphates both in their mothers womb-feedings and in her breast milk, or PFAS, or fusarium mold, or ... jeez is there any reason to go on... we all know the list is endless. ).

One of the only articles I could find on the gut microbiome of millenials compared to other generations was a pop sci article, not primary source... but it is revealing and interesting nonetheless.  It discusses another depressing statistic, that millenials struggle with being overweight and losing weight far more than their gen x counterparts.

Anyway one thing to consider statistically, is that its pretty hard to study the health gap bc unlike wealth , there is not some single quantity or number or variable which could serve as a definition of health, but a bunch of different proxies.  And furthermore, a lot of which we dont even know the causes for the fluctuation--we dont know how connected hormonal problems are to any given single endocrine dysrupting chemical when there are something like thousands or at the very least hundreds, out there wreaking havoc . But anyway , how does reproductive health and futurity sound as a proxy of the human future and vitality sound... I mean weve all watched Children of Men , right ?  Well, Park Macdougald,  in his review of a gloomy pop science book about this very topic, has done a nice job summarizing the evidence and how it used to be dismissed as crazy hippie or even , somehow,  redneck stuff...https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/theyre-after-our-bodily-fluids-review-of-count-down-by-shonna-h-swan

"As the list of chemicals in the above paragraphs suggests, Swan believes that the major culprit behind rising sexual abnormalities in humans and animals is the proliferation of toxins that interfere with our endocrine system, which is responsible for, among other things, “sexing” infants in the womb, inducing puberty, and regulating the balance of hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone, that are critical for our sexual and reproductive health. The number of endocrine-disrupting chemicals is dizzying, as is the list of ways in which we are exposed to them every day. For instance, phthalates are a class of EDC that are often “antiandrogenic,” meaning that they interfere with the normal functioning of masculinizing hormones such as testosterone. Due to this testosterone-blocking effect, male infants exposed to phthalates in the womb are more likely to exhibit female-typical behavior after birth, have smaller-than-average penises, and suffer from poor fertility or infertility as adults. Yet phthalates can be found in plastic products and vinyl, floor and wall coverings, medical tubing and medical devices, children’s toys, and personal care products, such as hair spray, nail polish, and perfume. Other EDCs include the pesticides and herbicides used on produce, the hormones and antibiotics given to food animals, estrogenic compounds in soy, and chemical flame retardants added to foam, upholstered furniture, mattresses, carpets, electronics, and children’s pajamas.

In fact, it’s hard not to become a bit paranoid when reading Swan’s book. Even allowing that some of the science she relates is speculative and inferential and that some of her findings are more established than others, the overwhelming sense one gets from Count Down is that one is being slowly poisoned every single day. It’s a classic horror story in that it highlights what is sinister and threatening in the seemingly mundane. Our food, toiletries, furniture, and other innocuous consumer goods are, apparently, arrayed in a vast conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

I could quote more from the review but the gist of it might as well be "everything is bad", at least if we are on the subject of fertility and reproductive and hormonal health and one is not a sadist or accelerationist.  From the standpoint of anyone who wants the human race to be fruitful and healthy and to thrive for much longer, none of it is good news . From the standpoint of winning the general argument I'm making about how our generation has inherited the worst possible health so far? Its great news!  Gen z, or whatever comes after that ... get ready for No future ! Except not in the punk way, more like the TS Eliot in The Wasteland and The Hollow Men meets Khmer Rouges concept of year zero... 

I dont like to talk that much about some of the unsavory arguments on topics that are less well understood by the mainstream or simply by anyone without this illness, in public, bc I dont think that most people understand this illness to understand why big financial expenditures related to housing are sometimes necessary.  But this may be an exception, since we are discussing a problem that may be nearly insurmountable, and is systemic, and since the people having these often private discussions hate the idea of bringing up systemic barriers to mold avoidance ability, etc.  

Many, perhaps even most, of the people pursuing healing via "mold avoidance " (a term I'm putting in scare quotes bc it's a bit oversimplified), have had the privilege to start with assets like houses or cars or both, or other real estate that they could simply sell, using the money from those sales, etc , to pay for RVs, or custom trailers or dwellings, or hotel rooms, or camping gear, or Vans.  There is certainly a lot of value to pursuing avoidance and healing in general with putting health first, and putting monetary concerns second, but at some point it's almost impossible, short of fundraising extreme amounts, for anyone in my generation to pull it off.   And yet we need to, more than anyone.  Because of the health gap.  I'm just an early adopter (of chronic illness,  and of course I kid... since this blog is written for a wide audience I unfortunately have to do things like explain joke and tone).  Or a canary in the coal mine... yes, I didnt choose this illness, it chose me, but what I mean by early adopter is that it's a trend that I'm ahead of the curve on, and will soon become the mainstream.  I suspect that chronic health issues will become the norm for people at my age, starting in their thirties (later than me, who got sick at 21).  And with their zero savings, and with the NIH comprised mostly of people from the generation that have the upper hand in this wealth/health gap, what will they do?

When I bring up this argument, I would like to point out that it was a person from one of these previous generations (boomer I believe), Erik Johnson, that pioneered the idea of mold avoidance, and tried in vain to help everyone in the community, after making a full recovery himself.  He did his best to try and get scientists to listen to him and to try and spare subsequent generations. And as far as I can tell, hes never told anybody that doesnt have enough money for an RV, or enough energy left to build their own from scratch,  mold resistant materials like metal , to suck it up--he is a remarkably intelligent and empathetic person.  

But the point of this post is not to shit on the baby boomer or Gen x generation.  And there are class divides that should be elaborated on within or above generational ones.  But the simultaneous generational health and wealth gaps are stark enough to need to be discussed in any conversation about practical solutions to these problems, individual or collective ones.  Sure, class structures exist on top of the generational wealth gaps, but those have been elaborated on enough.  

Anyway, awhile back, probably over thirty, maybe forty years ago, Erik Johnson said that we would all become sick, or something along those lines.  Well, he said that if things continued as they had been going, there would be millions of people just like him, inexplicably ill and inexorably sensitive to mold and toxic chemicals.  He said that, and nobody listened.  Of course, Erik wasn't a scientist or industry expert.  But it's probably crazier to face a torrent of chronic health issues, many of them novel, either wholly or partially, and not even consider doing in depth epidemiology to find out whether these illnesses are linked to environmental toxins, then it is to listen to a bright autodidact army veteran and hangglider, who happened to get very very sick, and find the way out, via what he knew about chemical weapons.  

Besides that we will all start to get very sick from this stuff, which honestly looks like an easy prediction from hindsight,  Erik's main other focus was on communicating that it wasn't normal mold that made him sick.  He was convinced that mold and possibly cyanobacteria ,  which infamously bloomed on Lake Tahoe the year of the Lake Tahoe CFS outbreak,  would change somehow when in contact with industrial pollution, that the microbes would either aggregate the existing nanoparticulates from industrial pollution into more potent clumps, or something like that... it was difficult to understand stuff when I encountered it as a sick person, and also to some people , a bit outlandish.  

If you read Park Macdougalds piece above, you may remember the college roommate he thought was the extreme eccentric for refusing to drink out of bisphenol A lined cans, and how Park stated that Jason had gotten the last laugh essentially.  Well, I dont consider Erik that eccentric myself, but his theories have perhaps been treated that way, and are mmaybe more complex and harder to swallow than "the lining of cans is toxic"... anyway, maybe this is the decade in which Jason, and Erik,  and all number of people once considered eccentrics, are getting the last laugh.

To center this revelation, I would like to cite three papers only... because quality beats quantity and I'd actually like to have you guys read these papers, this is not a gish gallop attempt.  Anyway the point isnt just mold is toxic,it's that Erik has been proven right about the very particular theory of mold combining with nanoparticles from industrial pollutants, to make something more pathogenic. "Nanoparticle decoration impacts airborne fungal pathology" 

Well, just read the paper, I wont summarize it for you.  But I will say, take it seriously, and that it's in a good journal (PNAS) with high impact factor.

With the second paper, I will link to a secondary source instead bc theres a great summary of the article.  Regardless, the essence of it is that a lab team tried to find a mysterious substance killing eagles in the southeast.  The culprit turned out to be a cyanobacteria toxin (cyanotoxin) but one that would only be produced when the cyanobacteria is exposed to bromide salts, eg type of chemical it isnt normally exposed to.  Here, just read it.  It's amazing, and awful.  I implore you not to look away.  

I know I said I'd pick three.  But I cant. So  here are two more, with less context.  (One, about mercury in coastal fog... influenced by bacteria converting it to methylmercury form, but also only in existence bc of heavy metal pollution)

(Two, about the way that fungal spores and fragments turn into nanoparticulates and even aerosols in the atmosphere... all to get deeper into your lungs and brain , my dear)

I did not want to just spam links here, although there are a lot.  The point with those last four studies was less about pointing out that everything is bad, health wise, and more about concluding by pointing  back  toward complex theoretical models that are already in existence about why things are so bad...listen to Erik Johnson might be one heuristic to takeaway from this.  Another takeaway might be that ecological systems are like any complex system in that if you throw a bunch of novel destabilizing stuff at them, they will change radically in ways we cant predict, ways that will harm nodes existing totally within the system (humans, for one).  The way in which weve recently harmed our ecology and also in which weve been sickened by it, seems to be less some unpredictable black Swan event caused by the unforeseen effect of a chemical that had already been safety tested, and more the opposite,  the predictable effect of throwing thousands of novel, often known but sometimes unknown, toxins, and never letting it fully recover.  Ecomodernity involves stressing an ecosystem chronically , at low to moderate levels, until it is broken and cannot support complex life. Modernity involves stressing human animals chronically at low levels instead of intermittently at high ones .  

We've decimated microbial biomass, and animal and plant biomass , and what survives in the wake of that often includes a lot of disgusting extremophiles that are fairly toxic.  Here are some quasi related links:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/626812/gut-microbiome-controls-craving-for-nature

Gut microbiota from amish but not hutterite children protect mice from asthma

The built environment is a microbial wasteland

A final closing thought?  The trends for both our generations wealth and health seem dire enough on their own, but imagining them as a feedback loop where the basics to support good health cannot be acquired bc of financial impoverishment is disturbing.  The feedback loop... poverty, precarity, ill-health, poverty, ill-health... this is what we have to look forward to without drastic overhauls of our current systems 

Postscript: one reader asked about how these trends identified mostly in america compare to other developed countries.  It's an intriguing question that I don't have the bandwidth to investigate further myself, but I will include a couple things ive found, and encourage others to investigate further.  As you probably know, there are EU regulations about chemicals and pesticides that are stricter than America in many ways and based on the precautionary principle.  But at the same time maybe there is more virgin forest and desert and less density in many parts of america than in Western Europe, so that's something that may be a point against parts of the EU.  Regardless we need far, far more research on this to know what to do.  

Australian info below:

Image from https://www.thegutsygroup.com.au/crohns-colitis/incidence/ 

Now, keep in mind that inflammatory bowel diseases aren't the only type of inflammatory disease with environmental factors as a possible cause, nor are they a perfect case study for what I'm writing about, especially b/c diet may play more of a direct role in these diseases than in others, so it's hardeto isolate changes caused by inhaled toxins/pollutants. But its difficult to study EVERY CHRONIC DISEASE AT ONCE, so I'm throwing in some of these interesting studies and stats about IBD prevalence in the footnote. Also, keep in mind that inflammatory effects from inhaled pollutants can influence diseases like this, which are not solely caused by diet.

Note that this isnt just a study of worldwide IBD prevalence rates by country but that it also includes a figure about prevalence rate CHANGE over time, on the bottom. Although I'd love to see a longer period of time than from 1990, it's still illuminating.

Figure from here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lan

gas/article/PIIS2468-1253(19)30333-4/fulltext

And remember, inflammatory bowel disease is related to MCAS, a disease often caused and triggered by environmental toxins: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1931524416000220