What elections, healthcare, and the ancient wisdom of Aparigraha reveal about the health of a society
Last week’s midterm elections gave us plenty to contemplate. BILLIONS (with a B) of dollars were spent attempting to influence the direction of our country, candidates made promises about our collective future, and millions of Americans stepped into the privacy of a voting booth to make their own decisions.
I find that last part particularly wonderful.
For all the money, messaging, political allegiance, and social pressure surrounding this election, there remained a moment when an individual could consider what they believe, what they value, and what kind of society they wish to participate in creating. No one standing beside them demanding an explanation. No obligation to publicly defend their choice.
We cannot know how many people voted differently from their usual political affiliations, or precisely what motivated their decisions. But the freedom to exercise independent judgment, particularly when it challenges the expectations of our social groups, is something worth appreciating.
And very much worth protecting.
The 2026 midterm elections are projected to have cost approximately $11.9 billion. An extraordinary amount of money devoted to shaping political outcomes. Meanwhile, Americans spend more than $5 TRILLION (with a T, and lots of zeros) annually on healthcare, a system that continues to struggle with affordability, access, and preventable disease.
These are very different expenditures, much of our healthcare spending provides genuinely valuable care. Still, placing these enormous numbers beside one another raises an uncomfortable question.
How did we become so extraordinarily capable of spending money without becoming equally capable of ensuring that the people those systems exist to serve can flourish?
When More Is No Longer Enough
There is a concept in classical yoga philosophy called Aparigraha, one of the five Yamas described in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras. Commonly translated as non-grasping or non-possessiveness, Aparigraha asks us to examine our relationship with accumulation, ownership, and attachment.
It doesn’t require us to reject prosperity, ambition, or the material resources necessary for a meaningful life. Rather, it invites a more discerning relationship with them.
At what point does having more begin to compromise our capacity to recognize what is enough?
That question becomes particularly interesting when we move beyond individual behavior and examine the institutions we have created.
Economic growth, profitability, and financial sustainability are important to functioning societies. Hospitals must pay their clinicians. Businesses must sustain their employees. Governments require resources to fulfill their responsibilities.
But when financial accumulation becomes the primary measure of success, we risk confusing the means with the purpose.
In healthcare, this tension is especially visible. We have developed extraordinary technologies, sophisticated diagnostics, life-saving pharmaceuticals, and interventions that would have been unimaginable a century ago. Yet our enormous investment in medical care has not translated proportionately into better health, greater longevity, or improved quality of life.
The relationship between healthcare spending and human well-being is far more complicated than the financial magnitude of the system might suggest.
Perhaps this is because we continue to invest so heavily in managing the consequences of illness while giving comparatively less attention to the biological, behavioral, environmental, and social conditions from which health emerges.
In governance something similar occurs when political success becomes increasingly dependent upon fundraising, advertising, and the financial machinery of campaigning. The question isn’t whether money has a place in these systems. Of course it does.
The question is whether we remain capable of recognizing when the pursuit of more begins to displace the very human purposes for which these institutions exist.
The Individual Is Not Separate From the Whole
In Integrative Ayurvedic Medicine (IAM), we understand health as an ongoing relationship between the individual and the conditions in which life unfolds.
Classical Ayurveda describes a correspondence between Puruṣha, the individual, and Loka, the larger world. We are not independent biological machines operating within an incidental environment. Our physiology is continually responding to the rhythms, relationships, resources, and circumstances of our lives. Our physiological health cannot be separated from our psychological experience, our social relationships, our cultural conditioning, our economic circumstances, or the larger questions of meaning and belonging that shape how we live.
Consider what happens when a person is struggling to afford healthcare. Financial uncertainty may affect sleep, nutrition, stress physiology, treatment adherence, and the ability to make decisions about the future. These aren’t simply failures of personal discipline or resilience. They are biological responses occurring within economic circumstances.
We often encourage people to take greater responsibility for their health, and rightly so. Individual agency is essential to good medicine and good health.
But responsibility requires opportunity.
We cannot reasonably ask people to cultivate personal health while ignoring the conditions that make healthy choices inaccessible, unaffordable, or unsustainable.
This is where the relationship between individual and collective well-being becomes impossible to overlook. To me it feels very bi-directional.
What Does It Mean to Flourish Together?
One of the more encouraging aspects of democratic participation is the possibility that people can examine their convictions and make choices that extend beyond their immediate interests.
A representative democracy also invites us to consider whose experiences are present in the decisions shaping our collective lives.
Age, sex, sexual orientation, cultural heritage, economic circumstances, geography, and countless other dimensions influence how people encounter the world. Representation alone does not guarantee thoughtful leadership or equitable outcomes, but a diversity of lived experience can broaden the understanding from which public decisions emerge.
I am so grateful to witness this happening realtime in our society. And interestingly, this is not so different from the systems understanding we use in my clinic.
A clinician who considers only one symptom may overlook the conditions contributing to illness. Likewise, institutions that consistently overlook particular communities may fail to understand the circumstances shaping their own health and well-being.
And this brings us back to Aparigraha.
Perhaps non-grasping has a collective expression as well as an individual one. Not merely the willingness to possess less, but the capacity to recognize that our own prosperity exists within relationships that sustain it.
We depend upon farmers, teachers, healthcare workers, tradespeople, caregivers, scientists, neighbors, and people whose lives may look nothing like our own.
Our lives are profoundly interconnected, whether or not we consciously acknowledge those relationships.
The question remains whether our economic and political structures reflect that understanding. I remain hopeful.
A Different Measure of Success
I wonder what might change if we became as interested in measuring human flourishing as we are in measuring economic growth.
What if we examined the success of healthcare not only through procedures performed, revenue generated, or diseases managed, but through the capacity of people to live meaningful, adaptable, healthy lives?
What if the success of our communities included the strength of their relationships, the accessibility of essential resources, and the ability of people with different perspectives to participate meaningfully in a shared community?
These questions don’t eliminate the difficult realities of economics, governance, or healthcare. Resources are finite. Priorities compete. Reasonable people disagree about how collective responsibilities should be organized and funded.
But disagreement about the methods need not prevent us from examining the purpose.
In my heart of hearts, health is not a destination, nor a commodity that can simply be purchased. It is a relationship cultivated through our ongoing participation in life.
Perhaps the health of our society deserves a similar understanding.
Remembering What We Belong To
As newly elected leaders begin their work, there is an opportunity for all of us to reconsider what we expect from leadership and what we contribute to the communities we inhabit.
Elections do not resolve the deeper questions of how we care for one another. They create opportunities to continue that work, through public policy, community participation, institutional accountability, and the countless ordinary decisions through which we shape our shared lives.
Aparigraha offers a useful place to begin.
When does having more become an obstacle to recognizing what is enough? And when does our attachment to what we possess, believe, or identify with prevent us from recognizing the humanity of someone else?
Perhaps flourishing together requires something more than accumulating sufficient resources to secure our individual futures. Perhaps it also requires remembering that the conditions supporting our lives are inseparable from those supporting the lives around us.
We have become very sophisticated at measuring the economic value of nearly everything. Yet some of the conditions most essential to human health—trust, dignity, belonging, meaningful participation, and our capacity to care for one another—remain difficult to capture on a balance sheet.
That doesn’t make them less valuable.
It may simply be time to reconsider what we are measuring, what we are cultivating, and what we have come to understand as enough.
