In March 2024 the DutchHealth Council stated thatfibromyalgia, a chronic disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain and fatigue, should be recognized as a valid health problem by the Dutch Ministry of Public Health. Since fibromyalgia lacks a known physical cause, patients receive little to no financial and social support and are often faced with stigma and social isolation. According to Jan Willem Förch, the director of ReumaNederland, recognition might lead to more research into possible causes and treatments. ‘For too long, people with fibromyalgia have only been told that they just have to learn to live with it.’ (NOS, 2024).

‘You just have to learn tolive with it’ is a reaction thatmany people with persistent physical or mental conditions receive. In this talk I take a philosophical-anthropological approach, questioning what possibilities people in late modern, capitalist societies have to meaningfully ‘live with’ a long-term or chronic condition. With the help of historian George Weisz (2014), I will show that the history of the concept of chronic illness in medical and political discourse is intertwined with narratives of progression, capitalist production and crisis. Nowadays, people with chronicillness are often faced with either of these two reactions: they either hear that they have to work hard to get better, or, when ‘nothing can be done’, they hear that they will have to ‘live with’ the fact that the disease will probably never end. I argue that these extremes are in fact two sides of the same coin: both are intertwined with a linear, progressive conception of time which does not allow for other kinds of futures except those that fit on a linear timescale (Hutchings, 2008; Cazdyn, 2012; Baraitser, 2017; Davies, 2023). This makes living with a condition that does not develop progressively seem like an almost impossible task.

Despite the dominance of linearnarratives in medical andpolitical discourse, phenomenologists and queer philosophers of time and care show that concrete, embodied daily life experiences of chronic illness involve
meaningful ways of sharing and taking care of non-progressive temporalities (Freeman, 2011; Baraitser, 2017; Wool & Livingston 2017; Wright 2022; Davies, 2023). At the end of this talk, I suggest that taking time for these
embodied, relational practices might open up ways to help people to meaningfully live with a non-progressive condition.

References

Baraitser,L. (2017). Enduring time. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Cazdyn, Eric (2012). The already dead. The new time of politics, cultureand illness. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Davies, S. (2023). Waiting, Staying andEnduring in General Practice. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Freeman, E. (2011). Theorizing the chronic. InA. Thal (Ed.), Chewing the scenery. Edition Fink.

Hutchings, K. (2008). Timeand world politics: Thinking the present. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

NOS (9^th of March, 2024).Gezondheidsraad: Fybromyalgie geeft chronische pijn en verdient erkenning. NOS Nieuws. Gezondheidsraad:fibromyalgie geeft chronische pijn en verdient erkenning (nos.nl)

Weisz, George (2014). Chronic disease in the twentiethcentury: a history. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press.

Wool, Z. H. andLivingston, J. (2017). Collateral Afterworlds: An Introduction. Social Text 35(1), 1-15.

Wright,F. (2022). Making good of crisis: Temporalities of Care in UK Mental Health
Services. Medical Anthropology 41(3),315-328.