I had an absence this morning, just before breakfast. It wasn’t a particularly bad one and nothing to worry about, but it was one of my first in a while so it was more or less due. I was thinking recently, though, about how I always tried to ignore those things, even convincing myself that I was imagining them: on the whole I think playing them down was far healthier than letting them get to me. Yet that seems to me to contrast starkly with the prevailing attitude today: sorry to go on about this, but people currently seem very eager to play up whatever medical conditions they might have, even blatantly exaggerating them and using them as the basis for their online personas. As someone who was always taught to play down his disabilities and just get on with life, this growing mass hypochondria is starting to seem very strange. Surely it is wiser not to focus on whatever disabilities or impairments you might have, rather than using them as the basis of your entire personality in order to attract attention and pity.