Replies

A dear relative of mine is a "germie". She won't eat off restaurant silverware, brings her own sheets and pillows when staying anywhere but at home, is constantly washing her hands, and is obsessed with how filthy and septic the world is.

She gets sick more than anyone I know.

I apprecaite hygiene as much as anybody else (and more so than many), but there's a line between hygiene and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Yes, public bathrooms are filthy, yes my toothbrush is a teeming bacerial hive, yes I'm eating a mouthful of pubic hair and skin flakes every time I have a meal in a restaurant. -- and so what? I almost never get sick, and when I do its invariably because of stress, the kind of stress that comes from working too hard, exercising too little, or worrying about how many viruses and pubic hairs I ate today.

I'm a big fan of cleanlness, but this kind of paranoia about a world teeming with germs will kill you, or drive you crazy, or both. I observe the rules of good hygiene, but I'll be darned if I'm going to go around in a surgical mask spraying doorknobs with DDT for fear of having my precious bodily fluids contaminated. If there's some genetic residue soaked into the sheets in a hotel room in which I'm staying, it won't kill me. If the elevator button I just pushed has a thin film of feces from the too-busy-to-wash executive who used the elevator before me, somehow I'll survive. If the food I eat at the rstaurant is contaminated with semen and Ebola, I trust that my mighty immune system will rise to the task. God will preserve me. May His will be done. Now let's eat.

A life lived in fear isn't life at all. I know public santitation is terribly bad, but I refuse to worry myself about it. If I die from hep as a result, then I die -- but I'd rather die that way than spend a lifetime terrified of the germs, the Germs, THE GERMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A healthy interest in cleanliness is a good thing. An obsession with cleanliness is itself a pathological state. Let's not play that game.

I had to spray myself with sanitizer after reading that!

A healthy interest in cleanliness is a good thing. An obsession with cleanliness is itself a pathological state.

You're absolutely right. Furthermore, an obsession with anything is itself a pathological state. Everything in life is on a continuum. :-)

Valid opinion, it makes me laugh because I'm careful too (but not OCD-level yet). But we have to see how this new situation develops. Maybe next year we'll all be carrying alcohol gel everywhere with no second thought.

When my friends from Germany came to the U.S. for a tour, they were shocked at everyone's preoccupation with germs. We told them that they should also be worried because they were going to go back to a country called Germ-many. ;-)