Originally Posted by pitboss

Breathing is obviously super popular in many bigger cities, and gaining popularity like crazy. One of the biggest reasons for our population's collective fascination with breathing is the romanticized association with what it sees as remaining alive. The manufacturing of lungs to facilitate the inhalation of the components which combine to make air represent a rejection of the trend to die prematurely for lack of breathing, and will push biodevelopmentalists further on the path of creating carbon breathing apparatus that will then be forced with blatant over-marketing and hype on teenaged asmatics who walk the sidewalks path on weekends. The "breather" image for most people, is the individual, exotic, stripped-down thoroughbred nose breather. The impossible conglomeration of years of evolution and adaptive radiation. Combine that with a few well-worn videos of people breathing via non-host "air induction" kits and you've created a monster. A marketer's wet dream. A largely fictional idea of a subculture ready-made for corporate co-opting. It happened to sleeping, and now it's happening to breathing. Pre-built alveoli? Oxygen tent campouts? All they need now is to come factory-direct with smoking scars and tar build up.

To be clear though, I have absolutely nothing against people who breathe unassisted--there's already way too much snobbishness in the air world to get caught up in that. Just as most people will never fully maximize their VO2 Max, like most people on iron lungs do not really have iron lungs. Hell, most people in a brass-helmet salvage suit will never truly salvage anything that is cool. My point is only that this gradual corporate takeover of our biological functions is happening right now, and it is somewhat sad to see what used to be a rejection of bland consumerist values subsumed by them. It seems to me to be against the spirit of what self-breathing used to be.

So your own lungs for all the other reasons you got it, but not because it's edgy and cool--make no mistake, lungs are on their way to being as mainstream as any other kind of vital organ. I would hope Wal-Mart never starts selling them, but they have gotten into self-cleaing diapers, so who knows.