Quote:
Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower
Maybe, maybe not. While RT gives a good analysis of her risk factors, I think the more compelling point is that you just never know. You. Never. Know. I just went to the memorial service of a biking friend who was in his 40s, in fantastic shape, had two young daughters, and succumbed to a blood cancer that killed him about six weeks after diagnosis. Making plans about your life based on what you perceive to be the statistical odds of you living to a certain age strikes me as the wrong way of looking at things. I thought I would live forever. I now know I will not. But RT is having a child because that is what she wants, and that is what she has wanted for a long time. And now it is becoming a reality and that is fantastic, and she is overjoyed and that is fantastic, and I hope they live to be a million years old and get to know their grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. And if for some reason they don’t, well, nobody can predict the future. But right now, here in the present, RT is having a child, and that is fantastic.
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I went to get the most uninteresting and unimportant of health care matters addressed two months ago and subsequently spent a week waiting to be tested for a very, very bad disease.
I'm fine. But the surprises are indeed just that. The disease that had to be ruled out was insanely rare, and what I'd had that mimicked it even more rare.
What will get us is usually not a surprise. But to your broader point, I agree. Data are useful, but they'll also sap your appetite for life. I hear all these pundits pondering why people aren't filling all these empty jobs. It's not unemployment benefits. It's not even lousy pay, though that is significant. I think it's because considering your own mortality as the world has for the past nearly two years, people have said "Fuck this... I'm not going to run on the hamster wheel as The Man and the The Systems, and the reams of data they tell me support living as they want me to live - obediently, helping fatten their wallets - say I must."
Fuck the Protestant Work Ethic. It's a lie sold to service the most pernicious bastardizations of Capitalism. The only currency of consequence is time and experience. One should of course live her life cognizant of the data, but to let it control one like some form of Grand Empirical Master? Fuck that. Life's too short.
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