A Cup of Tea

[Krill]

Every morning you wake up there is a none zero chance you won't go to bed at night, either.

Keeping working towards those life goals. And write a will.

[RefSteel]

Superdeath, it really really depends on the percentage!  If it were 100% or anything close, that would have a huge impact, and even a whole number would be horrible, but there is a percentage chance that I won't wake up after going to sleep every night; it's just really, really small - even smaller than the chance, as Krill points out, that I won't make it to bedtime on any given day when I wake up.  (I walk alongside and/or cross streets with cars on them nearly every day, too....)  Both chances are small enough that I'd much rather leave gifts (mostly but not exclusively metaphorical ones) for my future self than worry about the risk that my future self won't exist, but large enough that I try to make any given day worth living for its own sake.  The real challenge for most people, I think, is to figure out what constitutes a gift that will please their future selves and what really makes a day worth living.  If thought experiments like that one help you clear away some of the underbrush between you and the answer to either one, that's great!

[superdeath]

The experiment is to see others thoughts, vs my own higher risk of not waking up due to having had a seizure during my sleep. (i also apparently had a stroke before i was born) Even with meds, i have no clue if ill have another one or not and my last neurologist appointment made it fairly clear that my only two options are either meds for life which may or may not work, and brain surgery to take out the part of my brain that is causing the seizures, which my neurologist thinks is the same part that had a stroke. Neither is super appealing.

[thestick]

Well, with the caveat that I'm just a random fool on the internet, and we don't know each other in any way that matters in this situation... some rambling.

Don't want to go into details, but I'm stuck with meds for life after some stuff happened where I thought I wouldn't last the month. Still waiting for the day these meds fail me. But anyway, besides healthcare costs, laughing in the lurking face of death, and the realization that most cultural expectations simply don't apply to me, the main thing that's changed for me is forcing myself to take some enjoyment day to day, rather than pushing all of my rewards to an abstract 'later.' I definitely found that I was in a cycle of 'maximize time spent working. Do so by goofing off to amuse yourself between work,' rather than 'work to support time I actually enjoy.'

Of course, I'm lucky in that my meds seem to work and don't have many side effects. And I don't know what your situation is regarding work/lifestyle/enjoyment.

[Tarkeel]

Thought experiment. If you knew there was a % chance you wouldnt wake up after going to sleep each night. What would you do?

Let me introduce you to the concept of micromorts. QI actually had a pretty good episode about this:


This is just a complicated way of saying that everything in life has a risk.

Out of a thousand bananas, half a litre of wine, 1.4 cigarettes and two days in New York, all of them are as dangerous as each other. Stanford professor Ronald Howard invented a scale of dangerousness called the micromort in 1968. Something measuring one micromort means it has a one-in-a-million chance of killing you. For example, if a million outings on a hand-glider results in eight deaths then the chances of death by hand-glider is eight micromorts. The normal background risk of death in the UK is 41.6 micromorts. All of the listed risks above increase the risk of death by a single micromort, as well as living with someone who smokes and 40 tablespoons of peanut butter.

Humans are also extremely bad at evaluating risk, especially compounding risks. The best I example I have is how road-deaths in the US increased after 9/11:

We show that the public's response to terrorist threats can have unintended consequences that rival the attacks themselves in severity. Driving fatalities increased significantly after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, events that prompted many travellers to substitute road transportation for safer air transportation. After controlling for time trends, weather, road conditions and other factors, we find that travellers' response to 9/11 resulted in 327 driving deaths per month in late 2001. Moreover, while the effect of 9/11 weakened over time, as many as 2300 driving deaths may be attributable to the attacks.

[darrelljs]

Let me introduce you to the concept of micromorts

You can create many fun (and likely false) equivalencies, such as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for 36.7 years is as lethal as a gunshot wound to the head.  The wiki had some funny ones, e.g.:

• AstraZeneca vaccination against COVID-19 – 2.9 micromorts[31]
  
• COVID-19 infection at age 10 – 20 micromorts
  
• COVID-19 infection at age 25 – 100 micromorts
  
• COVID-19 infection at age 55 – 4,000 micromorts
  
• COVID-19 infection at age 65 – 14,000 micromorts
  
• COVID-19 infection at age 75 – 46,000 micromorts
  
• COVID-19 infection at age 85 – 150,000 micromorts
  

Darrell

[superdeath]

Well, with the caveat that I'm just a random fool on the internet, and we don't know each other in any way that matters in this situation... some rambling.

Don't want to go into details, but I'm stuck with meds for life after some stuff happened where I thought I wouldn't last the month. Still waiting for the day these meds fail me. But anyway, besides healthcare costs, laughing in the lurking face of death, and the realization that most cultural expectations simply don't apply to me, the main thing that's changed for me is forcing myself to take some enjoyment day to day, rather than pushing all of my rewards to an abstract 'later.' I definitely found that I was in a cycle of 'maximize time spent working. Do so by goofing off to amuse yourself between work,' rather than 'work to support time I actually enjoy.'

Of course, I'm lucky in that my meds seem to work and don't have many side effects. And I don't know what your situation is regarding work/lifestyle/enjoyment.

That does seem like an interesting way to look at things.

[superdeath]

THIS JUST IN:

Superdeaths depressing week just got worse!


As some of you may know from my past posts/rants, i occasionally have nighttime (only while asleep) seizures. Although i take meds to "cure" or prevent them they can still occur apparently. Being the good guy i am, i reported these to my neurologist, who of course logs them into the system. Now, because of an incident at work 2? summers ago where i passed out of heat exhaustion/stroke, my local hospital believed it to be a seizure despite my history being firmly NOT daytime/awake for them. (it was a very hot day that day, i had ate a big meal for lunch, and didnt drink much water while walking for work) So, the local D.O.T. suspended my license for 6months and required that i get a medical report from my neurologist. Every 6 months. My last report, i got to be able to drive again. All was good.


Fast forward some. Im still having seizures roughly the same frequency. I decided to of course, tell my neurologist that i had had one in august (i ended up having another one on new years eve that i called and told him about) well, i went in and had an appointment and had him fill out the medical report for this 6 months. Turned it in today. Get a call after awhile and get notified that they are suspending my license for another 6 months. I barely survived the last time with not being able to drive, as that dropped my hours at work from 40+ a week to less than 40 a month. I dont know what to do. i have 35 days or so till the suspension kicks in.

The only thing i can think of is if i can make it through this, i simply never report another seizure again.

[Amicalola]

I was thinking about this yesterday after I read it. FWIW, to give a serious answer, if the chance was notably high (I'm not sure what that is), two things that stick out to me are spending quality time with the people I care about (family, friends, partner, etc.), and attempting to make amends with people I'd wronged or upset in the past. Those would probably both be high on my priority list, although I've never been in that situation, and really it's impossible to speculate.

[RefSteel]

(Really late to get back to this, but...) Good luck, superdeath. That sounds like a really awful situation.

Also, Tarkeel, that's a cool, interesting way of looking at risk, but beware taking specific information from video commentaries on books 40+ years old. (Many of the numbers you list for most of those things are wildly wrong, partly because they're decades out of date). Also, humans are indeed bad at estimating risk, but way better than statisticians give us credit for (and way better than someone trying to assess risk based on statistics that necessarily make inapplicable assumptions). The world is much more complicated than it seems, and (to take an ~unrelated example) tendencies like "loss aversion" are evolved and effective survival strategies, not accidental mistakes.