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Noxulous
@Noxulous

This is a phenomenon ive noticed watching humans handle their health. They arent suicidally depressed but even when they have a chronic condition, they know its manageable, they simply dont, or do the bare minimum to keep their doctors happy.

Ive noticed it with those i know with heart problems, they complain that they wont live long because their heart is doing poorly but still eat many of the things that brought them to that place.

And before you say "walk a mile in their/my shoes" i will remind you; i am diabetic. Its type 2, and it was so bad when my doctors first discovered it that they werent sure if i was type 1 or type 2, thats bad, extremely bad. I knew how horrifying that was based on my cursory knowledge of chronoc conditions and cold turkeyed everything remotely carb or sugar laden, i ate extra lean, i switched to extra virgin olive oil as my sole cooking fat, i went on insulin, metformin, and atorvastatin for my extreme hyperlipidemia, i turned around my whole act.

The first 4 months i was dealing with tremors, hunger pangs so profound i couldnt move, full body pain, a headache that never, ever ceased in all that time. But i knew "its either this, or dying a horrific, painful death." And thats all i needed to consider, my A1C went down from 13 to 7 in 3 months, then 7 to 6 in 3 more. I didnt do the exercise they suggested only because of the nerve damage keeping my legs in excruciating pain. But i managed to keep my blood glucose in safe ranges for over 95% of the time.

When my diabetic counselor was finally able to see me i was already deep into my cold turkey, she looked at my numbers and then told me "we consider your blood glucose to be good if your average is above 70% which most of our patients struggle with." And i was shocked, it had been so easy for to just... Change, it even reduced the cost of my shopping trips. So when someone i know says "ill die early anyway" when i ask why they continue to eat unhealthily, i wonder if they hadnt grappled with the horror of dying of a health complication, or if their heart just... Isnt in it to choose life.

I dont understand this human proclivity to ignore imminently deadly and painful health threats, but then, i dont understand much about humans.


Lexie-Plays-Fast
@Lexie-Plays-Fast

In pure numerical terms, in terms solely of years alive in this world, most of us would benefit from all sorts of asceticism.

Abstaining from intoxicants due to risks, abstaining from rich foods due to health effects, abstaining from contact with other human beings due to risks of communicable diseases or other aspects of interpersonal interaction, abstaining from a soft bed due to risks of back trouble; the list, I can assure you, is endless.

But between a consummate ascetic that lives to be a hundred years old before quietly drifting off, and a bon vivant who lives to fifty and drops dead from a heart attack, who has lived the most?

Who has lived the best?

Obviously, that's something that each of us have to think about for ourselves, and to suppose that maximising for "time spent alive" is the universal goal to aspire to seems, to me, to be a mistake.


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in reply to @Noxulous's post:

two thoughts about this:

  1. it sounds like changing was actually really hard and painful but you managed to do it with grace, good job!

  2. my wife is a therapist and one thing she's learned about the human condition (at least in the US) is there's really a lot of despair out there. people don't always value their lives! they haven't worked out what they're living for and thus don't really have a good reason to value life. a surprising number of people will come up blank when asked "what's something you like to do"

As I've gotten older, the one thing I have learned is that the answer to any question that you can format with:

"I did X, why can't everybody do X?"

Is very rarely "They don't care." Or "They are lazy".

The answer is almost always "They are facing much greater obstacles than I was."

Just taking details from you post: You can afford medicine. You have a reliable way of getting your prescription filled every month. You have access to a doctor. You either have a job that you could still do with tremors and headache four 4 months, or you had external financial support. You have access to and can afford healthy foods. Not everyone has all those things.

This doesn't take away from your accomplishments! You did a very hard thing and are much better off for it! I'm proud of you! But you are making a huge assumption that other people "Don't care." I assure you that a lot of people are genuinely trying their best and still fail.

I cant afford medicine, but state insurance is really good where i live. I actually live in appalling poverty.

I see your point, but the group of people i refer to are the types to just equivocate and say "well everything kills you these days" and its depressingly nihilistic.

I’ll be honest here, I don’t get why you don’t get people’s aversion to doing things that suck in the name of health. Most of the time, things that benefit you psychologically, harm you physically, and vice versa. A prime example of this is salt. Generous amounts of salt is a strict requirement for 99% of foods to taste good, without it, food generally doesn’t taste like anything. And yet, salt is commonly derided by doctors as bad for health. Life, as it is now, under capitalism is subpar at best, to outright miserable at worst. Nobody is happy. As such everyone tends towards salt, alcohol and cigarettes, coffee, candy, and whatever else makes them happy in the moment with no regard for the future because what future even is there? They won’t have the energy or impetus stop until a health emergency lights a fire under their ass, as happened with you and sugar, or a family member of mine and salt. You said yourself that you experienced so much discomfort you could not move for months on end. Would anything short of the threat of impending death make you willing to put up with such a horrific experience? People don’t want life, at least not this one, but their instincts stop them from dying when the time comes, but only when they can feel real urgency. Otherwise health problems are simply too far off and too abstract to care about.

In short, a lot of this boils down to “are you going to be alive? Or are you going to live?”

Congratulations on bringing yourself into order though, that’s quite the achievement!

I guess i dont get it because i just.. Dont think like people do. It just seemed so clear... Its not even really about dying, its about the effects leading up to that death. Because you dont just die from these complications, you suffer horrifically, and i just... Dont want that. Idk... Im probably on a weird wavelength mentally.

But also they dont have to suck, i found tasty substitutes for just about everything, used holy basil, kept up with my meds, thats all i needed to do. I made concessions where i had to, and balanced them in other places. My diet is super tasty and also healthy, it just took a tiny bit of research and effort.