Agreed. Although I find that attitude is one that folks grow into as they get older and have more contact with even older folks aging off this planet in ways both good and bad. So him being in the “bust ass as hard as possible as long as possible to stay as healthy as possible” seems pretty darn sensible from his POV. And mostly is from any/everybody’s POV.
IIRC our OP is 20-something. And his attitude is par for the course for his age. He’s also seen more than his fair share of grossly non-rational behavior from older and now-dead folks. So his attitude of “Bust ass as hard as possible as long as possible to stay as healthy as possible as long as possible” makes a lot of sense from his POV. As it does from most peoples’ POV for most of their lives.
My understanding is that treatment of hypertension delays a vascular event by about 2-3 years and adds less than a year to life expectancy. So if your friend lost decades or more of life expectancy then there were other factors at play.
Really? Would you really have done that? Would you have done that to your own elderly mother?
It’s a nice idea that you would rather stuff a beer bong down your mother’s or mother-in-law’s throat than have her starve herself to death but…really?
Provided they’re rational I agree completely that anyone should be free to continue or to terminate their life however and whenever they want.
The OP provides some examples of people who are not rational, while other posters have provided examples of people who were seriously under-informed and under cared-for by the system. Folks in either of those situations will usually make bad decisions based on simple garbage-in-garbage-out.
ISTM we owe those folks a chance to be free of the garbage and then let them make their decision on an informed and rational basis. If they choose to walk away from treatment or to shoot themselves on the spot I’m happy to defend and assist them in so doing.
What is irrational about choosing not to force-feed yourself or stab yourself with an insulin needle daily?
We are all going to die. Some people decide they’ve had enough at some point and let nature take its course, others hasten things along by their own hand. What is rational about clinging to life at any cost? Some people may think a daily needle stick or a tube down your throat is a small thing for someone to endure in order to continue being alive, but why assume they haven’t reasonably weighed the pros and cons of living their own lives and made the right choice for themselves?
Personally, I think hanging around while you waste away in agony from a terminal disease when a quick death is a bullet away is irrational, but to each their own.
I see a difference between those two scenarios. Being force fed for the rest of your life would have a major negative effect in your ability to enjoy life while injecting insulin is much more minor. I can understand the person making the decision to wither away rather than being force fed, but the diabetic doesn’t seem to be making the same decision. They are just avoiding the needle because they don’t like needles, not that they think it’s their time to die. By avoiding the shot, they are setting themselves for many more hardships much worse than a needle shot. So it’s either deal with a needle a few times a day or deal with amputation, organ failure, and death.
The scenario you describe isn’t the same as refusing to take insulin. You seem to be talking about cancer here–where the “natural” way of refusing all treatment might not be very comfortable at all. It’s OK to refuse a radical treatment that doesn’t really offer a chance for longterm survival. But there’s a role for palliative care & hospice.
It isn’t for us to decide what is minor for someone else. If someone is phobic about needles, they don’t just “not like” them, and having to self-inject is not some minor inconvenience like brushing your teeth.
I’d probably choose death over either scenario, and I don’t even mind needles.
It’s easier to cope with the present than to plan for the future. Look at animals, did you ever wonder why the huge elephants with baby calves, don’t just run over and stomp the lions to death? They are content to cope with the problem at present, instead of stomping the lions and removing the future problem
Sadly, a recent study showed that those who lie to themselves are happier than those who don’t. This was the topic of a recent RadioLab broadcast on NPR. The better people were at lying to themselves, the happier they were. And those who lied to themselves the least had higher incidence of depression. So we choose happiness over knowledge.
