I choose a fucking big television…
Whoops. Sorry. It really, really, depends. I mean, if I have no further emotional connection, am I still going to feel responsible? Guilty? Angry?
Who am I kidding? Being relieved of emotional connection is nowhere near the relief from responsibility. Choose death.
I’d still be worried I’d be wrapping naked people up in saran wrap before cutting them into small pieces and tossing them in the ocean.
I’ll take the cure. Best case, I’m in the lucky ten percent who can reconnect with people; still unfortunate, but I’d get over it. If not, even if I can’t form emotional bonds, life may not completely suck. I won’t know until I try it, and, worst-case scenario, I off myself. Given that I can always keep death in reserve, I see no reason to jump for it.
A question: are we talking about a life without caring about emotional connections, or a life without emotional connections but still very much wanting them?
The former would be a life much diminished but still very livable. The latter would be torture, but still, I think, livable. There would still be many joys available to me and ways I could make a contribution to the world.
BTW, my reaction to the thread title, before reading the OP, was “Isn’t that the choice that people going into hiding for something like the witness protection program make?”
No longer loving my children may cause them intolerable pain. But then again, so may my death. So what would cause my boys the most pain, dying because I love them very much or living and I no longer love them? Someone still needs to care for them, but I have relatives who I know would take great care of them. So given anyone can provide them with their physical needs, the only special thing I can give them is their mother’s love. If I cannot give them that, then perhaps I’m really no good to them at all.
Even so, I think I would choose the cure, and write myself notes about my feelings for my boys and refer to them often later on. I would fake it. Maybe I could talk myself in having it both ways.
The original version of my comment above also had a comment like this. Maybe we can get together for TV night and mock Dexter for being too soppy.
I’d just buy a gun and shoot myself before the pain starts. Agonizing death vs. a life not worth living is no choice. A quick painless death with my loved ones still in my heart is best.
Pop me off thanks.
Death. The lack of emotional connections to my loved ones means that I would have died already–the stuff that makes me me is in my emotional connection to the world and its inhabitants–but without the closure of a death that could just be mourned.
It’s really a similar question to “Death or life in a coma or PVS?” Death isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s not even close.
Does this include the emotional connection I feel to God?
Why would anyone jump straight to death? Particularly with the “bone-crushing pain” element of the whole thing.
I’m with runcible spoon, give me the cure and I’ll hope to beat the odds. My loved ones would be pretty pissed off if I didn’t even try to stay with them.
that sums it up pretty well for me.
Well, the OP does mention a chemically-induced coma to avoid the bone-crunching pain.
I’d take the cure. Even with a complete severing of my emotions, I can still contribute to family and society – greater good, and all that. While I’d be incapable of experiencing the joys of emotional connection – and I’d know this on an intellectual level – it wouldn’t matter, as I’d be incapable of feeling despair over it. Plus, there’s always the possibility down the line that my new condition could be treated, too.
I don’t think I’d go all Dexter on the world, as my moral and ethical conclusions are reached intellectually, rather than emotionally.
I want to live!
But if you beat the odds, you are still only capable of “superficial attachments.” No thank you.
Give me the cure. There’s an obvious weasel, alas. Your friends and family know that you would love them if you were able to, and as long as they remember that, everything’s fine.
For me, the question becomes, if I go into it knowing about the effects, how well do I think I can fake it?
It might be worth a try.
If I take the example of my grandmother who had Alzheimer, I doubt this is true. We knew she would love us if she could, but it was still devastating.
If I would not care about whether or not I’d have emotional connections, I’d choose it without a second thought. However, since I’m personally not opposed to euthanasia in any form, and would consider this new life pointless, I’d choose death. Why bother being alive in a fashion that I wouldn’t even be able to enjoy? Once I cease to enjoy life, I have no great compunction to keep it going
I take the cure of course. It doesn’t sound so bad, pretty much just your basic emotional “reset” button, for better or for worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good emotional purge every 20 years or so would be pretty healthy and refreshing, cerebral measles or no.
Edit: Oh, I see, I missed the part about probably not being able to form future connections. Oh well, c’est la vie. Still kind of a mixed bag, emotional connections kinda suck a lot of the time anyway. Might be liberating. Certainly not worth commiting suicide over.