Discussion Forums > The Lounge
Welcome to America and Our Nation's Capital!
Nikkoru:
--- Quote from: AceHigh on March 17, 2012, 07:09:38 PM ---Yeah, that one just had to come. We don't want those extra years, it'the shitty years after all.
I will eat good food until the day I die. And when I do, I will die with a smile on my face!
Enjoy your salad, girls.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, because type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease is bitchin'.
Ixarku:
I'm with Ace on this one. I don't want to live to be 90. Hell, I don't think I want to live to be 70.
Nikkoru:
--- Quote from: Ixarku on March 18, 2012, 01:30:36 AM ---I'm with Ace on this one. I don't want to live to be 90. Hell, I don't think I want to live to be 70.
--- End quote ---
*le sigh*
If you want to kill yourself at 69, be my guest.
The fallacious assumption some people have is the presumption that "it will take years off your life" is some kind of abstraction. Like that scene in One Piece where Luffy gets injected with healing hormones so he can survive to save Ace at the cost of years off his lifespan. What it ignores is the very real consequences to your health in the near and not-so-distant future. Which may not kill you immediately, but could quite possibly lead to significantly decreasing the quality of your life from there on.
You might be fine suffering a fatal heart attack in your 50's, but chances are fairly high these days that it won't kill you - and then life gets tricky.
Furthermore, you have no idea what your attitudes towards life are going to be when you're 60, 70, 80, or 90. Hell I had no idea what it would be like to be in my twenties when I was 10. Perspectives change as we go through life, you have paradigm shifts of priorities. What you do know now is that whatever the future will bring, you can make simple healthy choices here and now which will make you all the more able to face it.
AceHigh:
And what you ignore is genetics. The way I eat, I should be fat. I am not. The way I strain my eyes I should be blind.
I am none of those, however my lungs are prone to complications if I get ill, since it runs on my father's side of the family. Yet I don't smoke or anything like that!
So much for health choices. Red meat is fucking good, I will not stop eat it and yet there is no guarantee that I will get any nasty conditions from it.
Winston Churchill was drinking and smoking every day, he lived until fucking 90. If your genes are so weak that you need to restrict yourself from all the good things in life, you should just die, so that humanity will purge some of it's weak genes.
Ixarku:
Again, I have to (mostly) agree with Ace. I understand all about decreasing quality of life over time as a result of bad behavior, but Ace's point about genetics is equally valid. I've seen plenty of examples of people on either side of the issue. For example, one of my co-workers survived several heart attacks while in his 50s, and completely changed his life as result -- ate better, managed stress better, etc. Then, years later, over the course of just a few weeks, he started getting persistent headaches. Turned out to be a congenital brain tumor that no one had ever known about before that had started growing for some reason. He survived the immediate surgery but died 2 weeks later. One of my best friends is strong, healthy, physically active, doesn't drink or smoke, and mostly eats well but has genetically high cholesterol despite medication and diet. I won't be surprised if I outlive him.
Conversely, my grandfather spent most of his life drinking, smoking, and living badly. He survived into his 60s, but there's no question that his lifestyle contributed to the heart disease that eventually killed him, and he wasn't healthy at all in the last decade of his life. Ditto for my grandmother, who had emphysema and eventually died due to a collapsed lung and the incompetence of some healthcare workers.
So my lifetime creed is and has been for many years, "Moderation in all things, including moderation." Nikkoru, I do have a good 10 to 15 years on you, and I can tell you that my core outlook on life hasn't changed much since I was a teenager. I've picked up a few new dreams over time and given up on some others, but my beliefs haven't changed a lot. I have a streak of nihilism that I rarely bring up; with what I know of life today, I wouldn't be that upset if a rock hit me in the head tomorrow and killed me. So now my goal in life is to work hard to the point where I don't have to work anymore, then just basically goof off and enjoy myself as long as I can. But in the meantime I'm also going to enjoy myself while I'm still young and able to do so. I'm not going to be completely self-destructive, but I'm not going to live a harshly puritan life, either.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version