A few months ago, I got news from Australia that a friend of mine from the past was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. The sister (I was very close with the family) has kept me in the loop from time to time on how things are going. After a lot of chemo, my friend recently had a double mastectomy, and will hopefully be going home this weekend, but she is going to have a very long road ahead of her still.
My own mother died from breast cancer back in 2004, six months after I came to live in Finland. She got her diagnosis back in 1995 and was given a couple years to live, even with treatment. As a result, she ended up not having any conventional medical intervention, and instead found her own ways to deal with it. At one point, the cancer was undetectable, but once it came back, it came back hard.
Looking at the statistics from the US,
In 2021, cancer accounted for almost 18 percent of all deaths in the U.S. while heart disease, the number one killer in the United States, was responsible for 20 percent of deaths.
Now, my mother and my friend as far as I have known her, were pretty healthy most of their lives, eating pretty well, exercising sometimes, not overweight, non-smokers, irregular drinkers. Yet, this doesn't protect someone from illness, it just lowers the chances.
Like most things, there is no certainty of outcome, just probability outcome. Yet, we often seem to live in a culture where people believe that they will beat the odds. At the end of the day though, most do not, which means that if behavior increases the chances of a particular outcome, it is likely the outcome will come to pass, or some close version of it. If someone eats too much and exercises too little, they will put on unhealthy weight. If someone smokes, they will get related illnesses. If someone drinks too much, they will get related illnesses.
And of course, while we have predispositions for particular outcomes, we aren't only affected by our genetics. Our lifestyle and environment matter too. If we don't look after ourselves, we will degrade quickly. If we live in a place where there is high pollution, we will be affected.
And I think that one of the problems we face today is that there are just so many things that we might do that could affect us negatively, that we don't have much chance of firstly avoiding them, and secondly being able to attribute what the actual cause of an ailment is.
For instance, I have talked a lot about depression over the years and its increasing instances and I think that a lot of it is cultural, and environmental. When I was trying to find ways to treat my own stomach issues, I read a lot about the gut biome and how the stomach acts as a second brain, sending signals to the first brain. The bacteria in our stomachs affects not only our body, but also our thoughts and our feelings. If it is out of balance, we are going to have more than just a bad stomach, our entire experience can be disrupted.
While I speak about this often with people, no one really takes notice of how impactful this might be, or how it might be affected in the first place. Today, I came across a crappy article about a doctor talking about just this though, where he was saying that if you have depression, you should stop eating processed foods, because it disrupts the gut biome.
Crappy article or not, I suspect it is one of the leading causes of depression, because not only does the actual food disrupt the mental and emotional state, the affects of the food on other aspects of life like energy levels, fitness and weight get affected. Then there is the secondary affects like poor self-esteem from not feeling good about oneself, or the feelings of headaches from sugar or sweetener withdrawals to contend with. And these secondary mental and emotional states are further amplified by a primary state that is primed to encourage more self-loathing.
People seem to see a lot of health issues as people being a victim of the condition, but I wonder how many conditions are self-inflicted through behaviors that are known to cause problems. For instance, I know a lot of people who are overweight, but are they victims of their circumstances, or creators of it? Same with cancer sufferers, or those with depression. It is impossible perhaps to know definitively, but if we consider that we are products of our environment, and we set up our environments in ways that encourage ill health, perhaps we aren't as innocent as we might believe ourselves to be.
If a pack a day smoker got lung cancer, would you be surprised?
I am not saying that they deserve getting cancer, and there might be many reasons for them to have started smoking in the first place, but it is would hardly be surprising, would it? If someone ate a lot of junk food, what do you predict their condition to be, and how would you visualize them? Most likely, you would visualize their physical presence, but what about their mental and emotional states?
If we were to consider how someone came to have cancer, we might predict an unhealthy lifestyle, but we also know there are lots of instances where there is no clear attributing cause. And, because of this ambiguity as to why and how, we tend to take the approach that it is just part of life that a lot of people will get cancer. However, when it comes to ourselves, most of us who live a pretty healthy life seem to think that we aren't included in those statistics. It is a contradictory understanding.
With so much complication and complexity, it seems that the odds of a healthy, quality life are lengthening - the opposite direction from where we should want them to go. What we should be working toward is shortening the odds for wellbeing, so that we are more likely to have what we would consider a quality life. Unfortunately though, that is not the way our economy is set up, because wellbeing doesn't support the cheapest way supply goods and services, nor the types of goods and services.
While everyone is so keen on the benefits of generative AI, I wonder if they would be keen to prompt the AI to tell them how to live their life, what to eat, what to do, what to avoid and then, actually do it. I suspect that most people wouldn't be able to follow even the basic, commonsense advice. Even if it would lead them to a better quality of life.
I might ask one of the AIs.
What I do think though is that we have created a pretty sick world, where so much of what we do isn't in our best interest as individuals, or as a society as a whole. It is no wonder that "lifestyle disorders" are on the increase, because we live such dysfunctional lifestyles across pretty much every aspect of our lives that matter. Instead of changing though, we just keep doubling down, because it is more convenient.
The odds are inconvenient.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]