It's October, the month of Halloween, and as such I decided to select a topic that lends itself handily to the macabre: death. Your death, to be exact. I have to admit that I found the inspiration for this topic on one of those lame MySpace surveys, but I have improved it somewhat. See, what I want to know is, if you could learn in advance the exact time, date and manner of your death - and know for a fact that it was accurate - would you want to know?
If you learned that you'd die in your sleep at the age of 103, would that cause you to change the way in which you lead your life? Would you take more risks? Or would you be more cautious? (After all, you wouldn't want a rash decision to make the intervening 60+ years hellish.)
If you learned that you would die fairly soon, would you try to change things? Even though you knew for a fact that Your Time was unalterable? Or would you simply try to make the best of the time you had left? And if so, how?
PS - No Physical Harm :-)
If you learned that you'd die in your sleep at the age of 103, would that cause you to change the way in which you lead your life? Would you take more risks? Or would you be more cautious? (After all, you wouldn't want a rash decision to make the intervening 60+ years hellish.)
If you learned that you would die fairly soon, would you try to change things? Even though you knew for a fact that Your Time was unalterable? Or would you simply try to make the best of the time you had left? And if so, how?
PS - No Physical Harm :-)
5 comments:
It seems that I currently have a death wish as I go to sleep every night in a room with closed doors, windows, and a running fan very close to my face. My students think that I am lying to them and get quite agitated over this. Misinformation really sucks, as do non-existent CSI investigators. At least I know one country in the world were it is quite easy to get away with murder and you can pin it on the fan thereby saving the costly need of a trial and incarceration.
Oh, fan death. I would never have made it out of childhood had fan death been a legitimate phenomenon. Just don't try telling that to most Koreans. (I do know one Korean man who tried sleeping in a closed room with a fan running when he was a kid, just to see what would happen. Obviously, he's still here and perfectly healthy. Of course, then there's this warning, which came with a fan Gwen and I purchased back in August...)
P.S. Truthfully, if I knew I would die on a certain date and time (for sure), it would involve me getting closer to loved ones, but also going off on others (some ex-supervisors and bosses), either mentally (via telling them exactly the type of lowlifes that they really are) or physically (on a certain child rapist who was let off due to insufficient laws in the past). Too much of the Old Testament was beat into me as a child.
I've always thought that it would be horrible to know the exact date when I was going to die. An important part of living is having hope. Knowing when you are going to die takes that away. Even if I had a terminal illness I wouldn't want to be told that I only had a year or so left.
However, if I was told, the only plus I see in it is John-from-Daejeon’s idea of taking revenge on those (1000s on last count) who have wronged me. That final year could be the sweetest of my life. How much fun would it be to take a bunch of jerks and wrongdoers with me :)
The difficulty with a prophecy like this one is that even if such a computation were possible, it would only be 100% predictive in a universe in which it hadn't been uttered. If you tell someone (in a convincingly portentious style) that s/he is going to die in five days, it's anybody's guess whether you have just increased or decreased that particular future's relative probability of occuring.
I think try to change things if I somehow came by the knowledge (however relatively uncertain) that I was going to die soon (unless, say, I found out somehow that unique circumstances of my death would generate more value than my continued life). I think I'd have a fighting chance, although my efforts might blow up in my face and kill me even sooner than expected.
Human agency has always been a bit of a crap shoot anyway.
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