How Do You Want To Die?
Sunday, July 19th, 2009Is living longer always better, or would you rather accept a shorter life span in exchange for living and dying how you want to?
I started thinking about this in a discussion in Steve Pavlina’s forum about raw foods. Steve said “If you’re an American, you have an 80-90% chance of dying from heart disease or cancer.” I took it that people who eat only raw foods have a much lower risk of succumbing to those diseases.
But is that necessarily a good thing? Your total probability of dying from all causes combined is 100%. That doesn’t change. So if you reduce the probability of dying from heart disease or cancer, you must increase the probability of dying in some other way, because it all has to add up to 100%.
If you knew that you were going to die from a heart attack at 65, maybe you’d change your diet to prevent that. But maybe then you’d live long enough to be skeletonized by piranhas at 66. Is that so much better? Suddenly the heart attack is looking pretty good.
Once you take heart disease and cancer off the table, so many unlikely causes of death become more realistic. Will you fall into a giant vat of sulfuric acid? Get strung up by an angry mob and burned at the stake? Get chopped up by an axe murderer who takes a little too much pride in his work?
The point of all this is that everyone talks about wanting to live longer, and many people make big sacrifices to do so. But dying from heart disease or cancer at a normal age doesn’t seem so bad. Dying a bit older in a horrible accident is worse. And worst of all is living too far past your prime, watching your body and mind slowly deteriorate as you run out of money, friends, and dignity.
As Benjamin Franklin said, “Wish not so much to live long as to live well.”






