Thinking Beyond Science

Change captures our attention because it’s surprising and exciting. But the behaviors that never change are history’s most powerful lessons, because they preview what to expect in the future. Your future. Everyone’s future. No matter who you are, where you’re from, how old you are, or how much money you make, there are timeless lessons from human behavior that are some of the most important things you can ever learn.

Philosophers have spent centuries discussing the idea that there are an infinite number of ways your life could play out, and you just happen to be living in this specific version. It’s a wild thing to contemplate, and it leads to the question: What would be true in every imaginable version of your life, not just this one?

Those universal truths are obviously the most important things to focus on, because they don’t rely on chance, luck, or accident.

Every event creates its own offspring, which impact the world in their own special ways. It makes prediction exceedingly hard. The absurdity of past connections should humble your confidence in predicting future ones. The other thing to keep in mind is to have a wider imagination.

No matter what the world looks like today, and what seems obvious today, everything can change tomorrow because of some tiny accident no one’s thinking about. Events, like money, compound. And the central feature of compounding is that it’s never intuitive how big something can grow from a small beginning.

Perhaps the most familiar these days is pregnancy and birth. We know the nine-month pattern of pregnancy: the changing symptoms as morning sickness gives way to heartburn; the early quickening and later slowing of the baby’s movements as the swollen belly constricts activity towards term; the pattern and stages of a normal birth. Watching dying is like watching birth: in both, there are recognisable stages in a progression of changes towards the anticipated outcome. Mainly, both processes can proceed safely without intervention, as any wise midwife knows. In fact, normal birth is probably more uncomfortable than normal dying, yet people have come to associate the idea of dying with pain and indignity that are rarely the case.

Sometimes, things that are right in front of our noses are not truly noticed until someone else calls them to our attention. Sometimes, courage is about more than choosing a brave course of action. Rather than performing brave deeds, courage may involve living bravely, even as life ebbs. Or it may involve embarking on a conversation that feels very uncomfortable, and yet enables someone to feel accompanied in their darkness, like a good deed in a naughty world.

The pattern of decline towards death varies in its trajectory, yet for an individual it follows a relatively even flow, and energy declines initially only year to year, later month to month, and eventually week by week. Towards the very end of life energy levels are less day by day, and this is usually a signal that time is very short. Time to gather. Time to say any important things not yet said. But sometimes there is an unexpected last rise before the final fall, a kind of swansong. Often this is unexplained, but occasionally there is a clear cause, and sometimes the energy rush is a mixed blessing.

Watching people approaching an anticipated death offers families and friends a comfort as they all arrange their priorities and live each day as it arrives. Sometimes, though, death arrives unannounced and unanticipated. In some circumstances this is seen by the survivors as a blessing, although adjustment to sudden death is often harder than a bereavement when there has been a chance to say goodbye.

Perhaps the cruelest circumstance, though, is when a sick person has been getting better and seems to be ‘out of danger, only to be snatched by death in a completely unforeseen manner. When this happens, a shocking adjustment has to be made by loved ones – and by professionals too.

All the Lonely Ballroomers were participating in clinical trials. Data were (and still are) gathered from centers all over Europe, and it is this constant, trans-European collaborative effort to find the highest possible cure rate that has made it possible to expect cure in more than 95 per cent of teratoma patients; even people with cancer as advanced as Alex’s have a cure rate of over 80 per cent. Their chemotherapy is highly toxic, not only to their cancer cells, but also to their bone marrow, kidneys and other organs.

This was a hard story to tell, and probably shocking to read. While most dying is manageable and gentle when it approaches in an anticipated way, the truth is that sudden and unexpected deaths do happen, and not all of them are ‘tidy. Although loss of consciousness during a sudden death usually protects the dying person from full awareness of the situation, those around them retain memories that may be difficult to bear.

Bereaved people, even those who have witnessed the apparently peaceful death of a loved one, often need to tell their story repeatedly, and that is an important part of transferring the experience they endured into a memory, instead of reliving it like a parallel reality every time they think about it.

And those of us who look after very sick people sometimes need to debrief too. It keeps us well, and able to go back to the workplace to be wounded in the line of duty.

Source : Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125116554-same-as-ever