Life, or something like it

Y do we live like this?

Why do we spend the best years of our lives dwelling in stressful tasks, immersed in work, doing stuff that guide us down the path of precocious aging?

Where does that lead us? Does it mean that if I work hard until I’m 50, I can expect to live until I’m 70-80 years old? Great, I’ll have enough time to develop several types of cancer, as well as some autoimmune diseases.

Wow, nowadays we have 20 or 30 more years of life expectancy, when compared to the 19th century. Amazing! Instead of dying after having a stroke, I can spend some decades stuck to a wheel-chair, eating through a straw! Isn't this something to live for!? Ironically, I’m likely to have that same stroke when I finally retire, thereby ruining the period of my life that I could dedicate all to myself.

Shouldn’t we spend the best years of our lives trying to, I don’t know, live the best years of our lives? Not that we shouldn’t work and/or study, and just lay back and enjoy the sunny weather. But why rush things? Why are of obsessed with having everything finished yesterday? If we can expect to live until we’re 65, do we need to accomplish all that is futile before we’re 30?

Evolutionary biologists profusely use the term fitness to, in leigh terms, define the ability of an organism to produce offspring, in a given environment. If the fitness is high, then that organism will almost certainly produce offspring and transmit its genetic information to the following generation. Simple, right? Then why do people in the so-called “developed countries” have fewer children? Or why do they have children at an older age, with an increased risk for their progeny of having genetic anomalies?

An increased life expectancy doesn’t imply an increase of our fitness. In most cases it doesn’t even stand for better quality of life. It’s just delaying the inevitable. Because we keep forgetting that we are not special, nor are we divine. We are just animals and, like all other animals, we die.

Our accomplishments may bring us remembrance, but we can only live through our children.

Sample size dilemma

Y keep rowing in one direction, if everyone else keeps going the opposite way?

It makes me wonder who’s wrong. Is it the majority, or maybe just me? To be truthful, recent history has shown me that a big majority can be completely mistaken. But can this be a recurrent event, or a mere fluke of chance?

I have to admit it, chance is a bitch… You can flip a coin 10 times, and even though the probability of getting heads is the same as getting tails, it’s not unlikely to get 8 or 9 heads, maybe even 10. That’s why you need big samples (>1000, if you aim low), because the values obtained when you sample lots and lots of times tend to match more accurately those that theory predicts.

Does this mean, assuming that the probability of a person being right is the same of it being wrong, that in a small group of people it is likely that the majority is wrong more often? Perhaps. But how can one say what’s wrong and what’s right? In some cases, only time will tell. In others, however, right and wrong are defined a priori. One already knows what must and mustn’t be done, which goals one should have and what to aim for. And if, after knowing all of this, one still goes with the flow, maybe it’s because that person agrees with what was defined.

Then why do some people enter the current but then start going upstream just like salmons in their way to spawn? News flash: salmons spawn, and then they die.