Tags

, ,

This has been a problem all my life: how do I convince my friends not to take serious chances with their life and health? The people I am talking about are not the vast numbers of humanity over whom I have no control, or even remote responsibility, they are people I care for personally; these are people I share conversations with, and sometimes we eat meals together. How do I convince people not to live directly on an earthquake fault, but a couple of miles to the side? How to suggest to someone not to live in a high crime area, when a short distance away it would be much safer? How to even suggest that using a motorcycle as daily transportation is likely to get them badly injured or killed? How to mention to someone that is more than a hundred pounds beyond obesity that it isn’t a good idea? Or even mention to a person who sneaks out to an alley to have a cigarette that every minute they smoke takes a minute off of their life expectancy, and equals a couple weeks’ vacation every year? How about not hiking alone into the wilderness without even a cell phone, or mountain biking alone, or blah blah blah, and I won’t get into base jumping, or watching TV, etc.? The list is near infinite so why am I carping?

I carp because I want my friends to live long and healthy lives, and I want to communicate to them the function of their brain and of their intelligence is to promote a long and healthy life. What apparently isn’t obvious is that silly little risks, those one in a thousand chances, catch up with you if you do them a thousand times.