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Assisted Suicide
Jan. 8th, 2024 10:15 amThe kiskas continue to be ambivalent.
Meaning they do trust things like flop on their backs to expose their tummies and butt up against my legs mewing & nuzzling, but they scamper away if I reach down too quickly to pet them and, of course, I must admire their tummies at a distance.
Behold the splendiferous Mabel-Molly tummy!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cat with calico markings on her tummy before!
###
Meanwhile, I realized last night that most likely, I am going to have to make my peace with suicide.
Assisted suicide: I’m not about to off myself in a fit of angst.
And presumably, that suicide will be 10 or 15 years in the future.
Not soon. But also not sometime in a future so remote that I can’t wrap my mind around it.
###
I’m deep into general budgeting and goal-setting calculations one does at the beginning of each year. If all goes according to plan (which almost certainly all won’t) I will have X amount of money distributed over X number of weeks & months to do X amount of things beyond the quotidian everyday-above-ground stuff.
This presumes my clients continue to love me because I certainly can’t afford to live on social security & pensions alone.
When the time comes that my clients stop loving me, or I become too mentally addled to think lucidly and produce the kind of work my clients want, I will no longer afford to be able to stay alive.
That’s just a fact.
I don’t find it personally depressing.
I do find it fascinating as an observation on the culture generally.
In the bitter generational Boomer versus Millennial battle, Boomers are oft excoriated for monopolizing all that capital that Millennials need to buy houses & shit. But see, that complaint only applies to a subsection of Boomers. And for every Boomer who spent his/her productive years as an industrious ant, you have at least two other Boomers who spent them hopping around from glittering leaf to glittering leaf as a mad grasshopper.
I was one such Boomer grasshopper!
Which is kinda weird, given that I have such a good intellectual grasp of the significance of capital in the abstract.
###
The American healthcare industry has been gearing up for its deluge of broken-winged—-and broken-hipped and cardiovascularly challenged and dementia-addled—-Boomer geezers for at least two decades.
From an economist’s point of view, this is kind of a mistake because that deluge will only last 30 years at most before Boomers die off entirely, and then the American healthcare industry is gonna be left with all this useless excess capacity.
(Expect to see a lot more recommendations for useless “preventative” tests: They’re gonna have to monetize that excess capacity somehow.)
I don’t see any public or private sector gearing up for the coming deluge of indigent Boomers, though.
And there are going to be vast numbers of those.
Housing is the big thing, of course. Affordable rental housing doesn’t exist anywhere in the U.S. anymore. REITs are buying up huge swathes of apartment buildings & one-family homes and turning them into financial instruments.
The decennial U.S. census attempts to count the number of the homeless. And I am guessing that in 2030, the census will reveal that at least 50% of the homeless are old people. Boomers!
###
Of course, I have children who love me, who will want to help me.
But I hate the idea of making my kids sacrifice anything just because I was too much of an idiot to plan prudently.
TaxBwana Linda tells me S. Korea is seeing a suicide epidemic among its senior citizens. (She spent three years in S. Korea as part of the U.S. diplomatic corps and keeps up with their news.) This is because, traditionally, younger generations cared for their parents and elders. But this generation, influenced by the West, is telling parents & elders, Take care of yourselves! We want to spend our money on us!
###
I’m not and never have been particularly attached to the idea of being alive. My consciousness is deeply rooted in this body—but it seems to me that there’s never been a time in my life when I wouldn’t have been perfectly content for that consciousness to soar through space like a balloon, to take off, to be somewhere else. Assuming that disentanglement of psyche from soma could be accomplished without too much physical pain.
Of course, once it’s loose, that consciousness, that psyche, will no longer be the me me. But it still will be me.
No, the big deal about suicide for me is actually that I believe it’s kinda the equivalent of dropping out of the karmic classroom without finishing the current class.
You’ll get an incomplete in the class!
You'll have to take it over.
I don’t think I want to repeat the life lessons I was supposed to learn this time around in any future incarnation.
So, I must ponder the full karmic implications of assisted suicide.
Assuming my health holds up or World War III doesn’t finish us all off—sketchy assumptions both.
###
What else happened yesterday?
I Remunerated. I studied up on the tax code.
I’m gonna take the IRS certification exam on Thursday.
The snow knocked off around 3. I thought about tromping. I decided against it.
But I must tromp today. Just as soon as the black ice melts.
Meaning they do trust things like flop on their backs to expose their tummies and butt up against my legs mewing & nuzzling, but they scamper away if I reach down too quickly to pet them and, of course, I must admire their tummies at a distance.
Behold the splendiferous Mabel-Molly tummy!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cat with calico markings on her tummy before!
###
Meanwhile, I realized last night that most likely, I am going to have to make my peace with suicide.
Assisted suicide: I’m not about to off myself in a fit of angst.
And presumably, that suicide will be 10 or 15 years in the future.
Not soon. But also not sometime in a future so remote that I can’t wrap my mind around it.
###
I’m deep into general budgeting and goal-setting calculations one does at the beginning of each year. If all goes according to plan (which almost certainly all won’t) I will have X amount of money distributed over X number of weeks & months to do X amount of things beyond the quotidian everyday-above-ground stuff.
This presumes my clients continue to love me because I certainly can’t afford to live on social security & pensions alone.
When the time comes that my clients stop loving me, or I become too mentally addled to think lucidly and produce the kind of work my clients want, I will no longer afford to be able to stay alive.
That’s just a fact.
I don’t find it personally depressing.
I do find it fascinating as an observation on the culture generally.
In the bitter generational Boomer versus Millennial battle, Boomers are oft excoriated for monopolizing all that capital that Millennials need to buy houses & shit. But see, that complaint only applies to a subsection of Boomers. And for every Boomer who spent his/her productive years as an industrious ant, you have at least two other Boomers who spent them hopping around from glittering leaf to glittering leaf as a mad grasshopper.
I was one such Boomer grasshopper!
Which is kinda weird, given that I have such a good intellectual grasp of the significance of capital in the abstract.
###
The American healthcare industry has been gearing up for its deluge of broken-winged—-and broken-hipped and cardiovascularly challenged and dementia-addled—-Boomer geezers for at least two decades.
From an economist’s point of view, this is kind of a mistake because that deluge will only last 30 years at most before Boomers die off entirely, and then the American healthcare industry is gonna be left with all this useless excess capacity.
(Expect to see a lot more recommendations for useless “preventative” tests: They’re gonna have to monetize that excess capacity somehow.)
I don’t see any public or private sector gearing up for the coming deluge of indigent Boomers, though.
And there are going to be vast numbers of those.
Housing is the big thing, of course. Affordable rental housing doesn’t exist anywhere in the U.S. anymore. REITs are buying up huge swathes of apartment buildings & one-family homes and turning them into financial instruments.
The decennial U.S. census attempts to count the number of the homeless. And I am guessing that in 2030, the census will reveal that at least 50% of the homeless are old people. Boomers!
###
Of course, I have children who love me, who will want to help me.
But I hate the idea of making my kids sacrifice anything just because I was too much of an idiot to plan prudently.
TaxBwana Linda tells me S. Korea is seeing a suicide epidemic among its senior citizens. (She spent three years in S. Korea as part of the U.S. diplomatic corps and keeps up with their news.) This is because, traditionally, younger generations cared for their parents and elders. But this generation, influenced by the West, is telling parents & elders, Take care of yourselves! We want to spend our money on us!
###
I’m not and never have been particularly attached to the idea of being alive. My consciousness is deeply rooted in this body—but it seems to me that there’s never been a time in my life when I wouldn’t have been perfectly content for that consciousness to soar through space like a balloon, to take off, to be somewhere else. Assuming that disentanglement of psyche from soma could be accomplished without too much physical pain.
Of course, once it’s loose, that consciousness, that psyche, will no longer be the me me. But it still will be me.
No, the big deal about suicide for me is actually that I believe it’s kinda the equivalent of dropping out of the karmic classroom without finishing the current class.
You’ll get an incomplete in the class!
You'll have to take it over.
I don’t think I want to repeat the life lessons I was supposed to learn this time around in any future incarnation.
So, I must ponder the full karmic implications of assisted suicide.
Assuming my health holds up or World War III doesn’t finish us all off—sketchy assumptions both.
###
What else happened yesterday?
I Remunerated. I studied up on the tax code.
I’m gonna take the IRS certification exam on Thursday.
The snow knocked off around 3. I thought about tromping. I decided against it.
But I must tromp today. Just as soon as the black ice melts.
