How Much of Your Life Is It Worth?
My continued and growing uneasiness with football continued this week with the confirmation that Junior Seau had CTE – the brain disorder that numerous football players have been diagnosed with from repeated head injury – and a story in the Miami newspapers about the injuries that Jason Taylor endured during his football career. The latter article ended with Taylor saying words to the effect of, “Knowing what I know now, I would do it all again.”
As Pattie and I were talking about it, she mentioned hearing someone say that if you offered a baseball pitcher a pill that would ensure he won 20 games a year for a decade but take 5 years off his life, he’d swallow the pill before you finished the sentence.
I guess it’s not really too surprising, though. We all make choices that are likely to reduce the sheer amount of time that we live in exchange for enjoying the time that we are alive more. I joked to Pattie, “Yeah, well if you put a cheesesteak in front of me and doctors tell me it’ll take a day off of my life, I’ll probably eat it and all I get out of that is enjoying the cheesesteak.”
Maybe we don’t think about it, but that’s the tradeoff we’re making. I’d like to live forever (with my family and friends) AND get to eat cheesesteaks, but apparently that wasn’t in the blueprints.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.