Perdicis Notes

2023-11-25 - On disability and being injured away from home

publish Written 2023-11-25. Part of Musings on philosophy.

I got a herniated disc yesterday morning on my birthday. While deadlifting in a hotel gym, pop! standing hurts a LOT; time to lie down for a quick minute / hour / rest of this week.

How symbolic it is to Google “back pain” upon entering my late 20s!1. Some cosmic force must have been waiting to deliver that punchline. I don’t find it very funny from down here though.

In the morning, I walk on 0 legs. In the afternoon, also 0. In the evening, still 0. Are there any in-network doctors in my area?

Anyways, having been floor-ridden for 24+ hours, I reflect on several things…

On disability and gratefulness

My biggest takeaway from yesterday is that the sensation of loss is a whole lot more vivid than the sensation of having or even gaining [the thing you lost].

Cases in point:

  1. I vividly experience being unable to walk. But I don’t vividly experienced walking.

Or:

  1. I vividly experience the cancellation of this week’s plans. As someone who doesn’t live in NYC, I’d set up a dozen+ things to do, between clubs, shopping, art shows, office coffees, … and I vividly experience the sensation of those plans ripped away. But making those plans didn’t trigger a equally vivid experience.

This too is a tricky example since plans aren’t themselves enjoyable; the activity they represent is enjoyable. I’m mourning the loss of the planned activity, not the planning of activities. So, one last example:

  1. I vividly experience not eating a second slice of cake, knowing I can’t walk off the calories.

Floor cake

This example seems to work IMO? A second slice of cake isn’t essential to anyone’s well-being. But at the same time: it’s cake; you’d take a second slice if you could justify it. And now I can’t. Withholding a second helping of cake knowing I’d put on weight feels like a vivid quality of life decrease.

To state that same point more strongly: I experience the lack of a second slice of cake more vividly than I felt the presence of the second slice (in the past).

So, if we agree that losing a thing, like a slice of cake, is more vivid than continuing to have said thing, what else can we conclude?

  • We take good things for granted ⇒ the loss of a good thing is a vivid experience (⇒ we should exercise gratefulness as much as possible for good things)
    • We take bad things for granted ⇒ the loss of a bad thing is a vivid experience?
  • The sensation of loss of good things is essential?
  • The degree of vivid loss is proportional to the goodness of a thing. But we never experience the goodness except through brief moments of its loss -?
    • Perhaps this holds vice versa too.
    • Perhaps loss of, or at least vivid recollection of the time before a good thing, is essential to experiencing the worth of a thing.

Not sure how to end this one. That insight triggers a few more thoughts:

  • How glad I am to be able to shower myself. I almost can’t. My shower time effectively doubled. But I can. And wow am I glad I don’t need someone to help.

Loss as a magnifying glass to view good things

A rocky conclusion I might reach from that last section is:

  1. The sensation of loss is far more hurtful than other sensations of tragedy.
  2. The sensation of loss is key to understanding happiness.

… emboldening these points even further (and perhaps making them absurd in the process):

  1. Loss is among life’s most upsetting experiences.
  2. Loss is the truest way to assess the goodness of something.

It further follows then that:

  1. Being given the taste of a good thing, then losing it, is an extremely upsetting experience.

This lands pretty close to the popular Caltech paper, Towards a Theory of Revolution:

Revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal. People then subjectively fear that ground gained with great effort will be quite lost; their mood becomes revolutionary.

^ the key word being “reversal” - i.e. having a thing and then suddenly not.

Tbh I’m not sure where I’m going with this line of reasoning. I guess the notion that (A) loss provides an accurate lens through which to assess the goodness of a thing you used to have; (B) seeing exactly how good a good thing is can be maddening, particularly if the thing you already knew was good turned out to be really good; (C) the most peaceful way to live life would be without loss informing the worth of anything.

But “peaceful” != “good”, in my opinion, so a life without great loss feels like it would be missing a solid range of The Sinusoid. Perhaps a life full of loss isn’t better for teaching gratefulness, but it’s better for some other reason.

On the common experience of loss and loss as a happiness function

TODO: Write this section.

Some investigative journalism is in order here: to correlate increase and decrease in wages or buying power of a currency, independent of a depression, and correlate the relative happiness of folks affected. Can we quantify the pain of losing an improved quality of life?

Something connected to Frankl’s MSFM: one with a reason to live can endure anything.

^ perhaps this sort of idealism is possible only when you haven’t experienced the loss of something you had, forcing you to know its exact worth.

Appendix

Alt title: Or: reflections on taking walking for granted.

Update 2024-05-12: Having my apartment drain fixed feels sort of like this! I appreciate my drain all the greater because I get to stop, pause, and think “oh right, I can use my faucet, how pleasant”. That brief moment of pondering makes the difference. And yet it’s over so fast…

Unused part of the intro

I noticed recently how great it feels to keep your knees at 90° angles. You’d never guess it, but it keeps your back straight while you relax your core. I must look like a human starfish.

Footnotes

  1. I’m actually told 26 is not one’s “late 20s” (Source: peers who are 26+). ↩

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