Perdicis Notes

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

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

My birthday present this year was a herniated disc in my back. I was lifting some weights in our family’s New Jersey hotel room when suddenly, pop - lying down is suddenly way more comfortable than standing. Both knees at 90 degree angles while I’m down here please.

Getting a back injury on your 26th birthday is such a symbolic thing, too. 26 means I’m officially in my late 20s1 and already I’m googling medical questions about my back!

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

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…

Footnotes

  1. I’m told 26 is not one’s “late 20s”. Source: peers who are also in their “mid 20s” … ↩

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