Sunday, December 01, 2024

What really bothers you about the future?

Profile photo for Jean-Marie Valheur
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One thing that bothers me about the future is the fact that we’re not there yet, and thus many of the life-saving inventions of the future aren’t here, and won’t arrive on time for those I love most… that sometimes stings, not gonna lie.

I’ve watched two of my grandparents die of Alzheimer’s disease, their brains turned to mush as they became prisoners in their own bodies…

It was terrible. And I do not wish that on the worst of people, let alone on the best of them. It’s just a horrific disease. There may be a point, ten or twenty or thirty years from now, where medical science can detect dementia early on and prevent it from progressing.

Alas, such technology will arrive far too late for those people I lost to the disease. The same is true of cancer, a disease to which I have lost a few dear loved ones. And there are many such diseases. We know, based on how fast modern medicine has progressive in the last few decades alone, that there’s a fairly high likelihood there will be some sort of pill that more or less “cures it all”. That all that ails us will, some day, be rectified, healed. And that we’ll get to this point where we can make it through life healthy to the last moment, without withering away slowly…

…but it’ll be too late, for many of us. I’m 32, so I have fairly high hopes for myself. I have even better hopes for my own children. But for my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother, the science just wasn’t there yet. Then there’s a part of me that fears that if ever it does, we may simply be unable to afford it — the billionaire class will live practically forever and us commoners will perish.

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