My first toga
22-Mar-08
Prepping for the John Smart’s toga party last weekend.
My First Toga Party
16-Mar-08
Being an introverted nerd in high school and college, I never attended any toga parties. Last night’s toga party, hosted by Iveta Brigis and John Smart, was my first. I had a great time–the crowd was packed with futurists, Googlers, engineers, and cryonicists of various stripes.
One question that generated a lot of discussion was the question: “If you only had 4 weeks to live, would you want to know?”
My answer was an immediate an emphatic “Yes!”. I do a lot of things in the present that decrease my current happiness, with the expectation that the sacrifice now will increase the happiness/satisfaction of my future selves. For example, among other things, I save money, I work on boring tasks, I don’t have sex indiscriminately, and I don’t take drugs.
If I knew with certainty that I only have 4 weeks to live, I would want to know so that I could cease the now pointless preparations for my happiness in later life, and redirect those energies to maximizing my happiness in my remaining time.
Val (sp?), a stats grad student, claimed that STD’s were rampant in some nursing homes due to promiscuity among the residents, suggesting that perhaps they made they same calculations.
There were several people, however, who did not want to know. Some believed that the increased anxiety would make it difficult to live happily in their remaining time. Others hypothesized that those who wanted to know were generally unhappy with their day to day lives, whereas those who didn’t want to know were generally happy with their day to day life.
How you would know if you were generally less happy with your day to day life than everyone else? What if you havejust as many “happy” feelings as the median person, but you have a higher standard before you would claim you were “happy” overall.