Anti-aging blood transfusions and two scared kitty cats

I should be writing more. Almost two weeks since last entry. I keep thinking of things to say and don’t find the time (or energy) to say it but I tend to feel much better when I do.
We got two cats at my house. Don’t think we introduced them properly. The sister (Nikita) abandoned her brother and climbed up into the basement ceiling to hide while the brother (Odie) isn’t really a climber so he’s trying to acclimate to the house by himself. He’s slowly warming up, but their fear and depression got me thinking about how different life experiences are, how vastly vastly different, like those two cats have never really been outside. They’ve spent their whole 3 year lives in a little apartment with only a handful of humans. They can’t conceive of what the outside even is.
My understanding of the world is like thousands of times beyond what theirs is.
And we have similar gaps with people. Some people really get how life works and are able to figure out strategies and see consequences while others endlessly struggle, letting life throw them about like a stick flowing down rapids.
It’s strange to think about what a huge gap in understanding I have now compared to the person I was 10 years ago. These kinds of gaps between people–everyone talks all the time about the wealth gap or the opportunity gap but no one talks much about education or understanding or self-confidence gaps, and in the day to day real world, it seems like these gaps actually have far more of an impact on our actual well being than money.

I’m at my Dad’s house back on the west coast. Driving isn’t stressful out here. It’s like a whole other world. I can just hop in the car and go places without having to psyche myself up and question my life choices like I do in Pittsburgh.

I watched the Bryan Johnson documentary on Netflix on the plane. That guy is actually super inspiring to me even if I think much of the stuff he’s doing is crazy and superficial and counter productive to what he’s really trying to achieve. I wish he was taking more of a hippie naturalistic approach but overall I really love what he’s doing. Measuring every aspect of his health and putting it all out there for everyone to see. I really feel like we should all be more open about our medical situations. More information sharing means more progress. I wish there was a way for me to opt out of all the privacy stuff that hospitals and doctors put us through and just make all my medical information public. If enough people did that it could really improve our understanding of what’s going on.
I might be making myself sound real ignorant here but I wonder why people are so secretive about their medical situations, because catching cancer or even erectile dysfunction isn’t really a shameful thing–but I guess it’s all evolution. In the Decoding Your Cat I listened to last week, it says that cat’s naturally evolved to hide their medical issues, that’s why it’s so difficult to tell when a cat is sick or suffering. It’s because predators will pick off the weakest and sickest among us… and also maybe having a visible medical issue reduces your chances to mate.
It’s probably pretty similar with humans.
Like so many things, we’re being motivated by instincts that we evolved thousands or millions of years ago when we lived in a world that worked completely and totally differently from the one we now live in.
Nowadays it’s the exact opposite: the person who hides their medical issues is less likely to get treatment, is more likely to be seen as deceitful and cowardly, less likely to get sympathy and help from the community and is actually–at least it seems to me–less likely to find a mate. Less likely to find the self-confidence from being your genuine self.
People think I’m crazy for always defaulting to openness and honesty–at least in theory–I mean there’s still a couple things remaining that I don’t talk about here.
But in my experience, openness and honesty, in nearly every case, works out for the best in the long run, even if it’s painful or humiliating in the short.

I also wanted to talk about the whole blood sharing thing–apparently this has been happening with the super rich for a couple few decades now but they’ve been keeping it secret. These rich folk hire healthy 18 year olds and pay them for their blood. I guess there is real science that taking blood regularly from a younger healthy person can actually reduce your rate of aging. Naturally people are super judgmental about this but I have a lot of respect for Bryan for being open and honest about it and exposing it as a thing that’s really happening for better or worse.
But it seems strange to me that people might find this disgusting and wrong but simultaneously are okay with breast implants or transgender surgeries that are not literally necessary for your body to properly function, but can still be beneficial to the person’s mental health. Those surgeries sometimes require blood donated by the public and take up other medical resources that could be used for other things.
When I first learned about transgender surgeries, I was like many people disgusted–at least that was my gut reaction, that this kind of thing is an unholy butchering of God’s creation. That’s naturally gonna be our initial reaction. But then over the years I talked to so so many trans people and realized that there’s this huge theme of these surgeries changing their lives in massively positive ways. I kept waiting to hear someone to say they regret it. I mean, I sure as hell regret having my wisdom teeth removed. I figured I’d eventually meet one person who felt the same about their trans surgery. But I’m still waiting to find anyone who actually regrets a trans surgery (outside of the obvious ones who are paraded around and exploited on Twitter by the haters).
So over time I realized that my initial reaction of disgust for these kinds of surgeries was very much misguided and ignorant. Fortunately most of the trans people I have met were very understanding, even when I was doing things like refusing to use their chosen pronouns.
But anyway, I think about that whenever I hear seemingly “crazy” things like blood transfusions for ant-aging. We need to really hear their stories before we pass judgement.
I think that goes for just about everything.

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