>>>I used to snore like crazy, probably had sleep apnea but was too afraid to go get tested since my grandmother died from becoming dependent on the machine and her lungs failed
I would like to hear more details on this. Being a CPAP machine user I have never heard of this (lungs failing) before.
My grandmother had lost her job and was forced into retirement a bit early and spent a lot of time at home. Since she was single, there wasn’t much for her to do except eat and sleep until others got home from work in the evening.
Well, she knew that she wasn’t supposed to sleep without her machine, so every time she got in bed, she’d put it on. This meant she was maybe spending 16 hours a day with this thing pumping air into her lungs. Now compound that with a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet over a couple of years and it makes sense.
Her last days were spent in a hospital on a ventilator and every time the doctors tried to remove it for her to breathe on her own, her lungs just could not keep up.
Obviously this is a special case. Many people use these machines with no ill side effects, but for me, since it’s so personal, I have an admittedly irrational fear of them. For me though, I’d rather not need it in the first place if I can avoid it.
This also only happened a few years ago so it’s still fresh for me.
My grandmother had lost her job and was forced into retirement a bit early and spent a lot of time at home. Since she was single, there wasn’t much for her to do except eat and sleep until others got home from work in the evening.
Well, she knew that she wasn’t supposed to sleep without her machine, so every time she got in bed, she’d put it on. This meant she was maybe spending 16 hours a day with this thing pumping air into her lungs. Now compound that with a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet over a couple of years and it makes sense.
Her last days were spent in a hospital on a ventilator and every time the doctors tried to remove it for her to breathe on her own, her lungs just could not keep up.
Obviously this is a special case. Many people use these machines with no ill side effects, but for me, since it’s so personal, I have an admitently irrational fear of them.
CPAP just splints the airway open, but BiPAP actually has an inhale/exhale cycle, so maybe they use it for people who have trouble breathing on their own?
"This feels like a particular awful thing to ask someone to do, but I believe if everyone truly were able to imagine the sudden death of the folks they love, it would change how they live."
In the past, this was a more common thing. Disease, injury, and war killed a lot more people than they do today. I wonder if people did cherish relationships more then than they do now.
I think you're on to something here. I wonder if a gradual loss of empathy is a product of the evolution of a first world country or advanced economy?
People die less, and without the threat of random deaths, life itself ends up valued less overall.
Humans seem less inherently empathetic toward emotions they haven't ever experienced close to themselves, loss being one of millions of negative human emotions that when experienced less, is less able to be empathized with at a macro level.
Perhaps this partly explains the current political climate and recent spike in authoritarianism among the average citizen in the US. Maybe we've hit a point where the life necessities and healthcare needs historically only enjoyed by the powerful are available to almost everyone and as a result, life expectancy has goes up (meaning statistically less people are dying in any given time frame). People start feeling subconsciously both slighted (economically) and invincible (biologically), and assume everyone else should be invincible too and there is no room for softness (empathy).
Perhaps this is even how humanity self-regulates. What if "dark ages" where reversals in progress are experienced are caused by this ebb and flow of the spirit of cooperation and empathy?
There is a nice, short (12 pages!) scholarly article on this topic called "Did the Ancients Care When Their Children Died?". Evidently, this question (and the more specific question of child mortality) has seen quite a bit of study. I strongly recommend that article, but if you can't access it let me give a sketchy recap below.
The article makes a few points. First, child mortality in Greco-Roman times was very high, maybe 30%. Second, art from that time has many references to the terrible emotional pain of losing a child -- grief seems to have been common. Third, handing over child-raising duties to another party (wet nurses, or even entire foster families) was also far more prevalent than it is today. Fourth, the death of a child was often mourned in a communal, ritualistic way, but it was also not uncommon to simply bury a child in the home with little fanfare.
These things are all hard to square, but the rough conclusion I got was: even when mortality was high, losing a child was keenly painful if that child was loved in the first place, which was less of a given at that time. However, even in that case, mourning and grieving -- by being both diffuse (by community) and following predefined rituals -- seem to have been more self-contained. In other words, the pain came, and then it (mostly) went. Child mortality being such a common experience, there were established societal ways to deal with it (plus your friends and family knew what it was like), and this made it genuinely easier. Your post makes some similar points.
My own take is that today is the worst time in human history to lose a child. Communities are more fractured, there are far fewer people who understand the experience, and parents have every reason to expect to never see any of their children die (and are consequently less prepared for it). Plus, in ancient times there were at most a few ways you or anybody around you would know how to raise a child, so a death that came from that process was in some sense excusable, or somehow just a stroke of fact. Contrast that with today, where we have maybe more freedom and choice than ever, and for every decision made we can find an argument against it -- there's just less certainty of having "done everything right". It's an ugly price for agency.
An anecdote and a poll. I grew up in India in middle class family where education was considered important. A recurring nightmare (autual dream I see during sleep) I see even in my adulthood is about me about to take an exam and not being prepared for it. I do not see this nightmare often but I still remember it since the amount of panic I feel when I see it. I discussed with my wife and she also have these nightmare of similar nature. I wanted to check whether anyone out here see this and whether it is more prevalent in culture like Indian culture or is it a universal phenomenon?
American also born to an education-focused set of parents.
I've been out of school well over a decade and still have those nightmares. Usually correlates with work-stress for me now, but at least once or twice a year I wake up terrified out of a dream where I'm walking around my highschool (always highschool, never college, oddly, despite my college courses being MUCH harder; I think because the artificial stakes and utter lack of autonomy) trying to find the classroom for some test I didn't realize I had.
I had this same conversation with my wife recently as well. It still blows me away that I'm hard pressed to think of situations where I felt as stressed/panicked as I was in parts of highschool, and I've not shirked challenges by any means. I both respect and would not want to be a kid growing up nowadays.
I commented up in the thread too, but talking about it to my doctor helped me. I have a recurring dream of waking up two days before chemistry exam and not having prepared anything. I don't know why it's always chemistry, I'd pick another subject that I really struggled at like physics if there was a choice.
I can attest that, as an American, my parents (college educated) would always bring up that recurring nightmare whenever the topic of dreams came up. They casually noted that it happened frequently in their adult lives, and that it would inevitably happen to me once I graduated college. Notably they didn't see it as a negative, but a sign of a "conscientious personality."
I decided to comment after seeing a number of negative comments here. I went through the process a it was a positive experience for me. I ended up interviewing at 5-6 places and didn't receive an offer. I liked getting the interview feedback. The time saved in skipping the usual application process seemed worthwhile to me ( You spend 2(?) hours on the triplebyte interview. Then a short introducutory call with each company you are matched and the onsite interview). My only complaint was that I was looking for larger and my matches were all 5-50 employee companies. I guess not many large firm are using them. Overall I would recommend triplebyte for anyone who is interested in startups and who currently in a full time job search.
Did your evaluation happen a long time ago? Or, another question... did you run the binaries and appropriately screen them? I had the same problem until I realized I sucked at making a binary live a long time, and my eyes were opened to screen :)
I worked on OpenVMS at the start of my career. I heard that the customer didn't want to port away from OpenVMS and this prevented HP from killing it off. One famous story in VMS folklore was where a building containing a datacenter catches fires and Unix admins run into the building to retrieve the backup disks and OpenVms admin do not since clustering give hot backup by default. Another story was of banks having data centers near the twin towers. The datacenters go down since the air conditioners go down due to the dust from the twin towers crashing. But the OpenVms cluster continue to operate since the half of the cluster is in New Jersey.
It was ported to Itanium while the x84 port and the POSIX compatibility project was never completed.
As an Indian who has lived in 7 apartment/homes in the US, I have yet to see a place which good ventilation in the kitchen. Usually the fan (if any) in the kitchen just circulates the air inside, which serves only to spread the smell. If I am lucky to have a window near the kitchen, I keep it open with fan near it as makeshift exhaust.
Houses in india have exhaust fans/ chimneys (electric or otherwise) that take the air in the kitchen and dumps it outside the house, which I believe is the only way to handle smells from indian cooking.
I remember those shitty fans from my days living in an apartment. They just shot the air back out into the house. Yeah... those suck. Totally agree!
I think the open concept layouts of many homes in the US aren't great for pungent cooking. The house also has a circulating air system, so every thing you cook goes into every room and closet.
The stove in my rental house has an exhaust hood, and it vents outside. Any idea what a proper cubic feet per minute rating I should look for?
I would like to hear more details on this. Being a CPAP machine user I have never heard of this (lungs failing) before.