December 31, 2008: What I’d like to do during the last few hours of December 31

This is my diary entry of this year’s December 31 (2008). I write my entries in form of letters to a fictional person named Alexander, and each has a title similar to the title of this post. I’ve omitted the greeting and the signature at the end. Here goes:

For some reason I hate partying at the end of the year. I’d much rather I was doing something I don’t usually do. For example, the best thing I can think of which I’d like to do at 11:59 pm today is write “THE END” on some novel, or see a “Build successful” message on a final release of some program. Wouldn’t that be the greatest cause of wishing myself a happy new year?

As it is, everyone just gets drunk on hot wine or beer or normal wine and champagne or whatever they want to get drunk on, then they go and throw fireworks and then they go sobering up for the rest of the first day of the new year. That’s such a boring way to open the door to new beginnings – with a slight daze in your head.

I’d rather open them with a sense of completion and success.

Oh and all those New Year’s wishes people tell each other… it’s a display of vanity greater than when wishes are told to people on their birthdays. “I wish you all the best” is a statement I hear most often. I’m sorry, what was that? Do you also wish me the best possible disease to catch this year? And the best and the most spectacular death? I think you might wanna think about that for a second.

Or, there’s another one of my favorites “I wish you whatever you wish yourself”. Well, in that case my wish has already not been granted – you’re vain despite me wishing otherwise. Right now I’m probably wishing that you be hit by a falling piano, so at least I can laugh about what nonsense you wish about your own dumb self.

Well, these are at least the new year’s wishes other Croats have for their buddies, translated. Feel free to modify them to your language’s equivalents. I’m sure you have them. There are vain people everywhere!

On the other hand, there are people who are very specific about what they wish for other people. They’d say things like “I wish you to find a woman and get married”. I mean, have they no manners? What if I was gay and/or my boyfriend was with me? They also say things about school too, like “I wish you get all A’s this year”. I don’t, really. Never even wanted to. Besides, why would anyone want me to spend hours studying subjects I’m not interested in to get a high grade and thus distort the image saying about me exactly which subjects I’m interested in and which I’m not interested in? Frankly, I’d rather study programming more than I need to get an A, than study Latin to get a B or a C.

Now, if someone told me they wanted my next year to be even more productive than the last, that’s something that would make me stop to honestly thank them. But alas, if I wish that to someone real, they’d probably go away laughing because they really, truly hate what they do. They don’t really deserve such a wish.

What really tops off the whole vanity thing is new year’s resolutions. Basically, they’re wishes to oneself – things to do to improve one’s own life – and there’s nothing wrong with that! But what’s wrong is that people would rather tell others what they want for them, rather than what they want for themselves. Telling others that one wants to improve one’s own life is bad and supposedly selfish and selfish is supposedly evil, but telling others how they should improve their life is somehow nice and selfless and selfless is supposedly good.

I’d rather people told other people about their new year’s resolutions instead of telling them what they want for them.

But that would actually be quite useless if people told their close ones their own decisions when they actually make those decisions (if, of course, that’s in accordance with those decisions). In that case it would be quite valid to wish others success at the end of the year, because one would really know what others want to do with their lives. As it is, people know very little to nothing about others and what they want, hence the vain New Year’s wishes such as “I wish for you whatever you wish”. It’s basically saying “I’ve no idea what you want. I don’t know you at all. But I have to make a wish for you for New Year, so here it is, such as it is.” Of course, it’s all wrapped up in dishonesty and hypocrisy – and no one’s the wiser.

Of course, the whole ordeal of vanity wishes is gone so berserk upon humanity that people just say those wishes casually, without thinking, as if that’s the safest and the nicest thing to say to another person. Sometimes they even end an excellent wish – which shows that they truly know the person they are wishing to – with some vanity wish. It’s horrible! Like a defect that’s become so much a part of our society that it’s considered perfectly normal – and anything that’s different is to be amputated.

What I think about diets

Seeing I’ve put on some excess pounds, I’ve taken up the goal of losing some this year. As part of my research into the available diets – all of which claim to work, of course – I couldn’t help but notice that most – if not all – of them claim that we should hold on to these particular diets for life, by just varying the amount of calories we eat and whatnot.

Then on the other hand, I hear the opponents of this one particular diet, or the proponents of another claiming that that one’s no good because it’s high in fat and fat means cholesterol, and cholesterol means a wide variety of diseases, or it’s high in sugars (carbohydrates) which is also bad for a long list of reasons.

What is the single constant I’m running into? All diets have its downsides and therefore they have opponents. There is only one advice which is always given: eat healthy and exercise. The thing that varies is the definition of “healthy.”

So now as I read about calorie restriction and about Raymond Kurzweil’s dieting program (not related), I come across a comment on Amazon on Ray’s book which claims that it is historically inaccurate – in 1900, it says, people didn’t die of cancer and heart disease at such high rates as they do today. Therefore, he concludes, these diseases are caused by processed foods.

Being the intelligent man I am, I don’t believe this without some data. So I figure that it would be prudent to check out the life expectancy at that time, and compare it to today’s life expectancy – after all, it is older people who die most frequently of such diseases, ages 40 and up (of course, it happens earlier too, but not as often).

It appears that in 1900, a life expectancy of a white male infant was 48.23 years. Today, or rather 2004, this has grown to 75.7 years, which is nearly 30 years more (data from here). So, that person’s “argument” is invalid because there weren’t enough people alive back then who were of the age when people actually die of heart diseases or cancer.

Improved technology and quality of life – AND better foods (they wouldn’t process foods unless they were actually better that way) – made it possible for us to live longer. With longer life, new diseases became a problem.

If evolution is to be consulted in matters of life expectancy, then everyone over the age of 30, maybe 35 should be dead already. For the most of our past, we humans have lived in caves or in huts, eating foods filled with dirt and sand. Having a lifestyle primarily of hunters, people were happy if they saw the age of 20. Today, many of us live to see the age of 50, not to mention 60, 70, 80, heck some even live to be 100 years old and more!

It is easily concievable that with this drastically prolonged lifespan, our bodies will go bad more frequently. During such a relatively long lifespan, EVERYTHING is a factor determining how long we are going to live and what we are going to die of, including our diet. If we’ve eaten too many fats, we might get high cholesterol and die of a heart attack. If we’ve smoked, we might die of cancer. If we’ve eaten too many carbs, we might die of some infectious disease that our immune system can otherwise handle.

I say “might” because our genetic makeup is also a factor. Some people’s bodies just handle their bad habits better than other people’s do. Some people eat too much and then they die of lung cancer. Some people smoke too much and then they die in a car crash.

So, no matter what diet you follow, or no matter what diet you try to follow and then fail, you can bet anything that what you ate – whatever you ate – is going to play a role at some point in your life, all other things being equal.

In short, diets can’t increase your life span – how could they? You can’t know how long you’re gonna live anyway. This can only be measured statistically, not individually. Some can only increase the probability that you’ll live longer than the average, but in the end – again, statistically speaking – that very same diet will be the end of you, provided your death isn’t a violent one.