The Mortality Trade-Off

Whenever I feel the urge to start kvetching about technology—you know, how Big Data rules the world, how privacy is gone, how the mainstream Internet makes you stupid and impatient, how online comments sections are cesspools—I pause and think about what medical technology has done for us. Rather astounding: the chronic diseases that are now manageable, the surgeries that save lives that would have been lost before, the emergency care, the eyeglasses and hearing aids, and so on. But still . . . but still. With these advances has come the sense that disease and death are affronts, indeed, that they are unjust and must be defeated. Which invites a weird existential angst to descend upon us, a sense of unease and anger that we address, as often as not, with technology in the form of meds. I'm not fully convinced the trade-off is worth it.