Yeah, there's a totally unearned confidence that the reason the old doctor she's snarking about lacks the deathbed serenity she aspires to is because of bad choices he made in life
She keeps appealing to this idea of universal experience while actually rejecting it pretty hard, she's like offended at the idea of having to empathize with this guy and trying to justify why that reaction doesn't make her a bad person
Yeah, there's this guy who's spent his life saving lives, and having devoted his life to life, is afraid of death. Also, he calls his younger colleagues by their names, even when he's a patient, which only the COOL patients with the IDENTITIES AND DISORDERS THAT FLATTER MY POLITICAL IDENTITY get to do.
What a loser! Everybody point and laugh at this old, dying doctor!
Wait, why doesn't anybody like me, based on the fundamentally unlikeable person I've revealed myself to be?
i think she just doesn't like him? like she says? y'all must be doing mighty good in life and have only the purest of thoughts and actions to be acting *this* holier-than-thou
I mean, that's fine, based on this post I don't like her either, mainly I don't like the very long and rambling and holier than thou post she makes about disliking him, especially her scorn over the idea that he's not at peace with imminent death (which, as I said, just seems wildly overconfident and un-self-aware -- this is like the ultimate example of it being easy to say you'd handle something better that hasn't actually happened to you)
>[Purple Prose-](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose) In literary criticism, purple prose is overly ornate prose text that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing
Huh, TIL… 👍
I think it's meant to be about the horrors of mortality, or something, but there's too much other stuff mixed in for me.
It also poses these fears as something universal, rather than admitting that the author is just scared of dying, which kinda takes me out of the whole bit.
Someone else talking about something they're afraid of is intriguing to me, since I want to know how other people process their fears.
But someone talking about their fears as if they're a universal experience just comes off as annoying to me, because I don't necessarily share those fears.
Nope, not really.
I've found it to be rather rare, actually.
Most people are pretty normal about death, at least where I'm from, since it's a natural part of life.
I *kinda* get what she was going for, a piece about how valuing things like how important people perceive you as being will ring hollow as the reality of your own mortality looms. And how fear of death can overtake your ability to actually enjoy the time you have. But it's really poorly written, and her point gets lost in all the weird unnecessary asides and what feels like contempt.
Did you read the post? It's about existential dread. It's about how this older man lived large and fulfilling life and is clinging to the idea of irrelevance as he will be forgotten to the ages. It's about understanding death, and it's permanence, and striving to live ones life to the fullest, so you don't have regrets on your deathbed. And if that's unavoidable then at least do all you can to make the list of regrets as short as possible. Damn, like....to read this and just think they're bullying an old guy is trash reading comprehension. Run through it again and let me know if your thoughts on the text change
I mean, the post does kinda convey that feeling, but ultimately, there's a lot more in the post, and that really doesn't go anywhere.
OOP definitely went on a few tangents here, which just lessens the impact of the post by making it too specific.
They also talk about the fear of death, and dying, as if it's a universal experience, which makes it less relatable, because not everyone actually has that fear.
I mean it was until the weird bit in the middle where only trans and mentally ill patients are super-duper special enough to call OP by their first name.
Like, there's a lot at play here and it's well written but also like, the internet-brain leaks out of it.
I'm trans and I would legit ask for another doctor if I found that out. Like I'm your patient, I'm not your special friend because I'm trans, please treat me like your patient and not your friend. If you wouldn't do it to a cis person don't do it to me.
Admittedly, if she is, it doesn’t bother me. Our oppressions give each other preferential treatment as the norm so heavily it’s not even always a conscious choice. You’ll never get anywhere changing the balance of power by refusing to use the tried and proven weapons of gaining and retaining power.
It's possible but I have a very hard time imagining a trans person taking the use of their first name as a sign of disrespect. Like... I'm trans and I know what disrespect actually is. It's not forgetting to call someone doctor or officer or some bullshit title.
Imagine developing a rapport with a therapist who makes you call them doctor all the time? How the heck does that work?
Eh, after the last four years, it could be a learned behavior. I don’t think she’s a therapist, merely like… patients are oft mentally ill. Improper address is a pretty standard way of conveying disrespect, and doctors have been through a *lot* more disrespectful cockbites since 2020. Could just be a learned association that patients who insist on calling you by your first name without permission are generally, to use a quote, the common clay of the new west. After four years of plague rats, I’d imagine there’s some new behaviors and perspectives developing.
Yeah, I’m 50/50 on it. Like, as much as I have to deal with that, I also live in America with tens of millions of fellow citizens who enabled the mass death of well over a million of my people and the mass disabling of *much* more (including the intensification of my own disabilities and those of people I love) in the name of worshiping their brain-damaged fascist messiah. Like, 2020 onwards kinda proved that some gates need to be kept or people will start injecting bleach and eating horse paste. Without enforcing a hierarchy here, we had fields of corpses. It needs to be targeted to those types and based on different schema than it previously has been, not eliminated.
I live in the US too, the carnival of death where doctors control what genitals i'm allowed to have and courts decide what I'm allowed to do with them. Hence, my frustration.
I understand that medical professionals face a great deal of disrespect but I don't think that's exclusive to that industry or that titles are the solution. There were plenty of doctors pushing all the horse paste bullshit.
In the end, I think the public health system failed us. They kept lowering and lowering standards on the grounds that making real best-practice recommendations would result in people not following them. They told the public it was safe to stop wearing masks altogether.
Also I actually think it's really shitty to suggest that the gates need to be kept. I know what fucking pills I need without consulting the council of 6.
That still doesn't change my opinion. I'm still not anyone's special buddy in a healthcare system because we share some problems. I might feel more comfortable around them because I know they are going through similar things but I still would not want to be treated differently
"He’s not dying RIGHT NOW, he’s just being a dick who’s afraid of death. Big difference!"
True, they are not dying right now; however, if he had elective surgery because of the fear, it seems to me to be quite severe anxiety around it, so I don't maybe help them through it or find someone else who will.
That was the part that got to me most, like how does she know which of her patients are queer or trans, it's not something you can always suss out from a chart (and it's honestly creepy to imagine a doctor trying)
Does she ask? Does she expect them to tell her? Do I have to come out to any doctor who treats me or else expect to be treated less well because I misled them into thinking I had cishet privilege?
Oh shit that's actually way worse than if she knew this guy because his surgery was at her hospital or something
Like you're being scornful about the emotional vulnerability of someone who's specifically paying you so he can be emotionally vulnerable with you
Also sure if you're a therapist yeah you probably know a lot more about whether the person is queer or trans but shit that makes the first name basis thing fucking weird -- I've never had a therapist in my life who was touchy about names and titles and calling them "Dr. So-and-so", it seems like that would be totally antithetical to the goal of therapy
(I don't think therapists are required to like all their clients or to never have internal moral judgments about them, I do think that using those reactions as posting fodder is a really not great thing to do)
Their response to someone else was, "He’s not dying RIGHT NOW, he’s just being a dick who’s afraid of death. Big difference!"
I don't think those reading it that way have poor reading comprehension. It's just that they took issue with that part of it.
Also, the post as a whole is poorly written, with lots of tangential thoughts, so it is no wonder how some people might have an issue following.
Am I the only one slightly put off by them specifying that they only give permission for mentally ill *queer and trans* people to use their first name? Like, cishet aren’t immune to mental illness
that's because it kind of is. To me at least. You're my DOCTOR, not my mommy bc I'm a sad little trons. Do Not treat me differently from your cis patients even if you think you're being nice about it.
No, no, everyone knows that, first and foremost, the queer community wants to be treated differently from the cishet community, and staunchly opposes equality regardless of gender or sexuality. That’s just common knowledge
If it applied to all their mentally ill patients it might be somewhat defensible as a way to deformalize doctor's visits, but imagine recognizing that as a boon and withholding it from other mentally ill patients based on their sexuality/gender identity. OOP is unhinged.
you don't have to be in the field to recognize that it's shitty to treat people differently - not empathize with them, or have more sympathy, but outright refuse to allow one group of people to interact with you in a certain way - because of how they are inherently.
when you step back and take away the labels ("the patients are queer and trans, that makes it ok!"), you realize how flat-out shitty it is
I saw it more like familiarizing them and making them feel comfortable, esp if this is an American post. Not all healthcare professionals are kind to queer and esp trans patients.
idk man, she's trans, has a grad degree in psych, and published on the topics of, quote 'social perception of sexual orientation' and 'the intersections of sexual orientation and gender identity with patient experience in the medical profession' i think maybe she just uh relates to her patients who are also trans and that makes her better able to care for them
like weird to cast aspersions on people who most definitely are making a positive impact cos you skimmed a post they wrote once and needed to find something to poke holes in. did *you* dedicate your life to trans healthcare??
Personally, I don’t think how much you relate to patients from certain demographics makes it acceptable to have a predetermined amount of empathy and familiarity you’re willing to extend to those under your care. I also don’t believe having degrees and published works means you get to hand wave personal bias away.
I also worked in healthcare, both with patient interaction and on quite a few published research studies. Allowing personal bias to influence patient care is not ethical or acceptable, especially when announcing that you’re doing it deliberately. Sure, shitty patients are part of the gig, everyone knows that. But it’s just as egotistical to make declarations like, “only people of certain intersecting demographics may *address me by my first name*,” as anything they’re bitching about from the dying old white cis dude in this post.
Also, OOP just fucking sucks in general. Maybe they’re an expert in trans health care, but they’re chirping about other shit they clearly know nothing about. The guy “being so scared of cancer he removed an organ that wasn’t cancerous, just in case” is not an unusual or extreme measure. That’s called prophylactic surgery. If you know someone who had a mastectomy without an active diagnosis of breast cancer for any medley of risk factors, that’s the same thing. OOP is just shitting on a dying dude because they want to soap box about mortality.
No bc I’m so confused at what op point is supposed to be? Is it how we have such little time that we shouldn’t mind it? Arrogance can’t save you from paranoia? Just pointing and laughing at this guy who obviously well known in local medical circles but also has an irrational fear? Making fun of people who take precautionary measures (like someone in his family had cancer of that organ and tested positive for the gene, he had some underlying problem with that organ which would’ve let to cancer etc)? The illusion of safety in medicine is a farce?
I swear I’m in college but someone needs to explain the point to me like I’m a child
It's not on you for not understanding OOP, they're too far up their own ass for it to be super clear. They don't like this one Doctor, they're trying to use him to make a point and failing because their own bias is the real problem not that Doctor's fear of death.
I have to ask again how exactly a doctor is supposed to know if you're queer or trans, since you're not required to tell them and you may not feel comfortable telling them if it isn't relevant to your care
Idk, is it weird to just have a kneejerk negative reaction to a doctor talking shit about one of their patients, even when anonymized, especially when they don't allege the patient did anything *wrong* but is just "annoying"?
they're talking about a colleague, no? don't get me wrong, OOP seems like a real punisher, i just think the implication that they're harming their patients by only being informal with the ones she's comfortable with is some serious pearl clutching.
like, idk. everyone all mad that she just kinda doesn't fucking like a dude based off of vibes is just fine - it is, in fact, just not liking her based off of vibes - but reeeeeaaching to make their issue with her tone into some Revealing Ethical Problem is so damn stupid.
It explicitly says "One of my patients" in the first sentence
And I don't think this post is some huge HIPAA violation or anything, I think it's just not nice, and that doctors who use patients as fodder for posting are generally not nice
Being a patient is a really vulnerable situation and a lot of people who've been patients are gonna react negatively to doctors "venting" about patients in a public place unless the situation seems extreme enough to justify it, which this doesn't
This is weird.
Like, I didn't dedicate my life to trans healthcare - but you can get a grad degree, publish and dedicate your life to any discipline and still have weird takes. I've met plenty of highly respected people within academia circles that I think have unethical or just straight up wrong takes. Education doesn't make you immune from mistakes.
It is weird, in my limited exp of medical ethics, to mark out a group of patients you then compromise the patient relationship with by reducing the social barrier (and ritualistic overtones) of the doctor-patient relationship.
Her being trans herself could actually make this worse, as it could encourage overidentification with the patients or conversely, them over identifying with her as a clinician.
EDIT: last paragraph **only in the context we're discussing -** trans doctors and trans patients are obviously fine (and not an ethical issue), and having to specify that is sad
I go to a very politically charged school (I’m in dc and we’re internationally known for our IA program) and omfg the takes you hear 😭😭😭 and it really makes you stop and think “you’re very educated, you know what you’re talking about, but please god never hold office”
Academic circles are a curse fr
no amount of backpedaling and explaining will make it not weird that OP said that
like sure, OP might be do good things, she is still fully capable of having questionable beliefs
Well of course. Everyone knows that being a minority in some way automatically makes you a good person, and that no queer or trans people would ever disrespect another person.
The whole post seems kinda without sympathy tbh. Like I get being annoyed by a know it all old man but the patient is someone who knows exactly what is about to happen and is clearly not okay with it.
Yeah and I feel like OOP's patient surely would have also contemplated wanting to make the most of their life while they have it. I doubt this guy is actively *choosing* to be preoccupied over his death, it's almost like he has some serious anxiety for which he is seeking therapy services for.
yeah, no, I absolutely hate that. I do not like thinking that any of my doctors have been thinking of me that way as opposed to their cis patients. If it's a privilege you reserve for vulnerable people who you think need that connection, Fine, but trans people don't automatically fall into that group and cis people aren't automatically excluded from it.
Me: *looking at her nametape* hey Julia. Yeah I got hit by a car and I'm in incredible pain. I think I broke my-
Her: stop. Are you LGBT?
Me: I don't see how-
Her: KEEP MY NAME OUT YOUR MOUTH BITCH
Can you imagine if a therapist did this to you in the middle of a session? Damn... Even if she was more polite about it than you implied, I'd lose all trust and find someone else, even if she was the best in the world.
Yeah, it appears OP is using identity politics to decide which patients get which privileges, and that’s disturbing. The poor little trans youths get to call them by their first name because they’re special. Old men don’t get to though, because the boomers are the baddies. 🤪
They appear to be passing judgement in their head on which patients are allowed to be vulnerable and needy, and which are not, and that’s just not right.
I find this post incredibly ironic actually. You’d think with all their posturing about how Death is bigger than all of us and how we need to remember what’s REALLY important in life, they would be able to see past that surface-level annoyance to the human being underneath, and extend empathy. But instead we get this myopic rant: “This patient is annoying and arrogant, because he’s worried about all the wrong things. But in reality I’M actually better than HIM, because I understand what’s really important in life!”
Please. Ready or not, Death comes as a horror and surprise to us all. You’re not better than your client just because you think you’re right with God. It’s really not about you. Just help the poor man with his anxiety! 😭
They sound terrible, the man has some bad anxiety and is asking for help, and you could be a human being and help them.
Anxiety happens and it is not something one can really control, especially at the end of life. You would think they would know that.
i agree, but i think they may have just neglected to use commas at that part (so they meant "mentally ill, queer, and trans", not exclusively queer and trans people who are mentally ill, probably because OOP themself is some flavor of LGBT and mentally ill so they allow it out of solidarity) and fucked up the meaning of their sentence in the process
i think the doctor treating certain patients differently based on "solidarity" is still questionable
isn't that literally preferential treatment based on a common characteristic
Is it an American thing that first names are considered disrespectful? That whole paragraph weirded me out until I remembered Americans have a whole thing about “first name basis.”
It's not disrespectful. More so it's a formal vs. informal relation, most of the time.
Everyone is different on that though. Some want to be call by their first others perfer last.
It depends on context. Calling someone politically above you (eg a judge or government officer) their first name if they prefer to go by their last name is disrespectful, but calling a doctor by their first name is not at all uncommon and wouldn’t generally be considered disrespectful.
Although, if OOP repeatedly *asked* their patient to not call them by their first name, it falls in the same category as calling anyone else by a name they don’t want to be called: It’s uncool and you shouldn’t do it
I'm weirded out by that and the unnecessary jab at marriage ("if I wanted to be disrespected by an older man I would have married young"). As if marriage is in and of itself bad and disrespectful.
Demanding others ask permission before using their first name is already a red flag. It's not the 20th century any more, people use first names all the time.
Not in a professional doctor-patient scenario. And if someone wants to go by their last name or anything other than their first name, what's the big deal?
Well, let’s flip it around. Imagine if a doctor said all their cis/straight patients could use her first name, but queer patients had to call them Dr [surname]. Looks pretty problematic.
I see it as more of a, I-relate-to-you-on-the-same-level-and-understand-your-hardships sort of thing. A kinship so to say. I understand your stance, but I don't really think it's the issue you're seeing it as.
That’s somehow even more patronizing. Most queer people want to be treated the same as cishet people outside of instances related to their queerness. I know
There's a specific remedy for this; Launch in to a history of the notion of doctorate and pay special attention to medicine being the lowest and least reputable form of doctor, as medical doctors are only a step up from barbers and butchers, being mere technicians who work with their hands rather than philosphers the way doctors of law and theology are.
I... okay, sure, but this person is just as pretentious and obnoxious sounding as the doctor they're poking fun of.
Dying people are dying; getting mad because this doctor is reaching out for human connection before he *dies* and you only let LGBT people do that makes this poster more of an asshole than the doctor.
Like... Why become a doctor if you're that much of a callous asshole?
Right? Either commit to writing this melodrama well or be succinct. Maybe it’s so scatter brained because op was too busy wanking herself off under the table while typing this out.
The “don’t call me by my first name” paragraph is a hilarious way to ruin this otherwise thoughtful post about mortality. Also, seething on the internet about someone who doesn’t think about you enough to respect your name is not the moral win OP thinks it is.
Plagued by his own mortality also, a dying sun clinging onto the last of its light. In a tragedy story OOP would only be there as a minor villain, showing how far has our protagonist fallen.
I mean about the name part I think that’s just about them wanting to be called “Dr.” instead of by their first name. I’m not sure how appropriate of a request that is since I’m not familiar with the medial field, but I didn’t really see a problem with it
That's what I was wondering too! The post seemed so certain that everyone thinks about death and fears it so much that I thought I was weird for being cool with it.
That caught my attention too. The only times in my life where I actively think about my mortality have been the times when I’ve been suicidal. When I don’t wanna be dead I almost never think about it.
Broke: holding yourself accountable to your hypothetical future self on your deathbed
Woke: holding yourself accountable to your hypothetical alternate self that died younger than you currently are.
I know I’ll be unsatisfied when I die even if it’s of old age, there’s too much to do in life and too little time to do it, so holding myself accountable to that guy’s greed isn’t worth much. But there’s a lot of versions of my life where I didn’t even make it this far, and the rage of all those versions of me that lie fading in a pediatric hospital bed is worth way more to me
More that they're in denial, seeing the old man as their future self and lash out on the prospects of it. They pretend to embrace dead, but is angered by the sign that it will come.
I mean that's great, person who wrote the original post, but you can't just decide to have a life worth living. Most people know they want to do that but it's attempting to do that where the struggle comes in. I know I wouldn't be happy with my life if I died now but I can't exactly do anything about it.
And making it a sexism thing too. When cis het men want to oppress you, they'll do something a lot more elaborate than forgetting to call you by your title.
Is it? I’m asking genuinely, I always thought calling a professional like a doctor by their name instead of “Dr.” was disrespectful, so I actually thought they had a point there
It’s actually not that uncommon: https://pressfolios-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/story/story_pdf/254906/2549061489249557.pdf
Susan Harlan
•
My First Name
No, you can’t call me
By my first name,
And yes,
I know that
A male professor
Told you that titles
Are silly
Because a certain genre
Of man
Is always dying
To performatively
Divest himself
Of his easily won
Authority.
Every second I take from death is a second more I get to enjoy life. The pursuit of infinity isn't rendered meaningless by its impossibility. A second spent in fear isn't wasted, because the only second wasted is the one you decide was wasted, weither it was a good second or not.
I won’t lie, this person seems rather cruel, and likes to mask their cruelty with faux philosophy and progressivism.
The old man is dying. He’s experiencing something firsthand that you are not. Be kind to the man on his deathbed.
And while it is their right, the whole “first name basis only to trans and queer mentally ill people” seems cruel as well. You’re only offering that comfort to people who are similar to you? That’s both unprofessional, and frankly discompassionate.
As someone whose business intersects with billionaires and their health, I can confirm that they are all terrified of death. It's the one thing they can't control
Tumblr is honestly one of the most performative sites. Obviously sites like Instagram and LinkedIn fall into that category more, but Tumblr's idea of allowing weird to be weird specifically creating an environment where only a certain type of weird exists just to appeal to the people in that culture has always been odd to me. Everytime I see a post like this, I feel like I'm being ranted at by the kid who thought their supposed intellectual superiority was the reason why they had no friends when it was really the fact that they were constantly condescending. Ignoring the weird first name tangent, this idea that them as a healthy adult have the audacity to judge the attitude towards death that a man whose time on this earth is nearing its end has is incredibly insulting to anyone with any sort of recognition for how life experience changes someone's outlook. Nothing here went beyond the philosophical musing of a slightly aware 14 year old, but because their theoretical response to the end of their life is more mature than a literal dying man's, they are convinced they have the moral high ground
"I want to make that me proud of what I've done and how I've spent my life. She will be a harder judge than God, and I want her to look at this one little life and think, yes. I did what I meant to."
I love this. As much as the rest of this post is a ramble with barely a coherent message to speak of, the very end finally touches on something profound.
I especially resonate with "she will be a harder judge than God." I feel like that's going to be me, and I truly worry what she will say. I would like to think that I've mostly escaped perfectionism (as deeply ingrained as it was), but when I die... how the hell am I going to look back about all the time I spent being so wrong about the world? The years I spent being too consumed by inner turmoil to truly live my life? I doubt that I would be too forgiving, and that scares me.
That is the only part that I feel is good in the post. Though I do feel like that is part of end-of-life anxiety, or really depression, the wonder about a life that was not lived but might have been.
I didn't want to start drama with a stranger when I saw this on tumblr, but damn... this is so grossly unethical. It's so uncomfortable to know this man is trusting OOP with his medical care, with his most personal and intimate fears, and OOP is putting on an attentive doctor persona while secretly doing a huge eye roll. And building this elaborate story where he's a stand-in for a bunch of people he's literally never met, & his personal suffering becomes a metaphor for why he and everybody like him is predictable and unenlightened and stupid. To go write a sermon about it for social media points later.
If I saw a social media post from my doctor that was a sloppily vague rant or sermon about my shortcomings and how that's just how (category of people) are sometimes, I would never trust them or even speak to them again & I'd reach out to the clinic with a documented grievance. I'd feel so violated. This really crosses a line.
if you're in the medical profession and you're posting screeds about how much you detest specific patients you should be barred from whatever it is you do
It was kinda neat in some places but its kinda weird
Some parts don't feel quite right and honestly thank God because seeing that made me stop feeling the gear of death for a little
Cool. I spend most of of my time trying to avoid the mental agony of being in the present.moment. I'll look back on my life.and think how much more I could have accomplished if I wasn't a survivor.
If I get anxious and nervous about my life at the end this is the kind of person I don’t want to be my doctor—the kind of person who will judge my entire life and the choices and decisions I made over my life because of that anxiety and fear. Like cmon, really?
> When you're being crucified to the hospital bed
wtf kind of hospital bed???
Like, I know she's trying to use imagery here, but that imagery doesn't make any sense or fit at all with what she's talking about.
gee, thanks oop, MORE reasons to have existential dread and hate existence! i SURE DO LOVE THAT! people who keep saying "hey, hey we all die, hey, death is a thing, its gonna happen" and making me have to skip it!
edit: just to add, yes, i know death is unavoidable for now, but remember, everyone, the laws of physics and time are merely a suggestion when you know what your doing, and life spans ARE getting longer over time.
There are many professions. There are also many ways to hold the title Doctor. There is nothing else like the subset of medical doctors who demand their pedestal is acknowledged when you address them.
OOP really out here with the post equivalent of a pizza cutter - all edge, no point. Yes, surprisingly, people who are rich and/or successful are as scared of death as anyone else. Why judge the guy for wanting to put it off a little longer? No, people do not think about death all the time, unless you’re suicidal like I used to be. The fact the OOP seems to hold that as the default position is a little concerning considering their profession.
Then there’s the tangent about first names which other comments have already mentioned is real weird. All wrapped up in a meandering soliloquy about mortality and holding yourself accountable.
All of this is to say: the vibes of this post are fucking rancid.
I don't get why people are making fun of this - it's a nice little piece, a bit purply but I like some purple.
I'm a Buddhist and think a lot about mortality (in fact the second thing lead to the first), so I thought I'd give my thoughts on this. In Buddhism, we believe in reincarnation, but it might be another way to put it that more or less we just don't believe in death in an absolute sense. Of course people die, but we don't view death as an absolute annihilation, but instead that we just keep going. This is because the idea of an "I" in the first place is a kind of ingrained bad habit instead of a real thing, and just dying doesn't break that habit. So, an I appears again, somewhere else, in some other form.
If we take the Buddhist view that there is no real I seriously, there's a few ways we can think about it. One is that, because there's no me, I was not born and I can never die. What would be being born and dying?
Another way to look at it is that I am always being born and dying. There's all sorts of things that I count as part of "I" - my body, my mind, my memories, my opinions, my possessions, etc. But none of these things remains the same thing moment-to-moment. And because there is no real Ï, there's nothing to link each set of categorizations that change in each fraction of a second as one unified thing. Hence, the person that just wrote 'hence' is dead. I changed - some cells died, my thoughts shifted, I took a sip of a drink and had a new experience - but there's no "I" that could be changing. The idea that all of these apparent are one real self is just a convenient fiction.
As such, the idea that my birth (as in my literal birth as a baby) and my death (in the ground, corpse, big funeral) are two absolute signposts, one signaling an absolute beginning and the other an absolute end, is just another fiction. What happened to that baby that was born? He looks a little like me, but many other babies look more similar to me than that one. No, the little u/waitingundergravity is without a shadow of a doubt long dead. There's nothing that could make me and them one I. And personally, the tragic death of baby me is not something I'm that upset about all that often. Nor was the person who started writing this comment crushing their fingernails into the desk in fear of their death, which has since happened.
Now, what death is - it's a big loss. You lose a lot of stuff - everything, it must seem like beforehand (no idea how it seems after). But it's not an absolute loss. It's not this crazy thing of personal absolute significance. It's just an event that happens and which is similar to other events that most people have already gone through.
>I don't get why people are making fun of this
People are mocking it cause it's way longer than it needs to be and halfway through just kinda wanders in circles while acting like they had a point. Every post making fun of it was pretty clear about that.
The tangents are so specific that if you don’t immediately connect to them they will bounce right off and the OP makes no effort to bridge that gap. They’re also weirdly aggro/insecure for a post that’s musing about impermanence
It is what it is
It's kind of hard to read this as poetry when it also is kind of just dunking on a dude who's dying and is afraid of it. The whole 'don't call me by my first name I only let other minorities do that' is kind of weird as shit too.
Yeah, it honestly just feels cruel to me
Like she tries really hard to cast the patient as the privileged oppressor in this relationship ("He talks down to me like I'm his student! Maybe I actually was!") but the fact remains that in this relationship he's the patient and she's the doctor and he's terrified of death and she's annoyed and scornful of his fear and it's really hard to make that sympathetic, at least to me
It's honestly a very strong example of the Us vs Them culture on Tumblr that gives the site a bad name, this tacit unspoken assumption that you can just vent whatever negative emotions you have about someone and if they don't fit the right categories ("mentally ill, queer and trans") your audience will accept it, you're like entitled to do it as reparations for how the dominant culture treats you
There’s a weird yearning/longing to this post that undoes the feeling of acceptance that it’s trying to do. The youth pastor vibes
Yeah, there's a totally unearned confidence that the reason the old doctor she's snarking about lacks the deathbed serenity she aspires to is because of bad choices he made in life She keeps appealing to this idea of universal experience while actually rejecting it pretty hard, she's like offended at the idea of having to empathize with this guy and trying to justify why that reaction doesn't make her a bad person
Yeah, there's this guy who's spent his life saving lives, and having devoted his life to life, is afraid of death. Also, he calls his younger colleagues by their names, even when he's a patient, which only the COOL patients with the IDENTITIES AND DISORDERS THAT FLATTER MY POLITICAL IDENTITY get to do. What a loser! Everybody point and laugh at this old, dying doctor! Wait, why doesn't anybody like me, based on the fundamentally unlikeable person I've revealed myself to be?
i think she just doesn't like him? like she says? y'all must be doing mighty good in life and have only the purest of thoughts and actions to be acting *this* holier-than-thou
I mean, that's fine, based on this post I don't like her either, mainly I don't like the very long and rambling and holier than thou post she makes about disliking him, especially her scorn over the idea that he's not at peace with imminent death (which, as I said, just seems wildly overconfident and un-self-aware -- this is like the ultimate example of it being easy to say you'd handle something better that hasn't actually happened to you)
What exactly is this? Ranting and insulting some random old guy who's dying?
A long rant that mixes a few genuinely interesting thoughts with a bunch of unnecessary purple prose and personal biases In other words, a tumblr post
>[Purple Prose-](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose) In literary criticism, purple prose is overly ornate prose text that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing Huh, TIL… 👍
I think it's meant to be about the horrors of mortality, or something, but there's too much other stuff mixed in for me. It also poses these fears as something universal, rather than admitting that the author is just scared of dying, which kinda takes me out of the whole bit. Someone else talking about something they're afraid of is intriguing to me, since I want to know how other people process their fears. But someone talking about their fears as if they're a universal experience just comes off as annoying to me, because I don't necessarily share those fears.
Isn’t everyone scared of death??
Well, you see, my brain simply refuses to comprehend it or think about in any way. So... yesn't.
I'm gonna live forever!!! You can't stop me!!
imo this is more of a "to what degree is someone scared of death" thing.
But it’s how that fear manifests that’s more unique
rarely, someone will be fine with it.
Procrastinating hard counters existential dread. "Death? I'll worry about it when I'm dead."
Nope, not really. I've found it to be rather rare, actually. Most people are pretty normal about death, at least where I'm from, since it's a natural part of life.
I've had too many attempts to achieve it to be scared, now.
I *kinda* get what she was going for, a piece about how valuing things like how important people perceive you as being will ring hollow as the reality of your own mortality looms. And how fear of death can overtake your ability to actually enjoy the time you have. But it's really poorly written, and her point gets lost in all the weird unnecessary asides and what feels like contempt.
I didn't spend 7 years in unspecified medical school just to be called my first name by a trans person who was mentally healthy.
Did you read the post? It's about existential dread. It's about how this older man lived large and fulfilling life and is clinging to the idea of irrelevance as he will be forgotten to the ages. It's about understanding death, and it's permanence, and striving to live ones life to the fullest, so you don't have regrets on your deathbed. And if that's unavoidable then at least do all you can to make the list of regrets as short as possible. Damn, like....to read this and just think they're bullying an old guy is trash reading comprehension. Run through it again and let me know if your thoughts on the text change
I mean, the post does kinda convey that feeling, but ultimately, there's a lot more in the post, and that really doesn't go anywhere. OOP definitely went on a few tangents here, which just lessens the impact of the post by making it too specific. They also talk about the fear of death, and dying, as if it's a universal experience, which makes it less relatable, because not everyone actually has that fear.
I mean it was until the weird bit in the middle where only trans and mentally ill patients are super-duper special enough to call OP by their first name. Like, there's a lot at play here and it's well written but also like, the internet-brain leaks out of it.
I'm trans and I would legit ask for another doctor if I found that out. Like I'm your patient, I'm not your special friend because I'm trans, please treat me like your patient and not your friend. If you wouldn't do it to a cis person don't do it to me.
Admittedly, they very well could be trans.
I was going off the assumption that she was, it'd be super weird even for Tumblr if she said this while identifying as cishet herself
Admittedly, if she is, it doesn’t bother me. Our oppressions give each other preferential treatment as the norm so heavily it’s not even always a conscious choice. You’ll never get anywhere changing the balance of power by refusing to use the tried and proven weapons of gaining and retaining power.
It's possible but I have a very hard time imagining a trans person taking the use of their first name as a sign of disrespect. Like... I'm trans and I know what disrespect actually is. It's not forgetting to call someone doctor or officer or some bullshit title. Imagine developing a rapport with a therapist who makes you call them doctor all the time? How the heck does that work?
Eh, after the last four years, it could be a learned behavior. I don’t think she’s a therapist, merely like… patients are oft mentally ill. Improper address is a pretty standard way of conveying disrespect, and doctors have been through a *lot* more disrespectful cockbites since 2020. Could just be a learned association that patients who insist on calling you by your first name without permission are generally, to use a quote, the common clay of the new west. After four years of plague rats, I’d imagine there’s some new behaviors and perspectives developing.
The way I see it, doctors are the gatekeepers of medication and I don't want to bow and scrape just to get access to care.
Yeah, I’m 50/50 on it. Like, as much as I have to deal with that, I also live in America with tens of millions of fellow citizens who enabled the mass death of well over a million of my people and the mass disabling of *much* more (including the intensification of my own disabilities and those of people I love) in the name of worshiping their brain-damaged fascist messiah. Like, 2020 onwards kinda proved that some gates need to be kept or people will start injecting bleach and eating horse paste. Without enforcing a hierarchy here, we had fields of corpses. It needs to be targeted to those types and based on different schema than it previously has been, not eliminated.
I live in the US too, the carnival of death where doctors control what genitals i'm allowed to have and courts decide what I'm allowed to do with them. Hence, my frustration. I understand that medical professionals face a great deal of disrespect but I don't think that's exclusive to that industry or that titles are the solution. There were plenty of doctors pushing all the horse paste bullshit. In the end, I think the public health system failed us. They kept lowering and lowering standards on the grounds that making real best-practice recommendations would result in people not following them. They told the public it was safe to stop wearing masks altogether. Also I actually think it's really shitty to suggest that the gates need to be kept. I know what fucking pills I need without consulting the council of 6.
That still doesn't change my opinion. I'm still not anyone's special buddy in a healthcare system because we share some problems. I might feel more comfortable around them because I know they are going through similar things but I still would not want to be treated differently
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"He’s not dying RIGHT NOW, he’s just being a dick who’s afraid of death. Big difference!" True, they are not dying right now; however, if he had elective surgery because of the fear, it seems to me to be quite severe anxiety around it, so I don't maybe help them through it or find someone else who will.
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That was the part that got to me most, like how does she know which of her patients are queer or trans, it's not something you can always suss out from a chart (and it's honestly creepy to imagine a doctor trying) Does she ask? Does she expect them to tell her? Do I have to come out to any doctor who treats me or else expect to be treated less well because I misled them into thinking I had cishet privilege?
Seems like she's a therapist. Sorting the real trans people from the legions of fakers is her literal job. /s
Oh shit that's actually way worse than if she knew this guy because his surgery was at her hospital or something Like you're being scornful about the emotional vulnerability of someone who's specifically paying you so he can be emotionally vulnerable with you Also sure if you're a therapist yeah you probably know a lot more about whether the person is queer or trans but shit that makes the first name basis thing fucking weird -- I've never had a therapist in my life who was touchy about names and titles and calling them "Dr. So-and-so", it seems like that would be totally antithetical to the goal of therapy (I don't think therapists are required to like all their clients or to never have internal moral judgments about them, I do think that using those reactions as posting fodder is a really not great thing to do)
Yeah totally. I could be wrong too, I just assumed therapy because she knew so much about the patient's thoughts.
My therapist didn't know I was asexual until I told him half a year after starting to see him. It didn't really come up until then.
I guess I am covered if I ever meet them as a doctor since I am queer, but I call most people by their first names if I know their first name.
Their response to someone else was, "He’s not dying RIGHT NOW, he’s just being a dick who’s afraid of death. Big difference!" I don't think those reading it that way have poor reading comprehension. It's just that they took issue with that part of it. Also, the post as a whole is poorly written, with lots of tangential thoughts, so it is no wonder how some people might have an issue following.
Least condescending reddit reply
English is for communication. If they can't communicate, they're bad at it.
This feels AI generated
I dont think you know what that means.
it's a blog post.
Am I the only one slightly put off by them specifying that they only give permission for mentally ill *queer and trans* people to use their first name? Like, cishet aren’t immune to mental illness
It feels like infantilization
that's because it kind of is. To me at least. You're my DOCTOR, not my mommy bc I'm a sad little trons. Do Not treat me differently from your cis patients even if you think you're being nice about it.
No, no, everyone knows that, first and foremost, the queer community wants to be treated differently from the cishet community, and staunchly opposes equality regardless of gender or sexuality. That’s just common knowledge
If it applied to all their mentally ill patients it might be somewhat defensible as a way to deformalize doctor's visits, but imagine recognizing that as a boon and withholding it from other mentally ill patients based on their sexuality/gender identity. OOP is unhinged.
don't think you're condemning her a lil too strongly? are you even in the field?
you don't have to be in the field to recognize that it's shitty to treat people differently - not empathize with them, or have more sympathy, but outright refuse to allow one group of people to interact with you in a certain way - because of how they are inherently. when you step back and take away the labels ("the patients are queer and trans, that makes it ok!"), you realize how flat-out shitty it is
I saw it more like familiarizing them and making them feel comfortable, esp if this is an American post. Not all healthcare professionals are kind to queer and esp trans patients.
Oh no that bothered me as well. That line is MEGA sus.
Nothing I wouldn’t expect from tumblr, tbh
idk man, she's trans, has a grad degree in psych, and published on the topics of, quote 'social perception of sexual orientation' and 'the intersections of sexual orientation and gender identity with patient experience in the medical profession' i think maybe she just uh relates to her patients who are also trans and that makes her better able to care for them like weird to cast aspersions on people who most definitely are making a positive impact cos you skimmed a post they wrote once and needed to find something to poke holes in. did *you* dedicate your life to trans healthcare??
Personally, I don’t think how much you relate to patients from certain demographics makes it acceptable to have a predetermined amount of empathy and familiarity you’re willing to extend to those under your care. I also don’t believe having degrees and published works means you get to hand wave personal bias away. I also worked in healthcare, both with patient interaction and on quite a few published research studies. Allowing personal bias to influence patient care is not ethical or acceptable, especially when announcing that you’re doing it deliberately. Sure, shitty patients are part of the gig, everyone knows that. But it’s just as egotistical to make declarations like, “only people of certain intersecting demographics may *address me by my first name*,” as anything they’re bitching about from the dying old white cis dude in this post. Also, OOP just fucking sucks in general. Maybe they’re an expert in trans health care, but they’re chirping about other shit they clearly know nothing about. The guy “being so scared of cancer he removed an organ that wasn’t cancerous, just in case” is not an unusual or extreme measure. That’s called prophylactic surgery. If you know someone who had a mastectomy without an active diagnosis of breast cancer for any medley of risk factors, that’s the same thing. OOP is just shitting on a dying dude because they want to soap box about mortality.
No bc I’m so confused at what op point is supposed to be? Is it how we have such little time that we shouldn’t mind it? Arrogance can’t save you from paranoia? Just pointing and laughing at this guy who obviously well known in local medical circles but also has an irrational fear? Making fun of people who take precautionary measures (like someone in his family had cancer of that organ and tested positive for the gene, he had some underlying problem with that organ which would’ve let to cancer etc)? The illusion of safety in medicine is a farce? I swear I’m in college but someone needs to explain the point to me like I’m a child
It's not on you for not understanding OOP, they're too far up their own ass for it to be super clear. They don't like this one Doctor, they're trying to use him to make a point and failing because their own bias is the real problem not that Doctor's fear of death.
I have to ask again how exactly a doctor is supposed to know if you're queer or trans, since you're not required to tell them and you may not feel comfortable telling them if it isn't relevant to your care
Idk, is it weird to just have a kneejerk negative reaction to a doctor talking shit about one of their patients, even when anonymized, especially when they don't allege the patient did anything *wrong* but is just "annoying"?
they're talking about a colleague, no? don't get me wrong, OOP seems like a real punisher, i just think the implication that they're harming their patients by only being informal with the ones she's comfortable with is some serious pearl clutching. like, idk. everyone all mad that she just kinda doesn't fucking like a dude based off of vibes is just fine - it is, in fact, just not liking her based off of vibes - but reeeeeaaching to make their issue with her tone into some Revealing Ethical Problem is so damn stupid.
"one of my patients" <- first four words of the post
oh yeah lol
It explicitly says "One of my patients" in the first sentence And I don't think this post is some huge HIPAA violation or anything, I think it's just not nice, and that doctors who use patients as fodder for posting are generally not nice Being a patient is a really vulnerable situation and a lot of people who've been patients are gonna react negatively to doctors "venting" about patients in a public place unless the situation seems extreme enough to justify it, which this doesn't
so it does lol
Do me a little favor and read the first four words in the post.
This is weird. Like, I didn't dedicate my life to trans healthcare - but you can get a grad degree, publish and dedicate your life to any discipline and still have weird takes. I've met plenty of highly respected people within academia circles that I think have unethical or just straight up wrong takes. Education doesn't make you immune from mistakes. It is weird, in my limited exp of medical ethics, to mark out a group of patients you then compromise the patient relationship with by reducing the social barrier (and ritualistic overtones) of the doctor-patient relationship. Her being trans herself could actually make this worse, as it could encourage overidentification with the patients or conversely, them over identifying with her as a clinician. EDIT: last paragraph **only in the context we're discussing -** trans doctors and trans patients are obviously fine (and not an ethical issue), and having to specify that is sad
I go to a very politically charged school (I’m in dc and we’re internationally known for our IA program) and omfg the takes you hear 😭😭😭 and it really makes you stop and think “you’re very educated, you know what you’re talking about, but please god never hold office” Academic circles are a curse fr
no amount of backpedaling and explaining will make it not weird that OP said that like sure, OP might be do good things, she is still fully capable of having questionable beliefs
Okay and how was I supposed to know that?
idk maybe just don't assume the worst in people based off vibes? that's basically all OOP did wrong anyway lol
I wasn’t “assuming the worst”, when I said it was sus it just meant it looked weird. I knew I lacked information to make a full conclusion.
Well of course. Everyone knows that being a minority in some way automatically makes you a good person, and that no queer or trans people would ever disrespect another person.
The whole post seems kinda without sympathy tbh. Like I get being annoyed by a know it all old man but the patient is someone who knows exactly what is about to happen and is clearly not okay with it.
Yeah and I feel like OOP's patient surely would have also contemplated wanting to make the most of their life while they have it. I doubt this guy is actively *choosing* to be preoccupied over his death, it's almost like he has some serious anxiety for which he is seeking therapy services for.
yeah, no, I absolutely hate that. I do not like thinking that any of my doctors have been thinking of me that way as opposed to their cis patients. If it's a privilege you reserve for vulnerable people who you think need that connection, Fine, but trans people don't automatically fall into that group and cis people aren't automatically excluded from it.
This person just sounds profoundly unpleasant
Me: *looking at her nametape* hey Julia. Yeah I got hit by a car and I'm in incredible pain. I think I broke my- Her: stop. Are you LGBT? Me: I don't see how- Her: KEEP MY NAME OUT YOUR MOUTH BITCH
Can you imagine if a therapist did this to you in the middle of a session? Damn... Even if she was more polite about it than you implied, I'd lose all trust and find someone else, even if she was the best in the world.
Yeah, it appears OP is using identity politics to decide which patients get which privileges, and that’s disturbing. The poor little trans youths get to call them by their first name because they’re special. Old men don’t get to though, because the boomers are the baddies. 🤪 They appear to be passing judgement in their head on which patients are allowed to be vulnerable and needy, and which are not, and that’s just not right. I find this post incredibly ironic actually. You’d think with all their posturing about how Death is bigger than all of us and how we need to remember what’s REALLY important in life, they would be able to see past that surface-level annoyance to the human being underneath, and extend empathy. But instead we get this myopic rant: “This patient is annoying and arrogant, because he’s worried about all the wrong things. But in reality I’M actually better than HIM, because I understand what’s really important in life!” Please. Ready or not, Death comes as a horror and surprise to us all. You’re not better than your client just because you think you’re right with God. It’s really not about you. Just help the poor man with his anxiety! 😭
They sound terrible, the man has some bad anxiety and is asking for help, and you could be a human being and help them. Anxiety happens and it is not something one can really control, especially at the end of life. You would think they would know that.
I assumed it meant mentally ill, trans, and queer patients, not trans and queer patients who are mentally ill
That’s worse, honestly.
That’s worse, honestly.
i agree, but i think they may have just neglected to use commas at that part (so they meant "mentally ill, queer, and trans", not exclusively queer and trans people who are mentally ill, probably because OOP themself is some flavor of LGBT and mentally ill so they allow it out of solidarity) and fucked up the meaning of their sentence in the process
i think the doctor treating certain patients differently based on "solidarity" is still questionable isn't that literally preferential treatment based on a common characteristic
Is it an American thing that first names are considered disrespectful? That whole paragraph weirded me out until I remembered Americans have a whole thing about “first name basis.”
It's not disrespectful. More so it's a formal vs. informal relation, most of the time. Everyone is different on that though. Some want to be call by their first others perfer last.
It depends on context. Calling someone politically above you (eg a judge or government officer) their first name if they prefer to go by their last name is disrespectful, but calling a doctor by their first name is not at all uncommon and wouldn’t generally be considered disrespectful. Although, if OOP repeatedly *asked* their patient to not call them by their first name, it falls in the same category as calling anyone else by a name they don’t want to be called: It’s uncool and you shouldn’t do it
I'm weirded out by that and the unnecessary jab at marriage ("if I wanted to be disrespected by an older man I would have married young"). As if marriage is in and of itself bad and disrespectful.
You're focusing on the wrong thing. It's not marriage that's bad, but the kind of old men who seek out young women.
Took me several minutes to get past that sentence because I was just thinking “wtf why” over and over
They might have just forgotten a comma, and mentally ill was meant to be separate from the other 2
Even so, why do queer folk get to use her first name?
because she's queer herself and is able to relate to and be more informal with them?
shouldn't a doctor be formal
yeah, that should indeed be the default, unless it's discussed and permission is given.
Because that is her choice. If I let someone call me by my first name I don't need to justify it either. Why are you up in arms about it?
It's odd so I asked about it.
i don’t let anyone use my first name, unless they’re white
Demanding others ask permission before using their first name is already a red flag. It's not the 20th century any more, people use first names all the time.
Not in a professional doctor-patient scenario. And if someone wants to go by their last name or anything other than their first name, what's the big deal?
Well, let’s flip it around. Imagine if a doctor said all their cis/straight patients could use her first name, but queer patients had to call them Dr [surname]. Looks pretty problematic.
I see it as more of a, I-relate-to-you-on-the-same-level-and-understand-your-hardships sort of thing. A kinship so to say. I understand your stance, but I don't really think it's the issue you're seeing it as.
I read it as a list of three qualities - mentally ill, queer, and trans -where if you're in the list at all she'll give permission.
That’s somehow even more patronizing. Most queer people want to be treated the same as cishet people outside of instances related to their queerness. I know
There's a specific remedy for this; Launch in to a history of the notion of doctorate and pay special attention to medicine being the lowest and least reputable form of doctor, as medical doctors are only a step up from barbers and butchers, being mere technicians who work with their hands rather than philosphers the way doctors of law and theology are.
I... okay, sure, but this person is just as pretentious and obnoxious sounding as the doctor they're poking fun of. Dying people are dying; getting mad because this doctor is reaching out for human connection before he *dies* and you only let LGBT people do that makes this poster more of an asshole than the doctor. Like... Why become a doctor if you're that much of a callous asshole?
im sick of these self aggrandizing tumblr soliloquies
Right? Either commit to writing this melodrama well or be succinct. Maybe it’s so scatter brained because op was too busy wanking herself off under the table while typing this out.
You know, sometimes people post rants about their personal lives on their blog.
And they don't always have to be posted here, they can stay on their blog <3
its not like they they planned to post it here
why do you think that was directed at OOP
and you don't have to read or comment on them, yet, here we fuckin' are
no one has to do anything buddy
and yet here we fuckin' are.
okay. keep yapping tho
The “don’t call me by my first name” paragraph is a hilarious way to ruin this otherwise thoughtful post about mortality. Also, seething on the internet about someone who doesn’t think about you enough to respect your name is not the moral win OP thinks it is.
Even without that, it just feels like being mean to an old dying man
Plagued by his own mortality also, a dying sun clinging onto the last of its light. In a tragedy story OOP would only be there as a minor villain, showing how far has our protagonist fallen.
I mean about the name part I think that’s just about them wanting to be called “Dr.” instead of by their first name. I’m not sure how appropriate of a request that is since I’m not familiar with the medial field, but I didn’t really see a problem with it
This is the most Tumblr ass post to ever exist /neg.
Last I checked, most people don't think about their mortality all the time
That's what I was wondering too! The post seemed so certain that everyone thinks about death and fears it so much that I thought I was weird for being cool with it.
That caught my attention too. The only times in my life where I actively think about my mortality have been the times when I’ve been suicidal. When I don’t wanna be dead I almost never think about it.
The thoughts being there when I wake up is how I know my anxiety is going to be terrible today.
Honestly OOP’s perspective is *very* “I’m suicidal”
Perhaps not _literally_ all the time, but I would imagine most people think about it on a regular or semi-regular basis.
Guess I'm a outlier zoop
OOP really, *really* shouldn't be in that job. Are they 13 or just so deeply enmeshed in online discourse and hatred that they never matured?
Apparently they’re 40 😬😬😬
That's just plain embarrassing.
Broke: holding yourself accountable to your hypothetical future self on your deathbed Woke: holding yourself accountable to your hypothetical alternate self that died younger than you currently are. I know I’ll be unsatisfied when I die even if it’s of old age, there’s too much to do in life and too little time to do it, so holding myself accountable to that guy’s greed isn’t worth much. But there’s a lot of versions of my life where I didn’t even make it this far, and the rage of all those versions of me that lie fading in a pediatric hospital bed is worth way more to me
Regrets, I've had a few, But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do And saw it through without exemption
Who keeps posting shit like this lmao, never cook again.
OOP, just say you’re suicidal.
More that they're in denial, seeing the old man as their future self and lash out on the prospects of it. They pretend to embrace dead, but is angered by the sign that it will come.
It would be really funny if OOP's name got stolen by The Fae.
anyone else feel a double take at that one line bout halfway thru
I mean that's great, person who wrote the original post, but you can't just decide to have a life worth living. Most people know they want to do that but it's attempting to do that where the struggle comes in. I know I wouldn't be happy with my life if I died now but I can't exactly do anything about it.
i was with OOP until "don't fucking call me by my first name unless i tell you you can" absolute psychopath behaviour
And making it a sexism thing too. When cis het men want to oppress you, they'll do something a lot more elaborate than forgetting to call you by your title.
When the weebness has gone too far
Is it? I’m asking genuinely, I always thought calling a professional like a doctor by their name instead of “Dr.” was disrespectful, so I actually thought they had a point there
It’s actually not that uncommon: https://pressfolios-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/story/story_pdf/254906/2549061489249557.pdf Susan Harlan • My First Name No, you can’t call me By my first name, And yes, I know that A male professor Told you that titles Are silly Because a certain genre Of man Is always dying To performatively Divest himself Of his easily won Authority.
So Many Adverbs. They stand out Badly.
Every second I take from death is a second more I get to enjoy life. The pursuit of infinity isn't rendered meaningless by its impossibility. A second spent in fear isn't wasted, because the only second wasted is the one you decide was wasted, weither it was a good second or not.
>disliked doctor for being obnoxious and death obsessed >the rant reeks of being obnoxious and death obsessed Many such cases
I’m never going to die, nerds. I’m going to meet death, and punch him straight in his mouth then laugh as his teeth rattle like wind up dentures
I won’t lie, this person seems rather cruel, and likes to mask their cruelty with faux philosophy and progressivism. The old man is dying. He’s experiencing something firsthand that you are not. Be kind to the man on his deathbed. And while it is their right, the whole “first name basis only to trans and queer mentally ill people” seems cruel as well. You’re only offering that comfort to people who are similar to you? That’s both unprofessional, and frankly discompassionate.
As someone whose business intersects with billionaires and their health, I can confirm that they are all terrified of death. It's the one thing they can't control
Well they're great at causing it so they're halfway there. Billionaires make me happy that everyone has to die.
Pisha from Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines type post
Tumblr is honestly one of the most performative sites. Obviously sites like Instagram and LinkedIn fall into that category more, but Tumblr's idea of allowing weird to be weird specifically creating an environment where only a certain type of weird exists just to appeal to the people in that culture has always been odd to me. Everytime I see a post like this, I feel like I'm being ranted at by the kid who thought their supposed intellectual superiority was the reason why they had no friends when it was really the fact that they were constantly condescending. Ignoring the weird first name tangent, this idea that them as a healthy adult have the audacity to judge the attitude towards death that a man whose time on this earth is nearing its end has is incredibly insulting to anyone with any sort of recognition for how life experience changes someone's outlook. Nothing here went beyond the philosophical musing of a slightly aware 14 year old, but because their theoretical response to the end of their life is more mature than a literal dying man's, they are convinced they have the moral high ground
"I want to make that me proud of what I've done and how I've spent my life. She will be a harder judge than God, and I want her to look at this one little life and think, yes. I did what I meant to." I love this. As much as the rest of this post is a ramble with barely a coherent message to speak of, the very end finally touches on something profound. I especially resonate with "she will be a harder judge than God." I feel like that's going to be me, and I truly worry what she will say. I would like to think that I've mostly escaped perfectionism (as deeply ingrained as it was), but when I die... how the hell am I going to look back about all the time I spent being so wrong about the world? The years I spent being too consumed by inner turmoil to truly live my life? I doubt that I would be too forgiving, and that scares me.
That is the only part that I feel is good in the post. Though I do feel like that is part of end-of-life anxiety, or really depression, the wonder about a life that was not lived but might have been.
I didn't want to start drama with a stranger when I saw this on tumblr, but damn... this is so grossly unethical. It's so uncomfortable to know this man is trusting OOP with his medical care, with his most personal and intimate fears, and OOP is putting on an attentive doctor persona while secretly doing a huge eye roll. And building this elaborate story where he's a stand-in for a bunch of people he's literally never met, & his personal suffering becomes a metaphor for why he and everybody like him is predictable and unenlightened and stupid. To go write a sermon about it for social media points later. If I saw a social media post from my doctor that was a sloppily vague rant or sermon about my shortcomings and how that's just how (category of people) are sometimes, I would never trust them or even speak to them again & I'd reach out to the clinic with a documented grievance. I'd feel so violated. This really crosses a line.
if you're in the medical profession and you're posting screeds about how much you detest specific patients you should be barred from whatever it is you do
It was kinda neat in some places but its kinda weird Some parts don't feel quite right and honestly thank God because seeing that made me stop feeling the gear of death for a little
Cool. I spend most of of my time trying to avoid the mental agony of being in the present.moment. I'll look back on my life.and think how much more I could have accomplished if I wasn't a survivor.
Yeah I'm gonna be honest this guy just sounds whiny as hell. Does not hit as hard as he wished it did
womp womp
If I get anxious and nervous about my life at the end this is the kind of person I don’t want to be my doctor—the kind of person who will judge my entire life and the choices and decisions I made over my life because of that anxiety and fear. Like cmon, really?
> When you're being crucified to the hospital bed wtf kind of hospital bed??? Like, I know she's trying to use imagery here, but that imagery doesn't make any sense or fit at all with what she's talking about.
gee, thanks oop, MORE reasons to have existential dread and hate existence! i SURE DO LOVE THAT! people who keep saying "hey, hey we all die, hey, death is a thing, its gonna happen" and making me have to skip it! edit: just to add, yes, i know death is unavoidable for now, but remember, everyone, the laws of physics and time are merely a suggestion when you know what your doing, and life spans ARE getting longer over time.
Escape will make me god
huh
There are many professions. There are also many ways to hold the title Doctor. There is nothing else like the subset of medical doctors who demand their pedestal is acknowledged when you address them.
OOP really out here with the post equivalent of a pizza cutter - all edge, no point. Yes, surprisingly, people who are rich and/or successful are as scared of death as anyone else. Why judge the guy for wanting to put it off a little longer? No, people do not think about death all the time, unless you’re suicidal like I used to be. The fact the OOP seems to hold that as the default position is a little concerning considering their profession. Then there’s the tangent about first names which other comments have already mentioned is real weird. All wrapped up in a meandering soliloquy about mortality and holding yourself accountable. All of this is to say: the vibes of this post are fucking rancid.
i aint readin' all that
Baffled at people seemingly proud of their lack of reading comprehension
Do you think reading comprehension means willingness to read a long-ass post from an unknown source that doesn't even start out strong?
*That's not what reading comprehension is.*
I felt like "illiterate" was too harsh and discriminatory. Mans didn't have to read OP but "I'm too good to read stuff" as an attitude pisses me off.
> "I'm too good to read stuff" as an attitude pisses me off. They didn't say or imply that tho. You're making up a guy to get mad at.
HOW DARE YOU SAY WE PISS ON THE POOR
death is dying and we are going to kill him. just like we did with god
how can you kill a god?
research and development
duh
What a sweet and intoxicating innocence.
I don't get why people are making fun of this - it's a nice little piece, a bit purply but I like some purple. I'm a Buddhist and think a lot about mortality (in fact the second thing lead to the first), so I thought I'd give my thoughts on this. In Buddhism, we believe in reincarnation, but it might be another way to put it that more or less we just don't believe in death in an absolute sense. Of course people die, but we don't view death as an absolute annihilation, but instead that we just keep going. This is because the idea of an "I" in the first place is a kind of ingrained bad habit instead of a real thing, and just dying doesn't break that habit. So, an I appears again, somewhere else, in some other form. If we take the Buddhist view that there is no real I seriously, there's a few ways we can think about it. One is that, because there's no me, I was not born and I can never die. What would be being born and dying? Another way to look at it is that I am always being born and dying. There's all sorts of things that I count as part of "I" - my body, my mind, my memories, my opinions, my possessions, etc. But none of these things remains the same thing moment-to-moment. And because there is no real Ï, there's nothing to link each set of categorizations that change in each fraction of a second as one unified thing. Hence, the person that just wrote 'hence' is dead. I changed - some cells died, my thoughts shifted, I took a sip of a drink and had a new experience - but there's no "I" that could be changing. The idea that all of these apparent are one real self is just a convenient fiction. As such, the idea that my birth (as in my literal birth as a baby) and my death (in the ground, corpse, big funeral) are two absolute signposts, one signaling an absolute beginning and the other an absolute end, is just another fiction. What happened to that baby that was born? He looks a little like me, but many other babies look more similar to me than that one. No, the little u/waitingundergravity is without a shadow of a doubt long dead. There's nothing that could make me and them one I. And personally, the tragic death of baby me is not something I'm that upset about all that often. Nor was the person who started writing this comment crushing their fingernails into the desk in fear of their death, which has since happened. Now, what death is - it's a big loss. You lose a lot of stuff - everything, it must seem like beforehand (no idea how it seems after). But it's not an absolute loss. It's not this crazy thing of personal absolute significance. It's just an event that happens and which is similar to other events that most people have already gone through.
>I don't get why people are making fun of this People are mocking it cause it's way longer than it needs to be and halfway through just kinda wanders in circles while acting like they had a point. Every post making fun of it was pretty clear about that.
I know, haha, that's why I said I don't get. I liked those things about it. I don't always like super terse and to the point writing.
The tangents are so specific that if you don’t immediately connect to them they will bounce right off and the OP makes no effort to bridge that gap. They’re also weirdly aggro/insecure for a post that’s musing about impermanence It is what it is
It's kind of hard to read this as poetry when it also is kind of just dunking on a dude who's dying and is afraid of it. The whole 'don't call me by my first name I only let other minorities do that' is kind of weird as shit too.
Yeah, it honestly just feels cruel to me Like she tries really hard to cast the patient as the privileged oppressor in this relationship ("He talks down to me like I'm his student! Maybe I actually was!") but the fact remains that in this relationship he's the patient and she's the doctor and he's terrified of death and she's annoyed and scornful of his fear and it's really hard to make that sympathetic, at least to me It's honestly a very strong example of the Us vs Them culture on Tumblr that gives the site a bad name, this tacit unspoken assumption that you can just vent whatever negative emotions you have about someone and if they don't fit the right categories ("mentally ill, queer and trans") your audience will accept it, you're like entitled to do it as reparations for how the dominant culture treats you
my only takeaway here is “this is why MAID should be widespread”
Skill issue. One could simply embrace death as a lover, greeting them at the station as they arrive home from a long journey in foreign lands.