Over this last weekend I watched the movie 50/50, starring Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I won’t give away too much about the film except to say that it can be a tear jerker, but the general idea is that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been diagnosed with a cancer that has a 50/50 survival rating. The movie traces his struggle with that news along with how the people around him react.
The movie, however, just barely touched on a point that I think would have made a good movie into a truly great movie. See, the fact is, every day we all have a 50/50 chance of survival. We’ll either make it or we won’t. You might think that’s overstating it, but truly, life is that fragile and that unpredictable. You’ll either wake up or you won’t. You’ll be able to go to bed comfortably or you won’t. The same holds true for your friends, your family – every one you see.
Given that, we should be far more grateful when we wake up every day, don’t you think? And given that, we should be far more grateful when we crawl into bed. We made it through another day. We were lucky.
In the movie, Adam, the main character, contemplates things he’s never done. I’m thinking when we wake up, our first thoughts should be things we want to accomplish today, and it shouldn’t all be work or tasks. “I want to spend some time reading outside.” “I want to spend some time just lying on my back listening to the locusts and tree frogs and crickets that have all started their late summer songs.” And just before we go to sleep, I think we should take a step back and see what we can be grateful for, apart from the fact that we made it through another day. Does everyone we love know we love them? Have burnt bridges been rebuilt? Have we said something that needed to be said? Did we enjoy our lives, even if it was a poopy day?
Every day, our chances are 50/50. It’s like the comedians say – life is a sexually transmitted disease for which there is no cure. At some point, our roads will end. Isn’t it great that our roads haven’t ended yet? We have a whole day stretching out before us when we wake up. A day full of opportunities, time, chances, and who knows what else. And when we get ready to sleep, we can reflect on all of that and think, “Geeze, what a miracle.” We can do all of that, but I’m not sure we really do. I don’t, not enough.
Your chances are 50/50. What are you going to do about it?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dalcrose/6362529113/ via Creative Commons
I think you’re joking…but just in case you aren’t:
Just because something has two possible outcomes (you will either die today or you won’t), the odds of either occurring are not 50/50. If it were, 50% of the world’s population would die every day. If that were the case, at the end of a month there would be somewhere between 6 to 7 people left in the world.
This reminds me of a Stephen Colbert (maybe Jon Stewart?) segment where they were interviewing this guy back in the day about the likelihood of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the earth by creating the Higgs Boson particle. Physicists working on the project predicted the odds of this happening as so small they were negligible. An opponent of the collider argued that because the only two outcomes of the experiments were that it either would or wouldn’t end the world, there was a 50/50 chance we were all going to be destroyed. A bit of an over-simplification.
Oh, by the way…I’m buying 2 lottery tickets tomorrow. Since both tickets will either win or lose, they each have a 50/50 chance of winning. That being the case, one or the other is going to win. Private island, here I come!!!
@LuftigWarren I think you sort of got a bit tangled up in the numbers there, Luftig. Of course saying that we have a 50/50 shot is a gross simplification of a complex matter, that being, you know, life, existence, etc. My point is that you *could* end your journey at any point. You never know what might happen or when. So living life as if your chances were 50/50 every day can be an empowering way to get through life.
@margieclayman LOL! Nah, I get it…I am just a huge stats nerd and wanted to throw my 2 cents in. Great post, as always. 🙂
I wouldn’t say this is a joke at all – like any mnemonic, it’s a tool for confronting complex information in a simplified, digestible way.
I’d say, simply, any decision you want to make which cannot be answered “Yes” or “No,” usually means you don’t have enough information to make a clear choice.
@ianmrountree Thanks Ian. That’s pretty much what I was going for. 🙂
I’m not going to try and break down your statistics Margie, but just wanted to say that 50/50 was a great film and Joseph Gordon-Levitt totally should have won an Oscar.
@mikestenger Agreed.