We're All Gonna Die!

Posted on September 02, 2022 by Amy Sellers, One of Thousands of Family Coaches on Noomii.

Yes. It’s true. In the meantime, I’d also like to live. Except, nobody wants to let me live–they all want to remind me of how I’m going to die, or how I’m going to cause my children to die.

I was packing my kid’s lunch the other day, and tossed in a little Debbie cake with a smile and stroke of endearment, when I happened to glance at my kid’s class newsletter on the table. A blurb on the newsletter informed me that if I feed my child twinkies, I might as well be feeding them rocket fuel. Rocket fuel, sheet rock, and twinkies are made out of the same things. If you consume rocket fuel, you are sheet rock and if you are sheet rock, you will die. I am killing my child.

I thought of replacing his snack with an apple. But I didn’t have organic apples, and hence, they were nutritionless, in addition to being miniscule death bombs, just like twinkies. Buying non-organic apples will kill the earth by causing soil erosion, and will kill my son because they are flush with toxins and pesticides. Good thing he doesn’t like apples. But and apple a day keeps the doctor away. Except, they will also kill him.

A few months ago, I was sitting on the couch enjoying some cookies and cream ice-cream when I saw an article in my newsfeed that said a new study shows that to rats, Oreos are more addictive than cocaine. So, Oreos will kill me, because I am just like a rat. And of course cocaine is equal to Oreo goo, and cocaine kills rats. So, Oreos kill people.

I was at my obligatory well check visit last week for my baby and told my pediatrician that my infant was exclusively breast fed and loving life. She looked me square in eye and asked if I’d heard about the latest study? Apparently we can’t love life yet, because my breastmilk doesn’t have enough Vitamin D. She anxiously gave me a free sample of the life saving drops to add to my breastmilk. So now my baby will grow stronger bones than my other children, which means he won’t have a hunchback when he’s 74. But, no worries, neither will the other kids, because they’ll all be dead, because they were breastfed without Vitamin D drops. Now I know the truth about why my first child broke her leg and another one is small. If only I had known about Vitamin D earlier.

I came home from a refreshing morning run a couple weeks ago and was stretching when my husband informed me of the latest research on running. If I run too much, it is worse than not moving at all. Ever. If you never move, you may as well be dead, and running too much is worse than that. So running is worse than being dead.

I was at a play group last summer, spraying my children with sunscreen when I overheard some moms talking about the latest study on sunscreen. We’re supposed to use sunscreen because if we don’t, we’ll die of skin caner. But we shouldn’t use spray-on sunscreen because if we do, and then we breathe, we’ll contract asthma, which restricts our breathing. Luckily, the asthma means we won’t be breathing sunscreen anymore. But we’ll still die because we’re not breathing. But at least it won’t be from skin cancer.

I was happily eating an egg sandwich with a side of bacon the other day, when me-saw the viral article containing the 10 foods Americans regularly consume that no other country will touch with a 10-foot pole. What?! I’m eating ractopamine disguised as a pig, which causes chromosomal abnormalities and erratic behavior changes? I’m eating potassium bromate disguised as bread, which is linked to kidney and nervous system disorders? And I am eating arsenic disguised as a baby chicken, which is a blood vessel enhancing notorious poison? How did my grandpa who gambled with life every day during breakfast on the family farm avoid spontaneous mutation whilst each of his pork-induced multiple personalities died a slow and painful death? Must have just been luck. Because dressed up pigs and baby chickens encapsulated by kidney-hating fluff are now my executioners.

Okay. So, I get it. And I’m with you. I too would love for me, my children, and my children’s children to die peacefully in our sleep at the age of 99 after having completed a vigorous session of Zumba and a mind-blowing, expert level crossword puzzle the day before. But in our obsessive quest to ensure an ideal, high-quality death in the future, we are hi-jacking our shot at a joyful and high quality life in the present.

I’ve known families living in debt because they will only eat, clean with, and bathe in things organic. I’ve known parents who can’t hold down jobs because they practically live in the ER and prescription drive-thru, running in over every single sniffle. I’ve known couples who can’t go out to eat and I’ve had friends afraid of social gatherings because no restaurant or party will cater to their special dietary whims.

Who wants to live this way?! I understand that there are some legitimate scenarios where diets and lifestyles really do need to be adjusted. But for the most part, all of this, which began as an innocent attempt to be wise, cautious, and healthy, is now getting completely out of hand. Even worse, we’re running on information that is often false. If it were true, if I really believed this stuff had a significant chance of altering my life, or death, for the better, you may have me halfway on board. But the thing is, most of it is not true, or only partially true. And what is considered “true” today may be false tomorrow.

Take, for example, the article where the author tries to convince us that choosing to hold your child on your lap on an airplane is akin to climbing “the side of a sheer mountain with your baby in one arm and a pickaxe in the other.” Yes. Exactly the same thing. Except that in one instance the chance of death is about 95%, and in the other, the chance of death equals about .00002%.

And this was published on USA Today in all of its sophisticated glory. Real adult human beings on planet earth are falling for the blatant, fear-mongering tactics of those driven by profit, power, or even misinformation that they themselves are fed–all vying for our dedicated readership. And it’s controlling our lives.

What we see in these articles is almost always consistent across the board. The news, the studies, and the quotations tend to either leave out numbers or masterfully disguise the real numbers to be something far beyond what they are. We’re told things like, “You’re 10 times more likely to die if…” While this may be true, when you dig a little deeper and do the real math, ten times a minuscule number still equals a minuscule number. The differences in health, safety, disease-prevention, and life-preservation almost always end up being nearly negligible.

As just one example of the formulaic click-baiting and bad reporting I am talking about, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen articles shouting that drinking diet soda will cause cancer. But when I actually did the research using primary sources–and by research, I don’t mean reading anecdotal evidence, websites that have a clear agenda either way, secondary sources, people’s opinions, or any of the other easily-accessible but so often non-factual junk you can find on the internet–I found that most of the claims were just outright absurd. For “diet soda causes cancer” to be even remotely true, I would have to be a rat who was injected with obscene and impossible amounts of artificial sweetener–every day throughout my life–and then just maybe I could get cancer. But, the headlines and 500 internet commenters tell me it will happen, hence, it must be true, right?

So, for the extremely remote possibility that drinking soda might actually cause cancer, one will avoid soda like the plague for the rest of their life and preach these gruesome, half-truth, cancer-filled details to their soda-loving friends and family at the risk of annoying or offending to the point of self-alienation. Never mind the newest study saying that cancer is usually the result of just plain old bad luck (and yes, don’t take that at face value either).

Are you following me? Please say you are. Because it needs to stop. The latest mind-boggling, manipulative, irrational-fear-inducing articles, offering gross misinterpretations of vague numerical summaries–these aren’t going to stop. But we can stop. We can stop falling for the scare-tactics and use a little critical thinking. It’s not that hard to do the research, to find the primary sources, to do the math–and as a result, to be able to quiet the fear and look at things with a bit more perspective.

I am still running outside, sometimes without sunblock on. The same son that ate his Twinkies also licked sheet rock last summer, no joke. And last night, in a fit of rebellion, I threw out the Vitamin D drops, and made Oreo milkshakes while snacking on a genetically engineered apple. To top it all off, I still occasionally fly on an airplane, with a child in my lap, while enjoying some carbonated poison. Not only are we all miraculously alive, but we’re generally in good health and loving life, despite our risky lifestyle.

Don’t get me wrong, we try to eat nutritious meals at our family dinners, we all buckle up in the car, and we did our best to honor covid precautions. It’s called using good judgment, moderation in all things…LIVING. Even so, we’re all still gonna die. But for the love of all things that are beautiful and amazing in life, please, let us live!