On Inviting Others into Your Game of Outliving Cancer

On Inviting Others into Your Game of Outliving Cancer

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Bless!

This perspective piece is a continuation of a prior article On the Gamification of Cancer Survival. Today, I hope to show you how you can use the social basis of human behaviour and wellbeing to improve your odds of survival and quality of life. The best thing about it? You get to do it with the people you love.

We humans are fascinating creatures, first of all, but we are also intensely social and communal animals.¹ In fact, for most of human prehistory, we lived in bands of multiple dozens to multiple hundreds of individuals, which collaborated in everything from food over protection from predators to rearing of children.

Nowadays, we live largely as atomised so-called ‘nuclear families’ or – even worse for our psychological health – alone. Humans aren’t solitary animals. Far from it, in fact. We are ferociously social. We tell stories, spin myths, eat together, and we almost certainly used to do more together than just that.

Both our psychology and our physiology is negatively affected by social isolation and discrimination, so much so, that socially isolated individuals have an increased risk of mortality across societies of various affluence than do individuals with more robust social networks.^2–3 This shouldn’t be surprising much. When have you last been entirely alone and isolated fromall of your fellow humans? Have you ever? Probably not. And if you ever have, how did you feel with it? Great? I reckon not.

If we want to get you to outlive cancer, which I believe we both want, we must address social isolation, but not simply for general nebulous reasons. There is hard evidence, that higher adrenergic and corticoid tone, is not just epidemiologically associated with higher cancer mortality, but is also mechanistically indicated in cancer cell survival, progression, and immune evasion in multiple cancer types.^4–9

Yeah… So, let’s get rid of stress as much as possible.

You may expect me here to talk about meditation, prayer, and massages or some such things, but I won’t. All of these can help with stress, but they’re mostly band aids, not actual fixes. Again, we are fiercely social and communal creatures. We thrive in close-knit, deep connections with multiple dozens to multiple hundreds of fellow humans. We thrive best, when we have a lot of people to love and to love us. That’s the simple fact of the matter.

So… how can we leverage that toward your efforts of outliving your diagnosis?

Well, the most effective way of doing that is to involve the people you love and who love you into your efforts of outliving your disease. And the cool part about gamifying your survival of cancer rather than making a war of it? You get to invite the people you love into a game instead of a fight to the death. The former can be made enjoyable; the latter decidedly can’t.

I know of examples, where cancer patients – and patients of other chronic ailments – don’t even tell their spouses and children about their disease. I’ve seen it first hand in a family living close by and how the eventual revelation to the children felt like stark betrayal to them. Of course, it would. How couldn’t it? I mean, imagine how you’d feel, if your spouse or parent elected not to tell you about a life-altering and -threatening illness they’re struggling with. How would you feel? Wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t you want to be involved? Wouldn’t you want to help? Wouldn’t you want to take some of their burden?

Of course, you would! How could you not?

And I’m not a betting man, but even so, I’d wager a significant sum that any and every single one of the people, who love you would very much like to know about your disease, would like to be involved in your game to overcome it, would want to help you emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, would want to take some of your burden. Just as you’d want to be allowed to do the same for them.

Why is this? Because contrary to free-market beliefs, we aren’t basally economical, transactional creatures. Rather, we’re highly social, communal, and transformative creatures. Not out of altruism, but because entirely egoistically, it’s the best way to go for our species, both evolutionarily in the context we evolved in and contemporarily in the contexts we live in. How much less of a burden would it be if everyone around you helped you in your efforts? I wager it would be almost magically less strenuous and stressful.

Sure, the game would still be stressful to some extend. That’s natural. But, I would bet that it would be far less stressfulnot having to keep that game hidden from your loved ones, and far more enjoyable to share this experience with them, even though neither you nor they ever chose to participate in this sordid game.

Besides, what have you got to lose? They’ll hardly hate you for sharing.

Swift healing and lasting health to you.

God bless,
Merlin L. Marquard