#because you can't predict when you'll physically be alone but it's almost inevitable that it happens from time to time

[uncanny-tranny]

Maybe the weirdest good that has come out of my aromanticism is that I just... appreciate how alone I am. I've learned to really evaluate how I view my time and how I spend it with myself, and it has enabled me to slowly try more and more things out of a desire to enjoy my own company and myself even more <3

[yokelfelonking]

We look on with horror - and rightly so - at the Canadian medical system's callous disregard for human life by basically offering euthanasia as an answer for everything.

The thing I don't think a lot of people realize is that, due to the upcoming demographic collapse, pretty soon this is probably going to be worldwide, and that this is almost inevitable.

The entire first world has an aging population without the birth numbers to replace it. That means that, in the not-too-distant future, there are going to be a lot more old people with failing health than there's going to be qualified caretakers for them.

I mean, that's already the case now. I had a job working in a nursing home / physical rehab facility for about six months (which was all I cared to do there), and it was me and two CNAs to 35 patients. And that's standard. There's plenty of places where the staffing ratios are even worse.

And the care in some of these places is atrocious. You'll hear horror stories about the state they find some people in in nursing homes, with no one having come to check on them for days as they lay helpless in bed, in their own piss and shit, bedsores down to the bone.

And that's with "professional" "medical" "care". Families aren't necessarily better; it's a lot harder to take care of a helpless adult than it is an infant, and despite attempts by family to take care of them, folks still wind up with bedsores and infections and all sorts of problems that do them in.

And if you've got no one then you're really fucked; or maybe less so, depending on how you look at it, because you might die quicker alone.

And it's not just nursing homes. People in need of more acute care are going to have less and less necessary time and attention spent on them as there's more and more of them and fewer and fewer people to care for them. Right now ICUs typically have a 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 ratio of nurses to patients. What happens when it becomes 1-to-6? What happens when the person in the ICU who needs to be tended to for 15 - 20 minutes of every hour is being looked after by someone who's got to split their time between 6 other patients? That person can't spend a third of an hour of individual care on six people at once; it's not physically possible.

"So just hire more help!" You understand that hiring doctors and nurses and other skilled medical staff isn't like hiring more people to stock the shelves at Target or work the register at Burger King, right? You need people with education and training and the ability to actually pass that education and training and the mindset that goes along with caring for people. And the more acute the care, the sharper that person has to be.

And my point is, even if it was that way, there's still going to be more old people in need of care than there's going to be people to care for them.

What's the staffing ratio going to be for nursing homes in 2050? One nurse to 80 patients? One to 100? Acute care units with one nurse to 20 patients - patients who are laid up in bed and can't get up and can't go to the bathroom and can't clean themselves and can't get their own food or water? Are we going to have ICUs with 1 nurse to 10 patients? At that point those won't be care facilities, they'll be warehouses for the dying.

And this is where euthanasia will be given as an answer. "We can't care for all of these people, who are simply dying slow deaths. The best we can do is make it quick and painless."

And it is a slippery slope. We can see it happening in Canada right now, how more and more people are being offered assisted suicide as the answer for what would be otherwise difficult or inconvenient medical issues.

My prediction is that by the year 2050 euthanasia will be a standard medical "treatment" for the elderly and anyone with chronic conditions.

And I legit don't have a good answer about that.