Globally Rational

Everybody occasionally feels depressed. Relationships… school… work… family… there is a plethora of reasons. You may be overwhelmed with more tasks than you have time for… or you may be struggling with a core belief in your basic life philosophy… or you may be upset because no way exists for you to get 7 hours of sleep tonight.

So what do you do?  Well, every single time I feel that life has been treating me unfairly… I promptly see a picture of Zambian Infant #1157.

I worked with a sample from Zambian Infant #1157 when I was doing HIV resesarch at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The sample was modified and a viral strain (known as SHIV1157) was produced… and whenever anybody talked about SHIV1157 or its derivatives, they thought of a virus. I’m not sure if anybody knew where the virus came from or why it was numbered as it was… I imagine that there were 2000 infants in a study and the 1157th one had an interesting viral strain.

Zambian Infant #1157, last time I checked, was 6 or 7 years old and still alive, battling HIV. He is one of the few infants born with HIV who manages to survive beyond a year or two. And his parents probably consider themselves lucky because his unique strain of HIV gets him special medical attention.

Zambian Infant #1157, an impoverished child who was born with HIV, is lucky. He is still alive at age 7 and his viral strain is used wordlwide in HIV research.

So what is “unlucky” in Zambia? And who am I to be upset about my bad stroke of luck?

I look to the right at the PowerBook that I recently convinced my boss to upgrade to a MacBook Pro, I look to the left at the Ford Taurus that I hate because it is one of the few cars that succeeds in mixing bad power with bad fuel economy, and I look above my head at the projector that I complain about because I don’t have cable TV and can’t watch the Cardinals play 162 times every year.

Until the day that I can’t afford to eat and my son is born with HIV, I am in no place to complain.

But people still do complain, and they all know about widespread problems like starvation and AIDS.  It seems that people’s problems are always relative to a baseline… once you become accustomed to a certain standard of living, you’re only happy if you’re living above that standard.  Once your income drops from $80,000 to $40,000 per year, even if you once lived happily on $40,000, you’ll be dissatisfied because you’re used to the $80,000 life.  If you lose your house because you had a subprime loan that you couldn’t afford, you’ll be dissatisfied despite the fact that you’re just back in the same place where you were before you bought the house.

How do we fix it?  Well, I think the only way is to realize that if you have the time and money to be reading this post on a computer, then you’re probably better off than most of the world.

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