I Lied When I Said We Did Everything We Could

Facing one's own mortality carries a tacit knowledge of death that can't be got by other means. It's one thing to think about it intellectually, to sort of turn it around in your mind. But it doesn't give you a sense of death. I can tell from your treatment of it that you haven't. And that you hold up this sort of deeply personal interaction as a demonstration of some problems you believe you've identified with an entire culture, I think shows of a different kind of callousness of heart.

> If he literally created the universe and all the laws of nature, couldn’t he create such a concept?

What is not, is not. Omnipotence means "being able to do anything that is possible to do", not "being able to do anything that is possible to be spoken of". Re-stating your argument:

* "He could even make a square circle" * "He could even tell a true falsehood" * "He could even do that which contradicts itself"

Making a rock too large to lift is "He could even make something that He could not control". What you have wound up rhyming with is Anselm's argument for the existence of God [1] - for if your god can make a rock to heavy for him to lift, then there exists a greater omnipotence that could lift that rock. Therefore, your god is not omnipotent, and is not god.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proslogion#Faith_Seeking_Under...

I am married to a ICU physician. Neurological Critical Care is their ultimate specialty, but they practice in all parts of the critical care system: Emergency->ICU/Neuro ICU.

It's a very emotionally and mentally taxing job. Basically nothing that arrives under your care is good news. Often you know the potential outcomes before anyone else, including the other physicians who are sending someone in to your care. A large portion of the job is telling other specialities "No", either because they haven't done their job or because the case is "non survivable". This is necessary because you have a very limited number of beds in an ICU and if you fill one, someone else might very well die while waiting to be prioritized in. Because of all that, you are almost never the 'hero' in the story. The very best you hope for is that people acknowledge that you were able to keep someone alive long enough to get the treatment they ultimately need, or you were able to stabilize them enough to move to a step-down or palliative care department.

Then there are the families. The vast majority seem (based on my external observation) seem to grasp what is happening and make reasonable decisions. There are some amount of them however, who are completely ignorant of the pain and suffering they are imposing on their loved one. Over time it seems like a young ICU physician goes from seeing these families as ill-informed and possibly well meaning to seeing them as selfish and uncaring.

Externally I would say that it seems like groupthink is almost always a component of the decision making process. In a setting where just a single partner or other person is making a decision, they have a lot of empathy, if it is a family or group, they have empathy for eachother, but not for the patient. At least not in the way they think they do.

I'm not sure where I am going with this other than to say that as an observer to this almost every day, this article really just scratches the surface of this issue. I shared it with my partner and another ICU physician and their reaction was "that's minor leagues after a while, but your first few do always stick with you" to "I don't know why I even do this job."

Current example: 87 year old patient, already has metastatic cancer, had a stroke and is being "maintained" entirely by machinery. The family "Doctor, you have to do everything, we want her to make it to her 90th birthday"

Can I also interpret it as “wow, I must have really fucked up if God wanted the total opposite of what I wanted the last time around?”

Hold your horses a bit, you can't make such blank statements about somebody who you don't know at all. People are so vastly different and unique inside that what works for you and defines you might have little to no meaning to next guy. What you consider an important marker of some aspect of personality might be lacking elsewhere, yet the aspect itself might be very well there.

Psychedelic drugs can give you perspective on, well almost everything that nothing else in western culture comes even close to. Or might not, as said we are so unique that no blanket statement can express the truth.

As for me, doing some rather extreme sports puts me to situation with imminent fear of death (ie climbing hundreds of meters above ground, used to have strong vertigo all my life), that one becomes well-aware and content with it. Maybe not every climber, but definitely me.

If I experience my parents/life partner passing in my hands, it will be a tough moment. But I will manage it, no doubt there. Same goes for rest of close people. If you expose yourself to extremes, you become familiar with how you react to them, and also in managing them.