Your probability estimates about how many years of health you’ll have have changed considerably, so you wouldn’t expect to continue with the exact same behavior.
For instance, if you’ve been working on something that would take you several more years of good health to accomplish, you might want to spend a month finding someone to carry it on for you who’s similarly motivated and making it easier for them to carry it on.
Or you might decide that you don’t care about that long-term goal enough to justify the time and effort it would take away from other things that are more important for you to do in your life, but that you would have spread out over a longer timespan if you were going to live longer and accomplish a number of less-important goals or ones that are only achievable if you have more time to work on them.
You might also realize that the things you want are considerably different than the ones you thought you wanted. Maybe that was previously “playing the game wrong”, but I can’t see how a human could rule out the possibility of themself having a change in outlook/values/expectations after getting such news, which may have an impact on basic motivations as well as shifting attention from old lines of thinking, which they may have tried to make very rational, to ones that they may have been neglecting—and I seriously doubt anyone lacks these. Shifts in where they reason and rationalize.
/shrugs
What are some suggestions for approaching life rationally when you know that most of your behavior will be counter to your goals, that you’ll know this behavior is counter to your goals, and you DON’T know whether or not ending this division between what you want and what you do (ie forgetting about your goals and why what you’re doing is irrational and just doing it) has a net harmful or helpful effect?
I’m referring to my anxiety disorder. My therapist recently told me something along the lines of, “But you have a very mild form of conversion disorder. Even though your whole body gets paralyzed, whereas you could function with just a hand paralyzed, most people with the disorder aren’t aware that it has a psychological cause, and they worry about it all the time, going to doctor after doctor to try to get a physical cure.” It doesn’t FEEL mild when I’ve been barely able to move for eight hours and finally get going enough to log onto the computer and waste time browsing online. Insight can be painful when you have so long to dwell on it.
My current thinking is that the best way to get what I want out of life is to get treatment, which I am doing, and to keep an optimistic view of my ability to be non-disabled. It’s gotten a lot better, but I still spend a considerable amount of time making very bad decisions, or having the anxiety make them for me.