I suspect every human is afflicted with a certain health issues, big or small. Doesn't matter how fit you are, there's always some form of sickness that bugs you all your life.

In my case it's dental issues and heat-related illness. It's a far cry from terminal situations many people have. The point is though it may not be the thing that ultimately kills you, it comes up frequent enough that it's character-defining.

So the question on my mind is what are the right mental models for dealing with them?

Do you take it like bad weather, being reactionary about it? This removes all forms of agency.

Do you live in fear of illnesses, do everything you can to prevent from triggering them? This makes a hardly fulfilling life.

Do you give the afflictions the middle fingers, eat drink and smoke whatever you like? Even if you're willing to suffer the consequences, people around you will have to pay a heavy price for your undoing.

It's common to think of your illnesses as an adversary to defeat. But perhaps they should be thought of as a trickster god.

The notion of a trickster god is rather uniquely ancient and Western. The East has never worshiped trickster god. This is as far as I know, I could be totally off about this.

Trickster demons might have been made up by the East but they are agents of chaos to be tamed, never examined and worshiped. That's tells you how much the East orientated toward order at great expense.

To think of illnesses as a trickster god takes a different attitude. First you need to respect it. That means giving it the right amount of acknowledgment, or eventually it's going to go postal. If you don't ignore it, maybe it will respect you back.

If you go too far with vices over time, the afflictions don't get enough respect, the trickster god plots his way to kill you slowly but surely.

But if you refrain from living out of fear, the trickster god wins. Can't have that.

So how do you find the balance? You test its limits, see how far you can take it before the body breaks. Thing is limits are elastic, they expand and contract based on practice and age. There's an entire industry of biohacking for doing this that's above my pay grade to talk about.

What this think-piece is about is the inner game for handling the relationship with illnesses. The closest modern allegory I can think of is the relationship between Batman and Joker.

Joker is the illness that Batman just couldn't shake. Batman may refuse to kill, and you're incapable of shaking your afflictions. Batman works hard to contain Joker as an agent of chaos, and that's the similar burden you have to carry with your illnesses too.

I think there comes a point where Batman embraces Joker's existence the same way Joker came into existence through Batman's emergence. You might someday think the same of your illnesses.

It's been said that a hero is only as worthy as his arch nemesis. Having a human nemesis might be a luxury few can afford. An affliction could be the next best thing if you know how to wield it into a worthy adversary.