“How and why did I get cancer?”, “Why me?”, “Will I be able to surmount this adversity?” are questions that a cancer patient thinks about. Medical staff, family members, friends, and the broader community of people pulling the affected out of the situation will wonder at those same dilemmas. Living with, surmounting, and bouncing back bigger from cancer is a team sport. Teams of people need inspiring, uplifting stories to propel them forward and distort reality in their favor. This post develops our story of how we, as a team, will not only pull me through cancer but create social good for other patients through my chemo journey. If and when I have more energetic time in this game of life, we will publish books, invent therapies, build businesses, self-organize DAOs, and positively influence humanity.
Living with, surmounting, and bouncing back bigger from cancer is a team sport. Teams of people need inspiring, uplifting stories to propel them forward and distort reality in their favor… The story need not be grand, but it needs to connect, inspire and uplift. I cover the story of my cancer and then why I chose this story.
Humans are the only species that can cooperate flexibly and in vast numbers. A city of 10 million people is orchestrated action that can survive hundreds of years. This is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We can do this because we invent and collectively believe in stories¹. Everything from nation-states to corporations to football teams to human rights to religions to liberty to money itself is fiction. These concepts have no basis in physical matter or the tangible — they belong to the ethereal world of storytelling.
What is the American Dream? A story that diverse disenfranchised people can come to America, where other people value certain ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, and equality) and get an opportunity to be successful. As long as enough people believe in, nay hallucinate the fiction, talented immigrants arrive, work hard and provide each other the opportunity they were seeking.
What is SpaceX? A story that we can travel to and live on Mars, with as yet unbuilt/unknown technologies, and that a group of maverick nerds led by Elon Musk will accomplish that goal. If enough maverick nerds hallucinate the fiction and dedicate their lives to it, coordinating tirelessly, it will actually happen.
What are human rights? If you dissect a human, you’ll see lungs, hearts, kidneys but no rights. These are fictions that every person ought to have — the right to a fair trial, protection against enslavement, etc. As long as we all believe in them and support causes to protect them, then the average person’s life improves materially.
A cancer patient, and the community around them, needs a story of their cancer and their recovery from it. The story need not be as grand as the ones we’ve covered, but it needs to connect, inspire and uplift. I cover the story of my cancer and then why I chose this story.
The story of my blood cancer
How odd is it that a successful biotechnologist crypto-entrepreneur, with a fascination for life extension, is placed as a cancer patient?
This universe behaves as a training ground for me. My initial assignment was to give me good birth in a developing nation. I trained and performed really well from that starting point. I got into the best university possible, did well in student leadership, learned basic chemical engineering and biotechnology. Then, I worked for a pharmaceutical giant, lived in five different nations, started a family, made the maverick decision to switch into cryptocurrency, did well as an entrepreneur in that alien field, and accumulated capital. I dreamt of building a life extension company and personally living to 150. I was grinding away at a theory of human aging to base that effort. We hold together as a loving family, and I have a supportive network of friends. My business partner is fantastic, and I adore the crypto community.
So, this intelligent universe decided to test me and simultaneously allow me to grow way beyond where I would have tread in the ordinary course. It’s test: A carefully considered form of blood cancer. This is the second assignment in my training.
How odd is it that a successful biotechnologist crypto-entrepreneur, with a fascination for life extension, is placed as a cancer patient? For pre-cancer Meher at 32, life extension was a distant desire. For post-cancer Meher at 33, life extension is the need of the hour. It accelerates everything I was already headed towards and gives me razor-sharp focus. It provides me with a perspective few other young people have — that of being an early-adopter cyborg, of being dependent on machines to survive the day in day out. It gives me a visceral empathy for the suffering that life extension seeks to solve. It is the perfect testing and training module for me at age 33.
I will make the best of this training module. Soak up knowledge of everything consequential around similar patient cancers. I will use this shock, this magnificent bolt of energy, to engage in creation: some creation, probably this chemo diary, to improve the lives of everyone in my shoes.
Why this story?
There are two main types of responses possible for any sizeable external shock: Either focus on dissipating the damage produced by surprise or concentrate on altering your identity in a way that you can leverage the shock to emerge stronger.
Your partner of 2 years left you for another person? You can focus on preserving your ego. You will erect barriers against other people in the future because that defense mechanism is needed to contain the damage produced by the shock.
The alternative is to mutate radically and yet gracefully: change in calculated ways that make it easier to attract and retain partners. Mutation requires casting aside old beliefs, habits, friends and may lead to an overhaul of identity. The correct modifications allow you to perceive the shock not as a shock, but as an opportunity.
Your society is beset with Covid and had to bring economic activity to a halt? The leadership can focus on printing money to keep festering companies, institutions, and old money afloat. Or it can totally change tack, accept that a significant structural mutation must happen, and invest in UBI, remote work/university/X, and biotech research. People, marriages, companies, cities, institutions, ideas, religions, and crypto networks face similar choices in the face of shock.
A cancer diagnosis is a substantial shock. When I think about my prognosis, I break it down into the fortunate case, the battle of attrition case, and the transcendent case. In the fortunate case, chemo will work on my body over the next 2 years and give me a 10–20 years life extension without any additional continual procedures. I will use these years to find or invent an insurance therapy against my own cancer and go on for more. The battle of attrition case is when chemo works short term (2 years), then cancer returns, and I am back to square one and so on. It’s multiple life-death struggles that must be borne by the body and mind one by one until maybe a targeted therapy clicks. And then, there is the transcendent case where death must be greeted like an old friend early. I don’t know the odds of either of these cases — that data will materialize over the following months when the impact of chemotherapy on my cancer is better understood.
My response, the only possible response I know how to have, is to regress. Become a child and a teenager. Look at the world with wonder, go forth in it with curiosity, make myself plastic, ever ready for calculated mutations. The belief system most aligned with such regression is to think of the universe itself as a university and cancer merely a test assignment. And in that innocence and willingness to soak knowledge, I will find the genius to convert this shock into usable energy and engage in a burst of creation.
And thus, at age 33, I herewith become a teenager studying at the School of Blood Cancer. But it won’t be just study — I will write up every nugget of trustable research insight I find into how to handle chemotherapy gracefully, alleviate graft versus host disease and other practical matters touching the lives of cancer patients. My first homework assignment is to improve our collective experience as cancer patients.
¹ The importance of storytelling for humanity’s progress is from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens.
