The stories we tell ourselves enough time and we start believing them. It’s really important and required to stay focused on it, though sometimes we should critically think about those or discuss it openly and calibrate the beliefs. It doesn't really happen if you don't take time to think about it. (some are not even focused, but we don't even take time to think about them.) Those are invisible scripts.

Few things which we are kind of given without much of choice

• Nationality

• Religion

• Name

We never get a chance to choose or we don’t have any say in it. That means we hardly think about it and accept and move on. - There are other invisible scripts which are given to us based on the environment we grow up in - (though I don’t subscribe to all, I am here taking liberty to list from my observation)

Some of the items below are specific to Indian culture. 

• you hardly question parents, teachers and elderly

• liquor is bad

• arrange marriage (asian tradition - again, its updated lot in recent years)

• what you study in engineering or medical for 4 or 5 years, dedicate your entire life to that type of work (mostly)

• Always taking blessings from elders, sometimes from whom we don’t even respect due to various reasons (asian)

• Don’t take much risk.

• Based on financial profile. (you know that it's just one life, but you don't really realize or accept it. If you would act on it, you would do a lot of things differently.)

• Loans/debt are bad

More general ones -

• Have milk, tea or coffee for breakfast

• You have to go to school and college for first 12 to 16 years of life

• mostly no questions asked.

• You have to get married

• You have to have kids

• Buy home

• Practice religion

• 9-5 work, and stay near work (in the last few years it has changed due to good or bad reasons)

• All fruits are good. Juice is better than other drinks

• Wear traditional clothes in religious places, weddings, fancy restaurant

• Keep everyone happy

• celebrating birthdays and anniversaries with cake

• Closing eyes while praying (majority people don't know why we do it, that way)

Few items are good to follow the crowd wisdom, but not all and not always. It's like making a decision, we don't want to critically think about all the decisions, as otherwise we will waste a lot of time and the outcome is not that different even if you pause and think and decide. If your decisions are average outcome will also going to be average, anytime you are looking for long shot, thats the outlier, for that you can’t go with average input or go with wisdom of crowd. (not suggesting to drive on wrong lane) Another way to look at it is, if you want to make a wrong decision, ask everyone.

We approximately make 35,000 decisions in a day. A lot of those are made without much of the effort, we subconsciously put the decisions in different categories without realizing -

Impulsive (first option available), Compliance (not much choice), Delegating, Reflecting - this is where we can make a difference. Topic for another write up.

In my observation, we adjust super quickly relatively. On that next big thing, death of someone near by, big loss or big gain. lets go by example -

Covid or any other breaking news effect. How it starts with bang, goes slow as adjustment happens, and dies. We want things normalized, and as they say life goes on. As we can already see how quickly we all had adjusted kids doing school from home, we all working from home, ordering food online, doing marriage, funeral, birthdays and all kind of events on zoom.

Lets for sake of imagination, if dinosaur egg is found today somewhere on earth, first couple weeks story will run on front page, then some company or country try to make acquisition on it, Disney like company opens the jurassic park and people are not longer fearful, instead pay double dollar to visit and watch it. Or for matter of fact, if alien is found, how easy people will get adjusted and normalize the change. It will only be news for sometime and we all will adjust to the new normal.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

In my opinion it doesn’t serves purpose, overall the visits are more like to get blood work done and get to know some stats, probably heart condition check and some basic advice. What its missing is - detailed plan based on years, nutrition awareness - which is missing and in fact communicated in very boring manner. Also analyzing the indicators on year over year basis if any changes, learning more about life style choices and basic recommendations depends on age of the patient.

Just getting appropriate information for life style and diet can help patient as well improve their overall health. It's also not with one specific doctor, over the years I have visited at least three different offices, visit multiple doctors and that feels that its was mostly fees based visit and not much of more detailed conversation around health, but instead it was mostly everything is fine. Like how good my insurance is, the treatment I was given which sort of make sense, but even basics seems off.

For car, computer, home we get certain updates in real time if air pressure low, or engine signs, our body is I guess more important than this, but we don't get vital stats in real time.

My feeling is whats missing is incentive, there is literally no incentive for proactive treatment, most of the incentives kicks in when the person becomes patient, and thats huge burden overall on health care system, at that point incentives start shifting from insurance company to medical system. That has caused in last few years trend of paying employees/customers if they get their blood work done, goes to gym regularly, goes to yearly physical, as that seem to reduce the high cost tickets and it keeps the insurance side incentives intact compared to medical systems. Whats probably required is more proactive plans for people in younger age, healthy food choices, sleeping cycle, mental health resources and monitoring of various things which are relatively easy to track.