But I’ll hazard a guess that the amount you need to spend to make it rather unlikely that you lose a lot of income >because of ill health isn’t terribly large.
Well another complicating factor—in my particular case—is that with chronic and especially mental health conditions, it’s actually very difficult to separate ‘preventative healthcare’ from frivolous spending. A lot of the things someone with my mental health might buy and do to keep them sane doesn’t look like healthcare spending at all. A lot of things that it is considered normal and even laudable to sacrifice for one’s education or career, especially when the latter is just beginning, such as sufficient sleep and leisure time, non-work-related social contact, etc are actually things where an insufficiency over more than a week or so will worsen my condition.
So you end up with people with conditions like mine spending money on things like ordering out to save time and energy, hiring help with the housework, paying frequently for travel to see friends—and it’s not clear, even to the person whose life it is, how much of that is sanity preservation and how much is just nice to have (and how much, if any, is nice-to-have but you tricked yourself into believing it was sanity-preservation).
But that’s a far more complicated question that I’m not going to ask people here to even attempt to answer.
Oh, if you have an already-existing condition—whether “physical” or “mental”, whether obvious at a glance or subtle and hidden—then of course it’s far more likely that there’s stuff you need to spend to keep yourself functioning well. I don’t think any reasonable person, inside or outside the EA movement, would have any objection to that. Even from a pure bullet-biting maximize-cash-flow-to-Africa perspective, you almost certainly do better to keep yourself functioning rather than giving everything you can in the short term and collapsing in a heap.
[EDITED to add: If whoever downvoted this is reading, I’d be interested to know why. I’m wondering whether I accidentally said something terribly insensitive or something.]
Well another complicating factor—in my particular case—is that with chronic and especially mental health conditions, it’s actually very difficult to separate ‘preventative healthcare’ from frivolous spending. A lot of the things someone with my mental health might buy and do to keep them sane doesn’t look like healthcare spending at all. A lot of things that it is considered normal and even laudable to sacrifice for one’s education or career, especially when the latter is just beginning, such as sufficient sleep and leisure time, non-work-related social contact, etc are actually things where an insufficiency over more than a week or so will worsen my condition.
So you end up with people with conditions like mine spending money on things like ordering out to save time and energy, hiring help with the housework, paying frequently for travel to see friends—and it’s not clear, even to the person whose life it is, how much of that is sanity preservation and how much is just nice to have (and how much, if any, is nice-to-have but you tricked yourself into believing it was sanity-preservation).
But that’s a far more complicated question that I’m not going to ask people here to even attempt to answer.
Oh, if you have an already-existing condition—whether “physical” or “mental”, whether obvious at a glance or subtle and hidden—then of course it’s far more likely that there’s stuff you need to spend to keep yourself functioning well. I don’t think any reasonable person, inside or outside the EA movement, would have any objection to that. Even from a pure bullet-biting maximize-cash-flow-to-Africa perspective, you almost certainly do better to keep yourself functioning rather than giving everything you can in the short term and collapsing in a heap.
[EDITED to add: If whoever downvoted this is reading, I’d be interested to know why. I’m wondering whether I accidentally said something terribly insensitive or something.]