Life's Purpose

I have always been a firm believer that to be happy in life you must have a life purpose; a large, lofty goal to aspire to achieve that makes mere mortals cower in fear. It should be larger than life, seemingly impossible, and yet offer the ability to slowly chip away at it each and every day.

I’ve developed my own life purposes at a pretty young age and have continued to stick by them to this day, knowing that each and every ounce of effort I put into life today will eventually lead me to accomplishing all of them. The goals I set out for myself involve space, the environment, and pharmaceuticals. The efforts I put into building companies and products today is in hopes of being able to make measurable impacts, for the better, on those three industries with the resources I gain over time.

Something changed recently, which has added a new life’s purpose to my list; a purpose that I now have a strong personal conviction towards. My dog, Max, passed away just a few days ago due to a practically invisible battle with cancer. He was just 7 years old. It took us all by surprise and has rocked me to my core; I am absolutely heartbroken and the only solace I have is that he’s no longer suffering and fighting this invisible battle. The last few weeks have opened my eyes to the world of doctors and medicine, an industry I have largely avoided by focusing on engineering-adjacent subjects, and I am not impressed.

I should say, the doctors we dealt with were all amazing, caring, and wanted the best for both Max and us; this is not about them. This is about the blackhole that is biology, and the lack of observability we have into these biological systems. We went through a significant amount of tests, bloodwork, imaging, and checkups when he first showing signs of something being wrong just 3 short weeks ago. In this time, I spoke to at least 7 different doctors of varying specialities and experiences; fresh out of residency, decades of experience, and everything in between. None of them were able to really find a true and proper diagnosis for him until finally he was too sick to even breathe. At this point we had spent thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to get to the bottom of this (time and money I would’ve spent 10x over if we could’ve done anything to help him), but nobody had seen this coming. We were told he likely had 4-6 months left to live if untreated, just 12 hours before he passed away.

Once again, I don’t think this is a failure of the doctors. This is a failure of modern technological systems in hospitals, as well as the cost and complexity of operating them. As a Canadian, this was my first taste of a for-profit medical system, and while it has it’s benefits (we had same day imaging done twice), it started to show a lot of issues within the system. Namely, the hesitancy to do appropriate testing due to cost, which dramatically reduces the pool of public research and records veterinarians or doctors can call upon when analyzing a case. This means they can’t be as accurate as both they and us want them to be, which leads to a lot of guess work being done to try their best to figure out the best course of action. This leads to a lot of precious time being wasted just attempting trial and error with medications or procedures and seeing how the patient’s quality of life improves over short bits of time.

This shouldn’t be this hard, this expensive, or this opaque. There should be more technological breakthroughs in tooling available to doctors to understand what is happening inside of a patient. Similarly, researchers shouldn’t have to spend hours testing how cells react to certain bacteria in petri dishes. We should have cohesive and in-depth systems to model after living organisms which offer repeatability and observability. Our tooling for getting images, doing tests, and finding out exactly what is wrong with a patient should be quick and practically free. There shouldn’t be a debate on whether or not a test should be run for a patient for any factor beyond the freedom of choice; getting to the root cause of each and every problem will only help the patient, if they so chose to be helped, and will improve science.

Maybe it’s the engineer and programmer in me, but we should be able to debug humans as well as we can debug a computer system. Find the root cause quickly, apply a fix, and live a long and happy life thereafter.

I understand it’s not that simple. I understand there are complexities. I get that there have been years of research and work done in an effort to do exactly this and we have yet to obtain such a system; I get it. That’s why it’s a great life’s purpose.

People will call you crazy, they will laugh at your lofty goals; but that’s exactly what makes them worth fighting for. Chip away.