I've had to think about this a lot lately and came to accept it, even look forward to it.
If you ever get a brain tumor, cancer, or a painful degenerative disease that destroys your ability to perform the true passions you've finally found in your life, and you're in chronic pain, and watch everything you've worked for get sucked away into the medical system, with insurance, it's more than crushing. It's the most comprehensive fucked you can experience. The depth of fucked can't even be described until you experience it. Passions of life unattainable, income dries up, bills pile up, pain progresses and is persistent every waking second.
I've got 6 classes left for my degree (and debt) after figuring my life out and going back to school at 26, and I probably won't be able to use it if I can even complete the classes which I haven't been able to for 4 weeks.
I made video games and have been a programmer for 3+ years, can't do it as of 2 months ago. That was my real passion after trying a lot of things, kept me up at night thinking about it, happy all the fucking time, it was the most liberating and empowering ability I've found in life to be able to combine every creative aspiration you can come up with into a visual, playable, media for tablets/smartphones or PC, web browser, whatever, from anywhere, any country, from a boat, from the beach, fml.
Now I'm hanging sheetrock and doing odd jobs where I don't have to interact with people (extremely painful, I have narcotics just for when I have to go interact with people, which fuck you up being all high and trying to think clearly), I can just go do the project as I can(I used to have my general contractors license and I became friends with a client and he throws me jobs I can do as an individual to put money in my pocket), it's what I did before school. But then it all gets sucked away in co-pays just to see the doctor. $40 for a consultation, $40 to come back and take the test, $40 to come back and get the results of the test and schedule more tests. More than 20x doctor visits in past 10 months, plus I had to start a tab at the hospital to make payments for all my medical debt insurance doesn't cover.
So yeah, I started cleaning up some of my messes, thinking that if I do die, I don't want to leave my gf and her family to dispose of old herb matter and the dirt I've piled up, same with nasty shit that piled up in my car from job sites.
I was also working on an algorithm of what's worth living for, giving points or subtracting points for things like "is parent still alive, +500, only 1 parent? +250, loss of life passion #1,2,3, -200 each, then figure out a cut score where I'll just have a party with friends, maybe take a trip, then take heroin and a psychoactive when shit gets to a certain point.
Probably hard to really understand until you have persistent pain, lose functionality, and face brain surgery that may leave you worse off.
And if you develop a condition that requires long term treatment, regular imaging, radiation, etc it doesn't matter how much money you have, it's just a matter of how much longer it takes to be sucked away as you lose employment opportunities and drain yourself, while facing medical bills with insurance. Radiation, etc all that shit just takes whatever you have, 10k, 50k, 100k, doesn't matter.
I've been a landlord for 9 years, don't qualify for any assistance unless I dump everything and completely destroy everything I've ever worked for. I still haven't defaulted on anything yet, but I've been down to borrowing $20/mo to cover my bills after what little work I can do. Have had to skip weeks of herb because I couldn't afford the $40 for an 1/8.
I've had a really good life, did what I wanted, tried everything I wanted(various crazy businesses), traveled a lot, had a boat, money, etc. I'm content.
And yet I'm still positive, shit happens, work with what you got, but at some point it's time to start over and re-roll in real life....
