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A Year of Books: 2016

"Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" by Atul Gawande

263 pages
http://amzn.com/0805095152

About
In "Being Mortal", Gawande explains how the role of medicine in our life has changed over time. He focuses on the elderly and people with terminal diseases and gives a look at how modern medicine has changed the way we live in this last stage of life.

Before modern medicine, people used to follow a more natural path towards death. They usually died in their home and in a more peaceful state. Nowadays, modern medicine has given us the ability to cure many diseases but also to artificially extend people's life. The latter has caused a shift for more people to die in nursing homes or hospitals in less peaceful conditions and more stress than before.

In this book, he explores alternatives to these solutions, where the elderly or people with terminal diseases can preserve their independence, autonomy, and decide on the best way to die in order to have a life of quality over quantity. It's also a call to talk about these issues where he gives a set of tools to know how to have these conversations and talk about what's really important in our lives.
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera completed this card.
Top Quotes
1. “In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.” 

2. “A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

Top Learnings
1. Quality over Quantity: A life worth living is where we have a sense of meaning and autonomy over our future. When we lose these, we may end up suffering more by extending our life.

2.  Our time is finite, make the most out of it!