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What if people had visible stats?

Asked by tom_g (16638points) April 9th, 2013

This is one of those “what if” questions that I usually avoid, so I feel strange asking it.

This question was inspired by a casual conversation I had a few years ago with a friend. I wondered how different things would be if every human had an expiration date on their forehead, that was guaranteed to be accurate? Would this have and an effect on how people treated each other? What if the person behind you in line at the market only had 2 days left? What if that screaming little 5 year old in the coffee shop having a tantrum only had 5 more years left, and would die of leukemia? It was an interesting thought experiment, and led me to the conclusion that I would likely treat people very differently if I knew when they were going to die. This is an uncomfortable realization to have, and I suspect many of us would likely act differently as well. But why? We already know that every stranger (of every age) we meet today will die. We know that many of them will die well before they reach the average life span.

Anyway, that is not really my question – although feel free to comment on that as well if you want. Inspired by that ridiculous expiration date thing, I was wondering how we would treat people if there were other visible stats on people. Say, for example, that loneliness could be measured on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 being the least amount of loneliness available for a human to experience, and 10 being the most amount of loneliness a human could experience. Let’s say we could see these stats when we looked at people…
– loneliness
– amount of current physical pain
– physical trauma experienced in the past
– emotional trauma experienced in the past
– confusion
– feelings of loss
etc…

How would those stats color our interactions with people we met?

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