A RAY OF HOPE: I’m sure you’ve all heard that Steve Jobs
died of pancreatic cancer, and technically, this is true.
He died of respiratory arrest due to a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
But, maybe, he didn’t have, or atleast he could’ve delayed his death by years if not
even a decade.
You see, while Steve Jobs did have pancreatic cancer, there was a silver lining in that
he had a special form of pancreatic cancer caused by islet cells.
Regular pancreatic cancer only has a 5-year survival rate of 1.8%, but islet cell tumors
have a 5-year survival rate of up to 93%.
Something that swung the odds even more in Jobs favor was that he found the cancer extremely
early.
Jobs wasn’t even at the stage at which he was experiencing symptoms due to the cancer.
In 2003, he was actually suffering from kidney stones, and when doctors performed a CT scan,
they just happened to notice a shadow on his pancreas.
So, if Jobs took quick action, he could have very well extended his lifespan by a substantial
amount, but he chose not to.
In fact, he consistently delayed medical treatment over and over again for the rest of his life.
For example, given Steve Jobs wealth and status, he probably could’ve scheduled a surgery
within a week of finding the tumor.
But instead, he decided to wait 9 months by which point the cancer had already spread
to his liver.
Another example of Jobs’ stubbornness was when he refused a liver transplant from Tim
Cook despite desperately needing one.
Jobs said that he didn’t want his body to be opened and that he didn’t want to be
violated in that way.
And while that’s understandable, this was literally a choice between life an death.
Also, I don’t think anyone wants to be violated in that way.
People go through these procedures because they have to.
But instead, Jobs felt that the best course of action was to stay on a strict vegan diet
and use herbal remedies and acupuncture.
While these choices may offer benefits in day to day life, there’s virtually no scientific
evidence that they help with cancer.
And given that Jobs was the founder and CEO of what would eventually become the largest
company in the world, you would think that he was extremely rational and objective with
these choices.
But, that was far from being the case.
People that knew him speculate that he felt that the problem would just disappear if he
ignored it.
This line of reasoning had worked for him in business in the past.
After all, his job was to literally create unimaginable products and convince the world
to use them.
But, this approach didn’t quite work within the medical industry.
Aside from Jobs reality distoration glasses, something that was pushing Jobs to make these
choices was his spiritual life and especially his beliefs regarding Buddhism and the afterlife.
Jobs even said “Maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife.
That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.
The wisdom you’ve accumulated.
Somehow it lives on.”
So, here’s the story of how Jobs developed these spiritual beliefs and how they eventually
played a role in his demise.
THE HIPPIE: Taking a look back, Jobs spiritual beliefs
predate his cancer by decades.
In fact, he was a hippie for basically his entire life which is not that surprising given
the time period in which he grew up.
If you’re not familiar with hippies, these were a group of people that rejected traditional
middle class life which they felt was dominated by materialism and repression.
Instead they embraced openness, peace, and experimentation.
They were known for vegetarian diets, holistic medicine, and of course psychedelics.
Jobs was especially interested in the latter and regularly experimented with them throughout
his late teenage years.
For him, this wasn’t just a matter of getting “high” or trying to live life more fully,
but it was actually a coping mechanism that he used to deal with the pain that his birth
parents abandoned him.
According to Jobs, psychedelics along with primal screaming opened up stored trauma in
the medulla.
Jobs took many of these habits and beliefs with him to Apple.
One frowned upon habit that he took with him was his tendency to not take showers.
Jobs believed that his commitment to a vegan diet meant that he had flushed out all of
the mucus from his body.
So, theoretically, he believed that he shouldn’t have a body odor and that he didn’t need
showers.
Ironically, this is not even true.
Vegan diets tend to skew away from proteins which play a significant role in the body’s
detoxification process.
So, Jobs’ vegan diet likely meant that he should’ve taken more showers, not less.
And let’s just say his coworkers strongly agreed.
Another unique trait of Jobs was his tendency to walk around barefoot.
He felt that walking around helped him think and be more creative, and there is some truth
to this.
Moving around does energize our brains and it reduces stress making it easier to focus
on singular thoughts and ideas.
But, Jobs didn’t just walk barefoot, he did some weird things barefoot.
Jobs liked to sink his feet into cold water to destress, and this seems completely harmless
at first, and it should be if done like a normal person.
Maybe you could fill a bowl up with water or maybe even buy a pedicure bowl.
But instead, Jobs sunk his feet into toilets at the office.
I suspect that this only made his body odor worse.
It wasn’t just his body that he did these weird experiments on either.
Jobs also practiced his hippie anti establishment mindset in other facets of his life as well
like his car.
Jobs wasn’t a fan of having a license plate on his car for some reason.
When questioned about it, he simply said that he didn’t have a licence plate because he
didn’t have a license plate.
The way that he made this work was by getting new leases every six months.
California law allowed people to not have a license plate for the first six months after
getting a new car, and Jobs exploited this loophole until he died.
It wasn’t till 2019 that California finally patched this loophole.
While all of these likely just seem like odd quirks, Jobs strongly believed in each and
every one one of them.
And these unorthodox choices carried over to his medical choices as well.
THE BUDDHIST: If you thought Jobs’ hippie behavior itself
was extreme, then you haven’t heard about his spiritual life.
From his college days, Jobs was especially interested in Buddhism.
This interest was initially sparked out of necessity as opposed to curiosity.
You see, as a broke college student, free food was a gift.
And, one of the places that offered free food was the Hare Krishna temple near Reed college.
Every Sunday, Jobs walked seven miles to the temple just to get free food.
But, very soon, he walked away with much more than just food.
Jobs became especially interested in Mahatma Gandhi and a Hindu sage named Neem Karoli
Baba.
Pretty soon, Jobs was talking to his friends about this sage and his teachings.
And given that most of his friends were hippies themselves, they were pretty open to ideas
of peace and enlightenment.
Eventually, they would get to a point where they wanted to go meet Neem Karoli Baba in
real life, but they just had one issue: they were still broke.
But, as fate would have it, an opportunity would arise.
At the time, Jobs was working as a consultant at a game development company called Atari.
One of their most popular games was pong, you’ve probably played it.
Pong gave Atari international notoriety and a company from Germany would buy a whole warehouse
full of circuit boards from Atari.
Unfortunately though, Atari didn’t quite make a good first impression given that half
the boards didn’t end up working out of the box.
Naturally, the German company wasn’t very happy and they wanted someone to come out
there a fix them.
Initially, Atari’s founder Nolan Bushnell sent over a tech guy to Germany, but this
guy just made things worse, so Nolan turned to Jobs.
He told Jobs that he would book him a first class round trip ticket to Germany and a 5
star hotel if he could go fix this issue.
Jobs agreed to take the job, but he had one condition.
He wanted a one way ticket to Germany and wanted the rest of the travel expenses in
cash.
Additionally, he negotiated that once the job was done, he was gone and that’s exactly
what happened.
He finished the job in Germany and he went to India with Dan Kottke.
Unfortunately though, India didn’t quite live up to his expectations.
First of all, the guy they were trying to meet, Neem Karoli Baba, had already died a
year before this, and they simply hadn’t heard the news yet.
Jobs also quote “found India far poorer than he had imagined and was struck by the
incongruity between the country's condition and its airs of holiness."
But, by far the worst part of the trip was the constant sickness.
The duo picked up lice, infections, and worst of all, uncontrollable diarrhea.
By the end of the trip, Jobs had lost a bunch of weight, but what he didn’t lose was his
belief.
While his belief in Hinduism decreased, his belief in Buddhism became stronger than ever.
REFUSING SURGERY When Jobs returned to the United States, he
implemented many buddhist principles into his day to day life.
One of his strongest Buddhist beliefs was that everything happens for a reason and that
nothing is random.
This was one of the ways that he coped with being fired from Apple in 80s.
He eventually came to accept that none of the successes that followed this event like
Pixar and the iPhone would’ve taken place if hadn’t been fired from Apple.
He also adopted a much more pragmatic perspective when it came to death.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered
to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment
or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is
truly important.”
This may have been one of the reasons that he refused to get surgery.
From his perspective, getting surgery seemed unnatural and intrusive.
And this went against all of his hippie and buddhist beliefs.
Jobs did eventually make the leap though.
By the time he died, he would go from refusing treatment to trying to get experimental treatment.
In 2009 for example, Jobs would travel to Switzerland to experiment with a radioactive
isotope.
The isotope was supposed to attack the faulty hormone-producing cells in the body.
He would also try to use his money to accelerate the process of getting a liver which many
people felt was unfair.
He didn’t cut lines or do anything illegal, but what he did do was sign up onto liver
transplant lists around the world.
This increased the chances that he would get a matching donor somewhere.
Personally, I don’t think this is a problem given that it’s only natural that you try
to use all the resources you have to try to save your life.
But, some like to argue that this is not something that the average person would be able to do
and so, it’s unethical.
Let me know which side you guys stand on down below.
But, anyway, the saddest part of this all is that Jobs would eventually regret his early
choices.
He admitted that he was wrong for rejecting professional help, and this is just made worse
by cancer experts constantly affirming that he could still be alive if he had just had
surgery earlier.
But, in the end, everyone dies at somepoint, but not everyone lives.
This, however, was never the case with Steve Jobs.
Since the age of 17, he lived by the quote, “If you live each day as if it was your
last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
And considering his impact on the world, there’s no doubt that he lived by this slogan till
the very last day.
Are you a fan of Steve Jobs?
Comment that down below.
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