[Health and Physical Education] Even if you're unlucky, just being alive means you're lucky

One theory suggests that the etymology of 'tsukareta' (tired) comes from being 'possessed' (tsukareta) by evil spirits. Therefore, people who habitually say 'I'm tired' are increasingly favored by evil spirits, leading to an accumulation of fatigue. It is said that if you change that habit to saying 'I'm lucky' (tsuiteru), the evil spirits will gradually be driven away, leading to the attraction of good fortune. That said, even if you repeat 'I'm lucky, I'm lucky' like a mantra, as if to mock you, bad luck just keeps piling up, and you can't help but think you must be possessed by something.
I left the house earlier than usual because I wanted to finish my work, but on that very day, the trains were delayed due to vehicle failures and signal problems. Other passengers were also getting irritated by this 'setback' from the very start of the morning. What fueled this irritation was the station attendant's announcement, which lacked any sense of remorse or apology: 'Passengers heading beyond Station XX, please go up the stairs; the train bound for XX on Platform 4 will arrive first. Please transfer.' Upon hearing that broadcast, the crowd of people was suddenly released from their drowsiness and dashed furiously toward Platform 4. Then, without waiting for them, the train bound for XX heartlessly departed. The crowd that didn't make it returned to the original platform. As for me, I was so accustomed to my unlucky daily life that I had given up on joining the 'mass migration' from the start, chanting my 'I'm lucky, I'm lucky' mantra. A group of people reacting to commands and moving back and forth between Platform 1 and Platform 4, their faces stained with the colors of dissatisfaction and stress. It's a scene that resembles something. Ah, I suppose the morning running we did in high school physical education was training for doing exactly this as an adult.
Still, will this kind of life continue at least until I'm sixty? In society, there's even talk of extending the retirement age in conjunction with the extension of the pension eligibility age... I was in my 20s and truly depressed. Of course, I became a company employee for the purpose of graduating from poverty, but I also held a desire to retire early once I was no longer troubled by money to a certain extent. Roughly speaking, how long will I be able to live? I'll kill time at the edge of Platform 1 while remembering my high school physical education class.

'Alright? I'll explain it one more time. A 'life table' is something that assumes the mortality situation of the base year of creation continues indefinitely, and it expresses how many more years survivors at each age can live on average in the process of a birth cohort born at the same time decreasing due to death, and what the population structure in a steady state looks like, using mortality rates, number of survivors, and life expectancy.
You are all 16 years old now, right? That means about 61 more years of life for boys, and about 66 more years for girls. Hey! You there, don't make noise! But, average life expectancy is constantly increasing, you know. In the 6th Life Table from Showa 10 to 11, it was 46.92 years for men and 49.63 years for women. This exceeded 50 years in Showa 22, becoming 50.06 years for men and 53.96 years for women. And according to the Abridged Life Table of Heisei 3, the data is 76.11 years for men and 82.11 years for women.
It would be sacrilegious to say you don't want to live a long life. Just being able to live for 16 years until now is a happy thing. Even in this day and age, during infancy, there is a possibility of mechanical asphyxiation due to aspiration of vomitus or suffocation by bedding, in early childhood up to age 4 there is a possibility of drowning, and at your age, the possibility of death by automobile accident is high.
Even so, if you are lucky enough to spend your time healthily and finish your coming-of-age ceremony safely, 10 years will pass in the blink of an eye, and from your 30s, unfortunately, it becomes a battle against the aging phenomenon. Hey! You there, don't make noise! Aging is something that proceeds through a process programmed into your genes. Yes, aging is determined by genetics. Because, think about it. The maximum lifespan and average lifespan are almost determined by the species and lineage of animals, aren't they? Your pet dogs and cats die before you, their human owners, right? It's genetics among humans too. For example, it is known that the difference in lifespan between identical twins is smaller than the difference in lifespan between brothers and sisters.
There are several environmental factors that affect individual aging, but the easiest to understand are exercise and diet. People who continue to exercise maintain reserve capacity in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems compared to those who lack exercise, and they have high blood concentrations of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol—ah, this is often called HDL—which prevents the deposition of vascular cholesterol. Furthermore, the mortality rate within 48 hours after the onset of myocardial infarction is low. Regarding diet, there is a famous experiment where rats whose diet was restricted had delayed maturation but lived longer.
However, no matter how much you pay attention to exercise and diet, as you age, your body temperature regulation function declines and your ability to control infections also decreases, so the risk of minor physical ailments becoming serious cannot be avoided. That means everyone will eventually face death. In the statistics of Heisei 2, about 820,000 people died, which means one person died every 38 seconds. Hey! You there, don't make noise!
Regarding the reasons for death, the trends have changed with the times. For example, malignant neoplasms of the stomach—in short, stomach cancer—this has been on a downward trend, peaking in Showa 54 for women and Showa 59 for men. It's about 20% now. Uterine cancer has also been on a consistent downward trend since Showa 25. The number of deaths in Showa 25 was 8,356, but in Heisei 2 it was 4,600, so it has nearly halved in these 40 years. On the other hand, what is increasing is colon cancer. In Heisei 2, 13,286 men and 11,346 women died, but compared to Showa 25, it has increased 7 times for men and 6 times for women.'

—I see, that's right, I'm lucky just to be alive right now. Moreover, I suffered from colon cancer at the age of 30, and it was in three places: two in the rectum and one in the sigmoid colon. Fortunately, it was cured by surgery due to early detection, so I was lucky enough to have my life saved.
Born by chance into a peaceful society and breathing with a healthy body, that alone is more than enough to be 'lucky.' However, human beings, or rather, a half-baked creature like me, tend to focus only on bad luck rather than rejoicing in good luck, and lament each and every one of them. If I look at it calmly, it shouldn't be such an unhappy life, so is my character twisted? No, no, it is also a fact that I am visited by small misfortunes every day. Without me knowing, stress accumulates like dust in the corner of a room, and it's so persistent that I don't even feel like cleaning it anymore.
After being late for work because of the commuter train, I get a nasty grumble from my boss saying, 'You should live near the company.' I have to work overtime because unexpected tasks are added to the already piled-up work. Just when I was about to go home, a senior colleague invited me for a drink. Well, alcohol is a broom for sorrow, so that part was fine, but after the izakaya, I was forcibly taken to a Korean aesthetic salon. Even though I refused, saying that a 30-minute 'exfoliation course' was enough, around the 25-minute mark, the female staff member stopped the treatment on her own and persistently recommended something called a 'Taekwondo course.' She pressed me, saying, 'I'll put on a condom and jerk you off with my hand, so pay the extra fee, customer. Your friend also extended.' Hey, hey, the shop and the senior colleague didn't promise this. To the forced pun of 'Hand-kwondo,' there was no atmosphere to refuse with 'Condom again,' and when I, resigned, asked, 'If you're just going to jerk me off with your hand, what's the point of wearing a condom?', she immediately replied, 'I'll rub it with this exfoliation glove. It feels good.' The surprising part is what happens next. As soon as I handed over a 5,000-yen bill, without even getting change, she said, 'Then the staff will change,' and a heavily made-up middle-aged woman appeared. The service was extremely obligatory. She moved her hands violently and annoyingly with a look that said, 'Hurry up and finish.' I had no choice but to close my eyes and think of the glamorous figure of the previous staff member to finish, but in such times, the richness of imagination is a grateful thing, and what needs to come out comes out properly. But the way it ended was halfway. Just as the first tadpole jumped out of the urethral opening, she stopped the treatment on her own as if to say, 'Yes, you came. Yes, that's it.' I couldn't leave my foolish son, who was still twitching while maintaining its hardness, so I involuntarily finished the rest with my own hand. The middle-aged woman laughed at me when she saw that. It was pathetic.
I somehow managed to get through the useless weekday and the long-awaited Saturday arrived. When I turned on the TV, an economist was still fueling anxiety, saying, 'You can see it by looking at the salaries of entertainers and the annual salaries of professional athletes. The difference between first-class and second-class is 100 times. From now on, the world will be composed of a very small number of very rich people and an overwhelming majority of poor people, and the middle class will cease to exist.' I got fed up and changed the channel to an interview with someone living leisurely in a mountain hut while playing the guitar. They clearly seem to have nothing to do with labor, but they are not in poverty either. Rather, there is a sense of ease. Is this the kind of person who belongs to the 'very small number of very rich people'?
There's no point in staying in my room, so when I got on my bicycle to at least take my dress shirt to the dry cleaners, the tire was flat. I had no choice but to walk for 10 minutes in the sweltering heat, only to find it temporarily closed due to the owner's whim. Just as I was about to walk back for 10 minutes, there was a downpour as if it were targeting only these 10 minutes. When I returned to my shabby apartment soaking wet, the elevator, which was the only one and so slow that I suspected it wasn't human-powered, had just left the first floor for the top floor. I had no choice but to run up the stairs, and as if targeting my absence for just these 20 minutes, a courier seemed to have arrived, and a delivery absence notice was roughly thrown into my door post. Once I was so abandoned by luck, I completely lost the desire to go out, and while I was washing off my sweaty body in the shower even after being drenched in the rain, the phone rang, which was rare, and only at such a time. Since it wouldn't stop ringing, I sensed it might be an emergency, so I hurriedly answered the phone with a bath towel in one hand, and it was a solicitation for real estate investment.
It's Sunday, and things are still not looking up. To break this unpleasant flow, I decided to go out into the city to have fun and got on the train. Then, the train I was on made an emergency stop at the first station, and 'Due to an accident involving a person at Station XX...'. Am I being made to have a bad dream? ...to be continued