I Almost Died

Back in 2009, I was laying in bed and had to take a piss.

Some context. I was living in a small row house in West New York, about 1600 square feet, and the bedroom was on the second floor. There was no master bath—there was a bathroom about twelve feet away down the hall.

I’m laying in bed, and I have to pee, so I get up, shuffle off to the bathroom, and hang it over the bowl. Suddenly, I felt dizzy, and not the kind of dizzy you get from riding a rollercoaster. I felt a little ill and very disoriented. I thought it would be best if I went downstairs to get a drink of water.

So I take a few steps over to the stairs, and...

Next thing I know I’m waking up face-down on the hardwood floor at the bottom of the stairs, and my wife is face-down on the floor next to me.

I am not making any of this up.

So here is what happened: I took one step and passed out, and fell down the steep stairs, landing face-first on the floor. My wife heard the ruckus and got out of bed to see what happened, and saw me in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs. She quickly ran down to administer first aid or something, and then fainted and collapsed on the floor next to me. She thought I was dead.

I woke up, wondering how I ended up on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and also wondered why my wife was passed out next to me. I figured there was a gas leak.

I have no explanation for why I suddenly fainted, but one was offered to me by my brother-in-law, a doctor. He said that I might have experienced something called vasovagal dilation, where the veins in your legs inexplicably dilate, and all the blood rushes from your head to the lower part of your body, and you pass out. Great, but I still don’t know why it happened.

But let me tell you—I am one lucky son-of-a-gun. I went face-first down a steep flight of wooden stairs and came away completely uninjured, apart from some floor burns on my face. I could have broken an arm, a leg, or my neck. I could have ended up in a wheelchair for life. That’s the sort of thing that usually happens to people who take a swan dive down the stairs face-first.

Shit like that happens to you, and then you start to wonder. Who is looking out for me? I don’t dabble in mysticism, but I’ve written about things like unexplainable phenomena and the afterlife in the past. Either I was saved, or I was lucky enough that I fell in the exact right way that I didn’t end up a quadriplegic. What are the chances? That was fourteen years ago, and I don’t think about it every day, but for some reason, I thought about it today, and how absurd it was. My wife gave me a piece of advice afterwards: if you are feeling dizzy, sit down.

But that’s not the only time in my life I almost died. Once, in high school, I was riding my bike to school, went to take a left turn and a car whizzed by at 45 miles per hour and hit my knuckle, scraping all the skin off of it. If that happens two-tenths of a second later, I’m dead. Or there was the time I was about 25 and driving in the East Bay on a five-lane highway, when some dipstick changes lanes into me and I slam the steering wheel over and go into a flat spin in the middle of the highway. I didn’t hit anyone. It was a miracle. I could probably think of two or three more stories if I had some time.

You ever sit around and think about all the times you almost ate shit and lived to tell the tale? Who, or what, is watching over us? And you ever think about the times that some poor 16-year-old gets into a car accident and dies? Why was her time up?

Part of this is that we have no ability to process randomness. It is true that random bad things happen to people. Random bad things happened to 3,000 people on 9/11. I had a tough time getting my brain around that one, and it changed my whole outlook on life. Instead of thinking that the universe was benevolent, I began to think it was malignant. And every plane crash, every wildfire, every tornado that I saw on the news reinforced my view. Not to mention the fact that I was a trader, where bad things happened in the markets all the time. That was around the time that the markets were obsessed with terrorism, so every time there was a suspicious package in an airport somewhere, the market would drop a percent or two, and everyone would freak out. This also was when I was afraid of death—I’m not anymore.

The news tends to reinforce this randomness, because the news reports on terror attacks, plane crashes, wildfires, and tornados, but it doesn’t report on when they don’t happen. And they don’t happen 99.9999% of the time. The universe is not accident-prone, the universe is accident-resistant. And since we are talking about 9/11, one of the remarkable things about 9/11 is that more people weren’t killed. As many as 10,000 people worked in those towers, and there were dozens, if not hundreds of stories of people who were late for work that day, or people who missed their flights. It could have been much, much worse. And it wasn’t. Ever think to ask why?

If you’ve ever lost a loved one, I’m sure you’ve had this experience where some complete dildo comes up to you and tells you that it was God’s plan. Really? What kind of God kills 16-year-olds in car crashes? Or maybe they tell you: things happen for a reason. As if there is some kind of awful determinism in the universe where we all die on a specific schedule, at specific times and places, it is all orchestrated, and none of it is within our control. I don’t like the concept of a deterministic universe. I believe in probability and risk management, which is why I don’t take selfies at the edge of a cliff. And I also believe that people use the “God’s plan” or “It happens for a reason” as a way of explaining away the bad luck. Because a probabilistic universe is orders of magnitude more scary, where bad shit happens to people and there is nothing we can do about it. People are much more comfortable with it if we have no choice in the matter.

I go back and forth on this a lot. Is the world probabilistic or deterministic? If you are a trader, you had better believe in probabilistic markets. But I will say that after 24 years of working in the markets, that probabilistic view is beginning to unwind. I’m not saying that there’s some divine plan for stocks rising or falling, but there are points in time where you know that something is going to happen. You can identify the turning points, almost to the minute. Remember, we don’t believe in random walks here—we believe that groups of people behave in fairly predictable ways. When someone say that there is a 50% chance of the Fed doing X at an upcoming meeting, that’s one of the most ludicrous things I’ve ever heard. There is a 100% chance of the Fed doing one thing, and a zero percent chance of them doing something else. They themselves know ahead of time what they are going to do. Groups of people behave in predictable ways. There have been very few Fed meetings where I haven’t been able to accurately predict the outcome.

Getting back to the afterlife issue, there have been cases of precognition in near-death experiences. This is when a person almost dies, has a near-death experience, and learns of some event that is going to happen in the future: usually the death of another person. They know the time and place. And they return from beyond and tell everyone about this precognition, and everyone dismisses it as fairytales and dreams, and then that person dies on the exact date in the exact manner that was predicted. Still believe in a probabilistic world? I am not so sure.

And then there is the book The Fourth Turning, which is essentially about deterministic history, that interactions between generations and social psychology results in predictable patterns in war, economics, and politics over the decades. And every eighty years, we have a huge social upheaval, usually a giant war, that ends up resetting everyone’s values and beliefs. This is supposed to happen in the next few years, if the authors are correct. Do you believe in deterministic history? Do you believe that we will be at war with China in a few years? Is there any escaping it? Or are we just sleepwalking into a giant spinning blade? For the record, I’m not much of a fan of The Fourth Turning or deterministic history, though I do like reading about the generational studies.

I wish I didn’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I wish I had free will. But the longer I’m on this earth, the more I believe that we’re gonna die when we’re meant to die and there’s not much we can do about it.