Would you want to know?

I have blogged about this before. If you could do a genetic test to find out if you are likely to get an ailment and die of it, would you want to know?

I am still up in the air on this one. I was interested to read about a 21 year old woman who has the BRCA 1 gene, watched her mother die of cancer, but has decided she doesn't want to know. Her choice is to live an  unstressed like without the burden of the knowledge that she could die of cancer and what it would be like.

I can completely understand that point of view. Just because we can learn about our medical and genetic make up, do we have to learn it? I mean is there a benefit to living in ignorance and letting life happen around us with out having to learn what might or might not happen to us?

Why are we supposed to learn to see what the future brings? I have never been to a palm reading or a fortune teller or anything. I haven't really wanted to. Isn't it better to have life unfold as it may than to plan and learn and change ourselves to compensate for what we learn?

Hindsight in light is always 20/20 - we always look back and think back how we could have done better or differently or improved the outcome. But is it really to our benefit to think how we might have done things differently? Then we spend too much time ruing our decisions.

This would complicate my life immensely. If I knew then I would have too much time to over plan my life which would cause me to spend time ruing my decisions and over thinking everything.

I don't want to know.