Stealing from Klosterman 2

Q: Think of someone who is your friend (do not select your best friend, but make sure the person is someone you would classify as "considerably more than an acquaintance").

This friend is going to be attacked by a grizzly bear.

Now, this person will survive this bear attack; that is guaranteed. There is a 100 percent chance that your friend will live. However, the extent of his/her injuries is unknown; he might receive nothing but a few superficial scratches, but he also might lose a thumb (or multiple limbs). He might recover completely in twenty-four hours with nothing but a great story, or he might spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Somehow, you have the ability to stop this attack from happening. You can magically save your friend from the bear. But his (or her) salvation will come at a peculiar price: if you choose to stop the bear, it will always rain. For the rest of your life, wherever you go, it will be raining. Sometimes it will pour and sometimes it will drizzle - but it will never not be raining. But it won't rain over the totality of the earth, nor will the hydrological cycle be disrupted; these storm clouds will be isolated, and they will focus entirely on your specific whereabouts. You will never see the sun again.

Do you stop the bear and accept a lifetime of rain?

This is, like most trade-off questions, nearly impossible to answer. It pits empathy against self-interest. It also pits a physically harmful conclusion for a friend against an emotionally impacting conclusion for yourself. If the roles were reversed, I'm not sure anyone would choose rain for their friend. The 'correct' answer is to be selfless, to claim that you'd be fine enduring a mostly shallow cost to stop a potentially horrific outcome.

I'm not sure I could live with rain, though.

Since I don't travel as much as I'd like, it would mean it would always be raining on DC. I can't imagine this phenomenon happening without people taking notice. I go to the same office five days a week. It would always be raining over the White House during the week. Logistically, I would be able to deal with constant rain. I would figure out how to live after a while. Always having an umbrella, etc. I don't think the rain is really what matters here - what matters is never seeing the sun. I assume I'd get incurably depressed at a certain point. Which would probably make my writing much better and more prolific.

I chose my friend Marco (just the first person that came to mind), and I can specifically see him turning the experience of a bear attack into something really unique in life. Some people, I could see it destroying them, but even if Marco was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, he would greet it well.

So it's a toss up between the possibility of him being wheelchair-bound for life, injured to an incredible to degree or the inevitability that I'll have rain on me forever, guaranteed. The possible versus the inevitable.

I choose my friend to be mauled by a bear. That's right. I took the selfish route. Statistically, he could come out unharmed while I most definitely would not. I base the decision partly on who I chose before knowing what the concept was, and I would probably choose rain for several people in my life, but Marco seems strong enough to handle it.

I would hope he'd choose for me to get mauled, too.