There’s a brilliant TV show where a guy gets cancer and it’s totally curable, but he refuses to get treatment and wants to go the “natural” route (which means he’ll almost certainly die).

His friends are horrified, and so they do what all of us have the temptation to do: 𝗸𝗶𝗱𝗻𝗮𝗽 𝗵𝗶𝗺, 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗵𝗶𝗺 𝘂𝗽 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗺 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁.

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What I love about the story is that they do save the friend’s life, but they also completely ruin their friendship and you also really, deeply see how horrible it is to forcefully take away somebody’s freedom. It gets pretty dark. It makes you question how much forcing people to “do what’s good for them” is worth it and when.

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I used to feel like if I could force people to do things that were good for them, I would. That there are some things that I’m so certain will hurt them that it’s worth the cost. I still think that’s true for some things, but the number of things that I’m confident enough in decreases every year I get older.

This is an important thing to think about. Fortunately it doesn’t usually come up in as extreme cases as cancer and death, but it comes up all the time in terms of people making romantic choices, making career decisions, making medical decisions.

People you love will make decisions that you’re quite confident will hurt them or others. And you’ll have the choice: do you let them freely choose the thing you know will kill them, or do you lock them in a basement, cause a different sort of pain, and lose them anyways (metaphorically speaking)

Show’s called Ill Behavior if you’re interested.