Is screenwriting deadly ?

haha, I don't take studies like this too seriously because it's another generalized study that doesn't really apply to specific individuals. Of course most people who sit more have more diseases, because statistically speaking that includes a lot of obese people who are already at risk for a TON more problems.

That being said, I sit quite a lot per day, but I also work out between 1-2 hours per day. I do 45 minutes of intense cardio 6 times a week, I do resistance training 3-4 times a week, I stretch most days, and eat healthy. Fitness is extremely important to me. But I still watch TV while I work out, and I sit while I type e-mails or work on screenplays or write whatever, do whatever, surf the net, etc. I don't think there's any increased risk of anything just by sitting, only by general day to day inactivity.

It's like this study I read that said kids who got less than 6 hours of sleep per night had a D average in high school. Well, I considered 6 hours a lot of sleep, I often slept only 2-4 hours one year, with a nap after school, and other years 5-6 hours. I had an A average and graduated at the top of my class. Statistics are great for a general observation but usually don't apply to me, so it's kind of useless considering something like that. It's like, "Most people..." statements. I'm not most people, so I ignore statements of that type as they're irrelevant.
 
JonathanLB said:
[...] I had an A average and graduated at the top of my class. Statistics are great for a general observation but usually don't apply to me, so it's kind of useless considering something like that.

It's like, "Most people..." statements. I'm not most people, so I ignore statements of that type as they're irrelevant.
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Take up smoking; most people who smoke die from what it does. :P
 
Jordan_Sopinsky said:
Take up smoking; most people who smoke die from what it does. :P
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Is that even true? I don't know. I think most smokers die from something else actually, but that's not to say it's a good idea, haha.

What you're saying really has nothing to do with what I was saying, though. If you smoke regularly and do it throughout your life, you will experience an increased risk of various diseases no matter who you are.

But if you find some study that says, "People who watch more than 2 hours of TV per day have an 18% higher chance of blah blah," whatever, you're not only getting the couch potatoes in there, you're throwing in athletes too, so it's a useless statistic that means absolutely nothing.

It's the same as screenwriting. It may be true that 99% of screenplays suck, but that doesn't affect my life at all because mine don't suck. There are a lot of statistics out there, most of them have little interest to the individual case and are more just an interesting stat overall. If someone told me going into college, "Most people by far do not graduate with a 3.95 or above, in fact your odds are only 3% of that happening," I would just look at them like they were crazy. Who cares if only 3% of people do that, my odds of doing that were more like 90%. Statistics do not apply to the individual as some blanket case. While it may be true that 97% of students can't do that well, it was also true that I knew I would do that well.

Pick any other stat and it's virtually the same thing. "90% of people don't have 20/20 or better vision." Does that mean the odds are that I don't have that good of vision? No, it's just a useless statistic saying if you pulled 100 people off the streets, statistically speaking 90 of them would have worse vision than that, but it says nothing about me. It never makes judgments about an individual case, just about a population or group as a whole.
 
JonathanLB said:
[...]What you're saying really has nothing to do with what I was saying, though. [...]
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You're saying statistics cannot be applied to individuals (like you). OK, so there are exceptions. But is it worth taking the chance to see if you really are the exception? It depends on the risk involved and the possible benefit.
 
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