It's impossible to spend more than a few minutes online without encountering an inspirational story meant to brighten your day. Which is nice, because it's probably sandwiched in between a story about a church getting shot up and a story about a mall getting shot up. Maybe there's a cool new technology, maybe an animal is being adorable. But it's increasingly common to see a headline like "Michigan Grandfather With Cancer Takes Up Uber Driving to Pay Off Home for Family."

"But wait," I assume you're objecting for the sake of this rhetorical device, "that sounds so depressing that a bottle of cheap vodka has somehow appeared before me, as though it knows it will be needed." Ah, but if you read that very real article, you'll discover that it's "actually" an uplifting tale of love. This 69-year-old man, Kenneth Broskey, loved his daughter and grandchildren so much that when he was told he only had two to ten weeks left to live, he continued to drive for Uber to help pay off a mortgage that his daughter otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford.

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Broskey was successful thanks to a GoFundMe started with the help of one of his passengers, who said, "His love for his family is limitless. This man is dying of cancer, and yet he's still out there driving an Uber cab just for his family every day. That's indescribable love." That's true, but what goes unmentioned in all the news on Broskey is how indescribably horrifying it is that a terminally ill senior citizen was compelled to spend his final weeks driving a fucking Uber. Maybe it would be more inspirational if the only thing standing between a couple of people getting kicked out of their home wasn't their dying grandfather working instead of being with them (or going into hospice care, as his doctors advised him to).

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According to "Dying Grandpa Refuses To Listen To Doctors, Then SHOCKS His Family When He Does THIS," which is ironically filed under the "Life" section, Broskey did the "unthinkable." But the writer meant it in the sense that you'd declare someone shotgunning a six-pack on spring break despite their doctor advising them not to drink "unthinkable" before high-fiving them and pouring them a shot of tequila. Meanwhile, Business Insider declared it "touching" that the GoFundMe (complete with a hashtag promoted by Uber, which is what people get instead of functioning heath insurance now) got the job done. No one talks about how fucked up the situation was, because it's becoming so common that we no longer think of it as sad. The unspoken assumption is that this is the new normal, and we should feel inspired because we might one day have to do it ourselves.