Getting older; getting wiser????

I just got back from a long drive to NY and my ears are ringing. They've been ringing for a number of years now, but it used to be noticeable only when there was very little noise -- at night mostly. Now, I'm finding that I notice it even when there is other noise and it gets worse after I've been in the car for awhile -- the road noise plus music, books-on-CD, etc.

This is an ethical problem for me. Back in graduate school, in my medical ethics class, I wrote a paper about animal testing and why it was wrong. I took the position that animals should not die in order to cure things that people do to themselves volitionally. Most ironically, I used the example of researchers killing monkeys after damaging their hearing in order to better understand how human hearing gets damaged so they could fix it. Oh boy!...Now I need that knowledge gained from all those dead monkeys and I feel like a hypocrite and a murderer!

My hearing loss is my fault, but also the accumulation of many, small decisions made in the moment without considering the long-term consequences. Or, the short-term gains outweighed my concerns about eventually losing my hearing. So what will I do? Swallow my ethical stance or get left out of life?!