Hacker News Reader

Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

1) Imagine yourself on dying bed - what would you regret/be proud of in your past life? Strive to go that way.

2) Bring good to humanity, and don't do evil. If nothing else, if raising kids, be a good parent and role model - don't bring more unbalanced, fucked up, childhood-issue-riddled people into this world. Too many of those around already.

View on HN

Why optimize for the contentment of one moment of your life? There's no way to know, usually, how such will play out. I think people should optimize for every day contentment with an eye toward the future. I.e. Periodically evaluating how content they feel and making due adjustments.

Dying is but a moment.

The point isn't to optimize for contentment at the end of life. Rather, it's a technique for getting to the 50,000-foot view of one's life.

There's a saying "what you focus on gets bigger." If you live in the day-to-day, it's easy to turn the minutiae into your whole life.

Also, "pleasure" and "happiness" are fairly orthogonal. Living in the day-to-day arguably prioritizes pleasure over happiness.

i optimize for the medium term. long term is too risky and short term leads to local minima

It is foolish to optimize your entire life just to feel a certain way in the last 5 minutes.

I mean, who knows what dying is actually like; you might end up thinking about peanut butter and lint. However, feeling shitty about your life can happen at any point, and the death perspective just helps force you to consider what you value about your life.

From brief exposure to various death-bed regrets, I get the impression that people generally regret what they didn't do. I.e. if one had a family-focused life, they'll regret not doing anything useful. If they worked hard to help their community or the world, they'll regret not spending enough time on relationships or not starting a family. Etc.

Sounds a lot like the "everyone hates their hair". Like, people with blonde wants to be red, curly to straight, and so forth.

An issue with 1), is that many people don't actually care prior to that situation. There are so many people with no goals and no motivation to do anything. They may start a project, but there is no incentive to complete it. If you don't work towards anything, you won't have anything to regret.

> Imagine yourself on dying bed

Do people really do retrospectives of their lives on their death beds? Seems like a really odd thing to do during final hours of life. I am sure everyone no matter how meaningful their lives are, is going to have regrets.

I just hope I am mentally well enough during my final days to enjoy it, not do an inventory of regrets vs accomplishments.

And physically well enough to exact revenge on those that wronged me.

Edit: That came out much darker than I meant it to.

Was it meant to be humorous? Because I got a chuckle out of it...

He just read The Count of Monte Cristo

It was. I'm glad you added the second sentence.

Revenge is underrated. Forgiveness is great, but only if the guilty party alters their hurtful behavior. If they just keep up their wicked ways, there's no moral reason to keep forgiving them over and over. Indeed, I'd argue it's rather irresponsible since you know they're going to hurt other people.

Holding on to resentment until your last days seems unlikely to be correlated much with what most people would think of as a 'good' life.

Yes, they do.

http://hintjens.com/blog:125

Do you ever have moments when you look back at some of your experiences (school, work, relations, spirituality, health, etc.) and reflect on them? Either because you enjoyed them, messed up, etc.

if so, this is similar but on a grander scale.

> I just hope I am mentally well enough during my final days to enjoy it, not do an inventory of regrets vs accomplishments.

Those two aren't mutually exclusive. You can reflect on your life and enjoy it to the very end. The general idea is to live the kind of life you can look back on and smile about when death comes knocking.

You don't have to have that kind of experience when you're near death of course, but a lot of people do.

3) Think over again the meaning of life, knowing it ends one day for everyone.

Spend time with people you love and care about.

Work on something that matters to you. But not too much. No one lays on their death bed wishing they had committed another line of code.

Maximize for happiness while causing the least amount of harm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com