Wastes of Time We Regret When We Get Older
lifehacker.com.au
lifehacker.com.au
If I were able to live my life anew, In the next I would try to commit more errors. I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more. I would be more foolish than I've been, In fact, I would take few things seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would run more risks, take more vacations, contemplate more sunsets, climb more mountains, swim more rivers. I would go to more places where I've never been, I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans, I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.
I was one of those people that lived sensibly and prolifically each minute of his life; Of course I had moments of happiness. If I could go back I would try to have only good moments. Because if you didn't know, of that is life made: only of moments; Don't lose the now. I was one of those that never went anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, an umbrella, and a parachute; If I could live again, I would travel lighter.
If I could live again, I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends. I would take more cart rides, contemplate more dawns, and play with more children, If I had another life ahead of me.
But already you see, I am 85, and I know that I am dying.
Edit: Not sure who the author is. I've seen it attributed to Jorge Luis Borges, but am pretty sure that is incorrect.
Are they really that much more dangerous than parachuting? I know they have more fatalities but wingsuiting is only more dangerous because people take more risks with them and fly close to the ridgeline(typically you only get into wingsuiting if you are an experienced parachute operator). Similar to in rock climbing with typical roped climbing vs. free soloing(sans ropes).
So yes, wingsuits when used in the way that wingsuits are almost always used are inherently dangerous.
I only rock climb but wouldn't it still be fun to be in the air for a longer time even if you are not close to objects? I think the wingsuit craze of flying near objects has more to do with being bored of the normal parachute experience.
(wingsuits are dangerous!)
But then, many insist on flying extremely close to terrain, and that's where things go sideways. I'm the type who would be perfectly content to never be closer than 10+ meters to terrain, but that's not their mindset. Several pioneers shown in the film suffered deaths, none (apparently) from equipment failure.
On the other hand though, I think it's just biological imperative. Statistically, young men (up to around 25 perhaps) are simply reckless and take stupid risks. They make the best soldiers (less fear for their life), extreme sportsmen etc., but obviously some of them end up dead or disabled.
You might hear from old people wishing they'd done more, you don't hear from young people who died while climbing mountains, swimming rivers, or ...er ... eating ice cream.
Which is to say: how cautious or not to be at any point in time is actually a very complex judgement. Seizing the day and living in the moment are important, but so is planning ahead, thinking about the future, practicing restraint at the right times and knowing when not to eat ice cream.
You don't hear about the people who stayed at their "secure" job as opposed to joining a more risky venture, only to lose their job the next month.
> how cautious or not to be at any point in time is actually a very complex judgement.
I think people are taking what was said a bit too far. You can do very safe mountain climbs and see some awesome views, and safely swim rivers near shore, You can reasonably live without taking absurd risks.
It is, but it isn't as drastic effect as say the survival bias from war or something. The logic being that under today's circumstances, many people live to grow old without the serious threat of from large scale war, famine and disease. In other words, there is survivor bias, but it is significantly diluted by the fact that almost everybody survives. For survivor bias to be significant, you have to have a lot of people not survive.
The people who did live that way and suffered a career-ending injury, or were killed in some dodgy third world country, or simply died a pauper - nobody cares about their advice.
Common and dangerous.
And without trying will you ever know?
I'm less than half the author's age, and I already regret eating too much ice cream and not enough beans.
I wonder how folks who took risks and got seriously hurt feel about this. Do they regret taking those risks, or do they regret not taking enough?
Any recommendations?
I owned a Xybernaut and a bunch of other HMDs throughout the years. Few were practical for reading and walking at the same time. (Interestingly, I've had several solutions that allowed me to do cardio on a machine while watching a movie.... and watching a movie, even a regular 2d movie in an occlusive HMD is, at least for me, super immersive and fun. None of the solutions I've tried were very robust, and they all end up breaking. If someone has a recommendation for something robust-ish that is easy to hook up to the major streaming services, I'm all ears. )
That said, I haven't looked at the current Microsoft solution; I thought it was tethered to a serious PC like the oculus. I own an Oculus and haven't yet setup a rig that lets me use it on a cardio rig.
As an aside, there is a lot of focus on the various two degrees of freedom treadmills look cool, with the 'teflon dish, felt shoes" design looking the most practical, of course, but I haven't even setup one of those yet; I don't know if there is a useful game ecosystem for them yet.
But, yeah, if there was something in the neighborhood of a kilobuck that would let me walk and read with reasonable safety, I would be super interested. I already live in an area/live a lifestyle where the 'dork factor' isn't an issue, which I think is the hardest part of solving this problem.
I'll probably be buying an oculus go (or one of the competing 'all in one' HMD products) for treadmill use, and using them for watching movies on the treadmill (watching movies on a HMD is way better supported than reading on a HMD, but that means being on a machine)
I remember that I was out drinking late with my friend (and now working at google) Orri Erling, he was blind and had a white stick, I held his arm on one side while on the other side I had a monocular on my head and a twiddler in my hand. We got some stares.
What I ended up doing was switching to an audio desktop (Emacspeak) and text-to-speech the articles or books I wanted to read.
I have tried the rowing machine with my GearVR, but putting a monitor in front of it is more comfortable. Even so I could try it with my Oculus or MR for a Bigscreen :-) or 360 view with some rowing video's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XCrq6ytQeE
And you say that it's compatible with the jock monocular displays? This is actually... pretty exciting.
As a bicyclist I've felt hyperaware compared against a large fraction of drivers who are clearly distracted. I imagine this is even more apparent to motorcyclists due to the higher speeds. Phones are bad, and audiobooks can clearly be distracting as well.
My suggestion if you have a long driving commute is to reduce the length of the commute, not do anything which endangers other road users. Alternatively you can switch to public transit or carpool and rotate drivers.
> During simple drives, people listening to audiobooks braked faster in response to hazards. Audiobooks also helped reduce speeding, a common driver response to mental underload, the study said.
> The findings, said Trick, are particularly useful for people with long daily commutes on familiar routes or on long stretches such as rural roads.
> During complex drives with various hazards, listening to audiobooks can be an added distraction for people who are poor at multi-tasking, the study found. People able to switch easily between tasks are not negatively affected, it said.
https://news.uoguelph.ca/2018/02/audiobooks-improve-focus-lo...
That is: a gym is a laboratory (workspace) for improving the physical condition and performance of your body.
That's not to say you can't make poor use of a gym (or a laboratory, for that matter). Or that all conditioning must occur at a gym (labs are complemented by fieldwork). But well-used, they're a vital adjunct to a fitness regimen.
That said: if it's possible to get there under your own power (walking, cycling), so much the better.
Just to put some numbers on this, walking 4mph (a mile every 15 mins) is unusually quick. Most people will work up a real sweat. A normal pace for many people is 17 minutes per mile.
If you walked 100 miles at 4mph, that comes to 1500 minutes or 25 hours.
25 hours/month walking is a sizable chunk of time. This is fantastic if you consider it time well spent.
For example: I’d hate to be stuck in a train carriage for two hours, packed in with people I don’t know, maybe Underground with no internet, all because my job requires me to be in a certain place at a certain time.
That’s two hours I could have spent sleeping; with a loved one; sleeping with a loved one... you get the idea.
So, like most Americans and thus most of people reading and commenting on HN? Also, while a train commute is way better than a car commute, being home is better than both. I read during my 40 mins subway commute and I would never want to be driving instead but I'd prefer to be reading at home for that time.
I personally agree, but having taken commuter rail for several months a few years ago, I noticed that quite a few people with longer commutes (~1 hour each way) seemed to really enjoy their (evening) train commute, treating it basically like a social hour at a bar. They frequently had beer. (Never saw anything like this in the morning.)
I didn't know enough people on the train to get into that, but I can see the appeal.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-a...
Mode: If you're commuting by train or bus point-to-point and the ride takes five minutes longer, you're not going to be much bothered. If you have to transfer or connect between multiple modes along the route, the journey is far more stressful. Similarly, highway driving with radio or audio material (or a phone) is relatively productive time, vs. stop-and-go city traffic.
Conditions: Having space to work (say on a commuter bus or rail) vs. being sardined into a city bus or urban subway makes a difference not captured in time alone.
Outliers: One pattern that likely has emerged are "marathon commuters" -- people with exceptionally long commutes. You'd need to compare the mean and median commute times to see what this trend is. It might well be that most people have the same time, but a small number have much longer commutes.
How to lie with statistics and all that.
About a year ago I finally broke, lost my job, and have since been focused on taking a break and working on my issues.
Thank you for sharing. I sincerely, to the point that I am welling up with tears, hope you can resolve your issues, as I totally understand the feeling. Know that there are others like you and it is possible for things to improve.
Just FYI: I am not totally over my problems, but what really helped me was therapy, medication for dermatological issues that were causing me distress and insecurity, socializing with nice friends and family and completely cutting out toxic family, dramatically cutting back on drugs I was using to cope, and creating (and doing my best to stick to) a daily self-care routine, tracked via a to-do app, that includes good sleep, daily showers and grooming, and walks.
It hasn’t been perfect but it’s made a big difference and for the first time in about seven years I am feeling OK about life.
This is from the book Top 5 regrets of the dying written by a nurse Bronnie Ware at a nursing home.
Here is a link about the book https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/03/top-5-regrets-of-t...
1. Not saying what you think 2. Not doing what you think is right (even if that would have been a mistake)
Later you may feel you've become an expert in something - and then it is very important to express what you think, but also to listen to what other people say too.
If we don't do any of this we might as well be machines :)
Well, in my opinion, for every such person there are probably hundreds who actually do that and as a result get nowhere in their careers. Family, especially an SO, to an extent looks up to you based on your success, typically, and more importantly, counts on your (e.g., financial) success. If you lived in the now and didn't succeed career-wise or financially, your SO probably would've left you long time ago, and you wouldn't have a family to begin with.
We don't hear from those people because they're "nobodys". We like to interview successful people, who get there through workaholism more or less, and we ask them what are their regrets and they tell us they wish they hadn't worked so hard. What they're really trying to say is that they could settle for a bit less success. But there's no guarantee they would've had minimum desired success if they didn't work as hard to begin with. Such successful people are simply telling you about their desire for some ideal/fantasy world, that doesn't exist, where they spent more time with family, lived more in the now, and still achieved the minimum desirable level of success ('minimum desirable' according to their own personal/subjective standards, which is probably not less than 80-90% of their actual success, e.g., someone with $400m net worth would think he could settle for $300m and be able to spend more time with family etc, but that's not how it works).
If someone interviewed any of those "nobodys" probably many of them would say they're happy with how their life went. But you, the reader of such regret lessons, have to ask yourself what do you want to do with your life. And based on that, your have to "pick" the regret-lessons that apply to you.
It's like studying for exams.
Sometimes in school I studied for 10 hours for exams that turned out to be trivially easy. I barely needed to study at all. I could have gotten more sleep, worked out, practiced some other skill... I would have been a much happier person if I'd spent those hours on something other than school.
But then other times I studied for 10 hours for an exam, and when I saw the questions I was kicking myself for not putting in just another hour or two. The exam covered material just barely beyond what I studied, and my grade would have improved dramatically if I'd only put in a little more effort.
When I put in long hours at my job--which I don't always do--I'm not doing so because I'm mistakenly believing that working is more important than relationships or relaxation; I'm working long hours because I'm unsure about the future and I want to make sure I have some minimum level of security. Sometimes I look back and those hours feel unnecessary, but other times I realize how lucky I was to have put in all that work.
That said, I still think there's a lesson here. We should constantly step back and ask ourselves what we really want to be doing. Sometimes that means working less, and sometimes that means working more. Just because we worked 60 hours last week doesn't mean we need to work 60 hours this week, and by the same token we shouldn't get complacent just because things are going well and there's no immediate need for more effort. Some of my best decisions in life have been when I completely re-evaluated where I was at and decided to do something completely different. Sometimes that meant pursuing a passion, but other times it meant giving up on a passion to do something realistic.
Jeepers, I really disagree with this and I hope it has not been your life experience. We're happy nobodies; we settled for modest jobs with modest incomes, limited hours, and good family time. We both contribute financially and have stability if not super-duper success. And I am certain neither of us "looks up to" the other in any way based on financial or career success.
That depends on having co-workers who also think this is true.
In my experience, this is not guaranteed. Frex, I used to work in that one company as a junior dev, where I was expected to know everything about the internal development processes of the dev team from day 1. Well, I hadn't taken "<that_one_company> 101" in my CS course so I had no idea, e.g. which one was the development server and how to get onto it. Still, when I asked people that information, they reacted as if I had transgressed some invisible barrier and I was taking up their time for no reason.
After a lot of this, I resolved to never ask anyone anything again. I mostly kept to it (one time I was sure someone had done something incredibly stupid that I didn't want to have to take the blame for, so I called them over to fix it themselves- and it turned out I was right). The upshot of this was that I learned a metric shit ton of things on my own, but of course the people who depended on my work being done quickly were constantly breathing dow my neck in rage.
On the bright side, once I felt I had received enough self-training at the expense of that company, I gave myself a promotion by finding another one, where I received some of the most brilliant mentoring I could ever expect, by co-workers who were incredibly relieved that a new hire was interested in learning about some of their legacy software.
While it can be uncomfortable (no downside) or expose that you don't know what you're expected to know (but fixes that quickly), in the majority of cases people are happy to explain their expertise.
> when I asked people that information, they reacted as if I had transgressed some invisible barrier and I was taking up their time for no reason.
The downside of your resolution, of course, was your 2 years, and the inefficiencies that not asking questions brings.
I complained about that to my line manager who assured me it was OK to ask, that it was part of more senior devs' job to answer questions etc, but of course nothing changed.
You survived it. You didn't do yourself any particular favours, beyond survival by the experience.
Context is everything.
Between paid work, house/family work, exercise, etc. I work as hard as anybody else I know, and I still enjoy a good video game session. I'll be playing Horizon: Zero Dawn in a few minutes. It's a better hobby than sneering at others.
GP wasn’t sneering. GP was communicating something they experienced.
It's a shame that leisure time itself has to be framed around work.
As we move forward we need to move past this concept of "work" and "productivity" as the main drivers of what it means to be human.
Also, work is the only means by which we do things that can benefit others. It's all very good to be concerned with your own experience, but if you want to be helpful to a partner, a family, or a community, you have to work.
This is why work has such meaning. It makes benefits that are not purely selfish. Benefiting other people strikes me as more meaningful than simply attending to one's self, trying to make the days until death more pleasant. This selfishness is what has always troubled me about the popular hedonistic conception of meaning that's taken hold in recent decades.
This one is tough for me.
Must all of life come down to having something to show for it?
What about those pockets of our existence where we can just _be_ and enjoy something for the sake of that enjoyment?
And if people stopped enjoying fiction, what motivation would there be for others to write if they had no readership to show for their work?
Productivity is a good goal but we're slightly more complicated as people than simple, single-purpose machines
This is not a substitute for experiencing things firsthand, but I can certainly point to many novels that shocked me into thinking about stuff differently.
Good fiction reaches you in a strongly empathic way, in a place where you're uniquely receptive to it. This is valuable for teaching things about your own life and the lives of others, which seems valuable.
The time spent commuting, standing in-line, sitting in meetings and so on may be felt like wasted time but they are activities which are, pretty much, difficult to avoid.
And let me tell you I'd go back to being lazy in a heartbeat. I was much less successful and poorer, but happier, calmer, and more interesting.
I highly recommend procrastinating.
Then my wakeup call was getting fired from my internship, realizing I had a shitty GPA, no idea how to code, and no guarantee I would graduate, or that I wouldn't end up homeless after I did.
So every time I needed to do something and had that feeling of procrastination I'd reach down inside, imagine how much my life would be a failure if I didn't accomplish these tasks and then push. And it worked. I started getting a lot more done, my grades improved dramatically, and at my next internship I was a star.
Then it was 5 years later, I'd done well at every job I had, but I was 25 pounds heavier, had stomach issues, my memory was terrible, I hadn't thought about anything but work in years, and my cortisol levels were abnormally high. I decided that I needed to slow down and I can't.
Success is addicting, and now interwoven with my identity. And I've found that it's very hard to slow down. And when I do I start to get depressed when I don't do as well on projects as I'm accustomed to so I usually end up revving back up again promising myself I'll slow down for the next one.
Not to say procrastinating is always great, but not procrastinating isn't just a bucket of pros without any cons.
That's great if you are actually able to enjoy the time spent procrastinating. But when your procrastinating ends up with me, high strung, hard to relax, hard to get work done procrastinator, then it's not that great.
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
I wish there was some magic phrase that would convince me it's not too late to catch up. If we have aspirations, how do we stop comparing ourselves to other people?
Careers can go like the game snakes and ladders sometimes. If you can phrase the time you spent more positively I think it can work out.
The years weren't a total loss, since I did release a reasonably complex tablet app (with $10k sales) plus a bunch of smaller, less profitable ones. But it took me 3-4 times as long to develop them as it would have any competent engineer, at least based on the stuff that gets posted to HN.
I still want to keep working on myself and break through to the other side of productivity, but sometimes it feels like I'm just circling the drain. My personality is such that I can lift my head one day and find that entire months have disappeared out from under me.
Next time you stay awake, go get a piece of paper and pen, and think back on your travels and current life. What things have you learned that you enjoy doing (especially things that surprise you)? What things have your learned that you don't enjoy (especially things that are often considered desirable/good)?
From there you might be able to come up with some guidelines for how to chose your path forward. And you will probably realize that your traveling years has taught you a lot about the most important thing - yourself!
That said, don’t discount your ambitions — sometimes a poor, unsuccessful life spent in pursuit of something beautiful is more happy than a traditionally successful life in pursuit of nothing at all.
This is inane. I'm reminded of Mark Wahlberg "forgiving himself" for beating the old Vietnamese man blind.
I just see two paths: working where the money is or trying to get by with things I'm passionate about.
I'm quite fine with my current job, but for it to be more of my passion, it would have to include more art and/or science and preferably not be 40h/week + commute and breaks.