How Will I Measure My Life?
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“A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. […]
“I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands
“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”
* "Take time to spend on leisure" or "allow yourself to 'waste' some time"
* say what you think
* cultivate friendships
* be happy
Interestingly, Kent seems to have focused in on hygiene-motivation factors more than anything else, while the large takeaway I brought from the book is more about relationships than money/freetime options. While it is important to be locally maximizing the balance of those two, I found the message of the book to be about focusing outward, more away from one's self and career, and more towards others in ways that you can positively effect them.
Not saying at all that the content is wrong (because it's not, it's a fun engineering way of looking at it), but for those curious it also represents a subset of the book.
I think finding a sustainable balance should be sought after when looking for a job. Does the job let you disconnect? Does the job feel satisfying to you? Do you like the office environment? How much does it pay? And how does this job affect your career?
If you have sufficient money, you can quit at any time and find a suitable less-demanding (both physically and psychologically) job.
I like to think that, I can provide value to a company. If they don't appreciate that and try to take advantage of me without compensation I am always free to look for better opportunities.
Once I did an internship working crazy hours. The people I worked with also worked non-stop. A couple of them slept in the office, a guy slept in the gym. Everyone there was telling us to evaluate our options, think carefully before committing to that firm. And we were thinking that once we got in, our lives would be on hold for the next 10 years. While we were discussing this in the middle of the night another employee looked at us and said "You can quit at any time. See this job as an opportunity to learn things while making good money. Once you stop working, they take the firm cellphone away. All notifications stop. Everything will be back to normal." That talk stuck with me. Whatever the circumstances are a job is a means to make some money. You are free and nobody's slave.
While I do get an amount of enjoyment out of producing music for others, it may or may not be music that I personally like. It has to meet certain criteria. It has to sound like this, use these instruments, or be that duration, or whatever.
A lot like programming, I think. I can program on my own time, making whatever I fancy, using whatever language I want, to my own maximum enjoyment. At a programming job, I will likely enjoy it to at least some degree, but I may or may not be doing everything in a way that I think best, because I'm doing the work for the satisfaction of someone else.
But then, producing something for someone else, be it software or music or whatever, results in a different kind of satisfaction on my end: the satisfaction of meeting someone else's need. They wanted X, and I made X for them, and they are happy with it. I may or may not like X myself, but I am pleased that they like it!
Also, may lead to build fragile in the Talebian sense structures, that is, a lifestyle too dependent on the local minima.
What happens if they change and your life isn't as optimized as you wanted?
These are questions, but the answers are too personal for everyone to respond here.
So what, then, is the point of optimization criteria, if they wouldn't actually enable any possible decision making that accomplishes the "goal"?
Sorry to be so down on this, Kent, but this line of reasoning is such a fail on so many levels. Once in a while--maybe often!--we should just turn off the optimizer and let life unfold.
Many software engineers get paid a lot of money, so it's not too difficult to retire at 35 if you can keep your expenses down.
Qualitative measures are probably to be preferred though, e.g. Love.
Whenever I whine on my b'day about turning-a-certain-age, there's always some older person in the room who gets all wistful and says, "Ah, to be N again..."
Oh thanks! Way to mellow my harsh man!
(I gotta stop inviting that guy.)
Could unit of life be
money? time? number of pizza's u ate? number of babies u had?
Or are they binary in nature?
Happy or Unhappy, Satisfied or Unsatisfied, Enjoyed or Not Enjoyed. Fulfilled or Unfulfilled?
What could it be?
I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable, incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement. It may be difficult to reason about the value of family dinners or acts of kindness, and more difficult still to calculate or approximate some kind of dinners-per-kindness measurement, but that's a different thing entirely from claiming there is not and cannot be such a measurement.
For example, you could adopt the axes from the rest of the article, and ask questions like "how much of my money and/or free time would I give up for a family dinner?" "how much would I give up for a random act of kindness?" "is there a minimum amount of money and/or free time I need to be able to afford family dinners or acts of kindness?" "if I only had enough to afford one of the two, which would I choose?"
Saying "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them" is the start of a series of interesting questions that ultimately yields a better understanding of yourself. Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.
Worse, the entire foundation of the premise is rotten. Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?
Yes you can. And the sooner you stop thinking that significance demands ignorance, the sooner you can start understanding and improving the things that are most important to you.
> "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them"
The article implies nothing of the sort.
No, not "definitely". You are assuming they are because "reasons". However, we have no idea whether those "reasons" apply, or whether they mean something is measurable.
You may have an argument that they should be measurable, but that's a far cry from "they are definitely".
A little humility is a Good Thing™
We have no good evidence so far to believe in magic.
Everything is definitely measureable? How did you solve the Measurement Problem? It seems to have all the other quantum physicists stumped.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem
The problem with saying "everything in reality is physical/material", is that we don't even know what that is on a quantum level.
It is however a license for doubt over certainty.
>not a human limitation
Once again, no one is sure about this.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but it seems like your only way of appreciating the value of such experiences is by determining a monetary opportunity cost?
(The adjective "monetary" is redundant when discussing evaluations and costs.)
Obviously, educational experiences can be evaluated as any other investment.
What about human feelings (e.g. mental/physical health)? Are those important in evaluating experiences?
>(The adjective "monetary" is redundant when discussing evaluations and costs.)
The definition of opportunity cost does not mandate that the "cost" is monetary.
If, and only if, they have a monetary effect.
For example a professional foot-racer becoming more healthy by X amount means the expected value of him/her running a race increases by some $Y amount (due to higher probability of winning a [higher] prize).
> The definition of opportunity cost does not mandate that the "cost" is monetary.
The cost in-question is important if and only if it is equivalent to some loss of (monetary) value.
To someone suffering depression or similar mental troubles, both may be worth potentially the entirety of possible future lifetime earnings, potentially zero ... or potentially some trivial amount in between due to, say, reduced frequency of making mistakes.
What is the extent that (a) you value passing your assets to a child/descendant upon death, (b) you don't have a (living) child, and (c) you expect to have a legitimate child with that lover in the future? That is precisely the extent to which the warmth of a lover's embrace is valuable to you.
But I expect that item "(a)" is zero for most people, including myself, so generally the value is still zero.
(I consider death to be an ultimate loss of everything, no matter what kind of other-person, descendant or otherwise, ends up in possession of what I owned whilst I lived. ... Of course, if one's balance sheet were negative and one had no expectation of being able to remedy that situation, then death would not seem so bad...)
In what sense is it dangerous and in what sense is it mysticism?
It's actually kind of an interesting philosophical question, I linked to some background reading at the end of this post.
>Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.
It's not anti-intellectual, it's a different intellectual viewpoint from yours.
>Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?
This isn't an anti-rational viewpoint.
[1] https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAI-2.pdf
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-incommensurable/#Va...
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory/#Inc
[4] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674447561
It is anti-intellectual, in the sense that it posits a separate magisterium of things "too complex to reason about" (or sometimes, "too profound to dare and reason about") and asks to give up the attempt. That way lies supernatural.
Why try to find an objective scientific/monetary measurement of the value of a subjective experience like the warmth of a lovers embrace when you can feel it directly and immediately?
http://maverikeducation.blogspot.com/2014/03/difficulty-vs-c...
>In what sense is it dangerous and in what sense is it mysticism?
Mysticism is dangerous because it challenges the status quo ideal of extreme materialism; that your worth as a human being is defined by the size of your bank account.
E.g. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
A real mystic of this kind would practice a strong version of fate or destiny principle which essentially makes free will irrelevant.
To judge is to measure and quantify (or classify) in a less strict way.
The tone of your response has piqued my curiosity more than the content of your response. Why such a strong, negative reaction?
You will only end up comparing your life to others, (which is not a particularly good thing to do in my opinion).
I shudder to think about all the data Facebook manages to suck up when you give it the ability.