Chris Crawford on Mortality
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For the record, I'm almost as old as OP and this is all the opposite of how I think. I cherish every day. I can't wait to get to work. And to play. And to eat good food, drink good beer, and hang out with good friends and family. Yesterday, I jogged through the woods, emailed 15 friends, had cake and ice cream with my mother, hung out on hacker news, and wrote some really cool code. Today will probably be even better.
Moving a bead from one jar to the other is not only depressing, it's sick. Throw out those jars, OP, and get on doing what you love.
I don't care how old I am or how old anyone else is. I don't even want to think about my death, I just want to keep on living my life.
I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather did, not screaming and yelling like everyone else in the car.
Aging is ridiculously unfair, but ignoring it doesn't stop it from happening. The Reaper keeps track of the beads whether or not you do. People get old. Their bodies and minds slowly break down. At some point they have to stop working, stop driving, stop doing lots of things they love doing.
This accounting of days sounds depressing at first, but I can speak from experience: you soon go back to your normal level of happiness, but with a more accurate view of reality. I think a similar thing happens with terminally ill patients, although the time scale is shorter.
The terminal illness analogy maps pretty well to aging. So much so that I encourage people to donate to anti-aging research such as the Methuselah Foundation (https://www.mfoundation.org/?pn=mj_donate) or SENS (http://www.sens.org/donate). I just donated $50 the latter.
How is that not ridiculously unfair?
I look at it this way: the near-eternity that occurred before my birth didn't bother me. So I won't be bothered by the eternity that occurs after my death. I won't be around to contemplate it.
You can take this line of thinking to either of its natural conclusions: the morbid one or the "seize the day" one. I'm somewhere in the middle. I try to seize the day, but I'm a realist.
Some days I grab life by the nuts. Some days I count the beads.
I won't be bothered by the eternity that occurs after my death.
Would you mind if you died tomorrow? What about in a year? 10 years? 100? 1,000? If you had a choice in the matter, would you ever want to age and die? Would you condemn others to the same fate?
I want to be alive tomorrow. Tomorrow I will want to be alive the next day. And so on. So I want to be alive indefinitely. This may or may not be possible, but it doesn't change the fact that it is desirable.
Would you condemn others to the same fate?
I don't think that's a fair question, given that I haven't said anything of the sort. I would love for everyone to live as long as they could and prosper to whatever extent they could. I bear no animus to anyone who will win the birth lottery and be born into the age of 1,000-year lifespans. Similarly, I do not revel in the unfortunate fates of those who were born in the dark ages.
A lot of people seem to have a mental block regarding the possibility that our biological clock, like almost everything else, may eventually be changed by technology.
I am especially surprised by science fiction writers. Why are there old people in so much sci fi? Why are there old people on shows like Star Trek? Does anyone seriously think we will grow old and die 500 years from now? And isn't sci fi suppose to lead the way in this area? I mean, what is the point of sci fi, if it doesn't help people imagine how the future might be different? (Obviously, I'm talking about that branch of sci fi that avoids fantasies and dystopias)
Virginia Postrel has sort of hit on this theme in her writing, where she wonders why sci fi tends to be less optimistic than it used to be. The future is no longer what it once was:
http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/archives/002834.html
A lot of things that used to be sci fi are now real: space travel, global communication devices, computers that can fit in your pocket, medical treatments for once untreatable illnesses, etc.
It would be interesting to have a poll on Hacker News and ask people how long they think they will live. Since Hacker News is a community of forward looking individuals (and pro-technology too), such a poll would give a sense of how much a forward thinking group thinks medical technology is going to change in the next 60 years.
Absolutely. Here's a few reasons why I think that way:
A)Even if we somehow solve the problem of aging, some people (quite possibly many or even most) will still choose to live a "natural" life for any number of reasons.
B)History suggests that we will not continue our current rate of progress indefinitely. Who knows how long it may take to recover from the inevitable disruptions.
C)I suspect that, like cancer or practical flying cars, aging is a harder problem than we think it is. Just because we can envision the end result does not mean we can achieve it.
D)Based on current medical trends, any effective anti-aging treatment is likely to be so expensive that the vast majority of people will not be able to afford it.
E)In the end, entropy always wins.
My apologies for all the pessimism. :)
But seriously, will (wealthy) people age 500 years from now?
If someone recommended that you prepare yourself for your failures by repeating to yourself 50 times a day "I am certain to horrendously screw up everything that I undertake", would that seem like sage advice? All I can say is "don't be surprised when you're right".
Terrible idea.
[Ob reference: http://www.sens.org ]
If we choose to do that of course. But if everyone walks through life with blinkers, assuming that it can only be the same as that of their parents, then nothing will change.
The future depends on people who break their indoctrination and work to make things different. Acceptance of what you saw as a child is death and stasis.
Maybe life will be significantly longer in the near future, maybe not. In the 60s we expected moon colonies around now and in the 50s top researchers considered AI almost around the corner. Science predictions are meaningless. From what I see right now my parents at their 60s aren't much different from my grandparents at the same age.
I see this more as a warning story than anything. If you truly love something and want to contribute: Never stop.
The irony is that during his time of not contributing, others have risen and passed him, contributing more to games than he ever did.
The reality is that I had to google him to find out who he was. That is not someone who is committed to his craft.
He did. He was trying to develop a new form of game. It didn't work, but he tried. At least he was following his vision rather than trying to churn out vapid, ephemeral clones of Angry Birds or Doom or whatever, chasing after money.
What!?
Google is in many ways a measure of popularity and relevance, not commitment. Chris and the games industry have gone in completely different directions. He is no longer interested in writing games for the same reasons that I no longer play games.
He's off writing what he loves. Saying that others have contributed far more is a lot like comparing DHH to _why and suggesting that DHH has contributed far more to Ruby than _why. Yes, of course, but how does that diminish _why?
I can't speak for him, but if he wants to stay true to his vision, the most likely outcome is to influence the world to come a little closer to where he is. Dragging himself over to where the games industry is today would mean making games that aren't very Chris Crawford at all.
He literally wrote the book on how to write games for the Atari 800 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Re_Atari
I don't think he stopped -- he tried to pull the industry in a direction he wanted to see it go and has not (yet) been successful.
When Java first started appearing on cell phones in the early 00's I tracked him down and sent him an email asking if he was interested in porting some of his old hits to a phone as they were about as powerful as a 80's PC. He responded with the source code of one I said I enjoyed, Eastern Front 1942, and said go for it. I spent a couple hours trying to make sense of the 6502 Assembly code and quit.
Porting it was a good idea when the Motorola RAZR was the new hotness, but it doesn't hold up as well now that the processor in my iPhone is almost as fast as the one in my laptop: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-eastern-f...
I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone, Mr. Crawford in particular. What he describes in this post is clearly in line with Becker's concept of an "immortality project."
I also wasted tons of time on Eastern Front 1942. A great game because UI was so well thought out
Now he's 94 and he avidly reads books in English, German and Danish. He's trying to learn about the internet, but hasn't really gotten down the concept of "surfing the web".
Yes, you can be productive past your 80s. I plan to be, but I also have six decades until I'm there.
I loved the bead idea though. Pure genius to really nail in how finite life is. It hits home for all.
Life is short and you cannot expect to achieve much, so be sure to provide a proper write up of the hacks that were hardest to discover. Teach them. Then they will not be lost and progress can accumulate.
Maybe he was just 20 years ahead of the tech?