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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to go out on a limb and request that people not post this sort of thing here. HNers, I believe, have a higher-than-average rate of anxiety and psychosomaticism (myself included). Articles like this that don't include any real hopeful message or interesting takeaway just cause pointless distress for many of us.

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On the other hand, many people on HN just like most likely pretty much every human you meet needs to hear something like this in the end blurb:

> If I get a soapbox, here’s my short shtick: We are all so fragile. Each day is precious. And the most important parts of our lives are the relationships we invest in.

Carpe diem! Do something nice for your loved ones. Make friends with someone you dislike. Go be good to somebody who doesn't deserve it. Our time here is limited, there's little space to be petty.

I doubt there's anyone in our society who hasn't heard that adage at one point or another. Not that it isn't meaningful, but I don't think hearing it repeated again justifies the toll on mental health that comes with it in this instance.

I assure you, I've heard it (and said) it tens of thousands of times in my life.

Looking back, I didn't even know what it meant until I lost my Mum a year ago at age 67 to cancer.

Life is damn short, and the most important thing you can do is have happiness right now.

I suspect what you may be describing is that it doesn't resonate with everybody all the time. But I think it's pretty common for some life experience to hit hard and someone realizes that all the corny, hackneyed cliches, as silly and overly simple as they seemed, basically had something to it. Then it clicks.

But I am sorry to hear about the toll on mental health.

Respectfully, it might be worth considering how people have a plurality or reactions to content. This content is obviously distressing and could have used some sort of warning.

Not everyone thinks or responds the same and it is good to be conscious of that.

I feel like the title of this one sufficiently conveys the kind of content you can expect. If you know this is a problem for you, you aren't required to read it. There will not be a test. The mods will not email you and inquire as to why you failed to comment on this particular article.

When I first joined, I was extremely ill and I turned off Show Dead because it just upset the hell out of me to see dead comments and dead articles. And I knew it was because I was so very sick and that made me emotionally fragile.

As I got healthier, that stopped bothering me and I turned on Show Dead because it's additional information and it's useful for knowing what is going on here.

I'm prone to nitpicking titles and I don't have any problem with people nitpicking titles because they feel the title didn't adequately signal that is wasn't really the kind of content they come here for. But I think it's overkill to ask people to not submit this kind of content.

The title implies that we're reading someone writing on their struggle with death, not the last published words of a dying man, insisting that he will fight a disease and try to beat the odds, punctuated by the editors note that he died days writing after the article.

I'm sorry but I think that is deserving of a more explicit content warning, and I don't see what that would cost you or others.

Agreed. This should have a content warning.

But the micro targeting facilitated via big data on social media, which plays in to our hopes and fears, desensitizes us.

I have 2 rare diseases myself, so I am pretty numb to articles like these, which is terrible, in and of itself.

My closing paragraph:

On the contrary, articles like this remind me to not take life for granted.

Ever since I read about Lee Holloway at Cloudflare I try to be grateful for every day on this Earth. I am 30 and yet so many promising and beloved people have died before my own young age.

We will all die. I am lucky to still be here experiencing this life.

When I was in college I put off a lot of things, because I was waiting to get out into the 'real world'. Which when I got out into the 'real world' realized was just stupid. Life is as you live it. It's all the real world.

The article was brutal. I think Wired should have put a warning at the beginning of the article, instead of the very end, but; do you really think censoring yourself from all harsh reality and expecting "disney" endings for everything is wise? Should every article contain a hopeful message with mandatory rose colored glasses? Should survivorship bias echoing be enforced? Zealous positivity can prevent you from somber reflection, asking difficult questions, and growing as a person overall. I don't think its wise to dwell on negative realities like the information technology fueled Muslim concentration camps in China or the relative slave labor that manufactures your electronics and clothing or the cows and chickens that get brutally slaughtered so that you can eat meat and make necessary protein chains; but, hey, I enjoy my steak and my smartphone and just keep rolling baby! That's life.

> Zealous positivity can prevent you from somber reflection, asking difficult questions, and growing as a person overall.

Well said. This advice is something I try to follow more as I get older.

Dwelling on negative realities is a bit more challenging especially with the current events.

> Dwelling on negative realities is a bit more challenging especially with the current events.

It is. The numbers are staggering and our federal mismanagement of it is horrifying. In response, I have cast myself into a dev hole, am building a large-scale dream project, and i am very thankful to have the extra time.

> the cows and chickens that get brutally slaughtered so that you can eat meat and make necessary protein chains;

This one is solvable - you can either just don't eat meat (plenty of people don't eat meat and they seem to do fine) or eeat meat from animals which were treated humanely.

You're making a lot of incorrect assumptions about my worldview, and I don't appreciate it.

No matter how grounded one's perspective is, each person has a finite amount of emotional energy to spend at a given time. This is a universal truth. Articles like this one can trash one's energy reserves - causing distress - without introducing any meaningful new information or perspective whatsoever. It's simply a bad cost/benefit ratio. I didn't learn any new hard truths by reading it, and I don't need your assistance to consider all of the bad things in the world, thank you very much. What I have trouble with is ceasing to do that even for a brief moment.

Don't preach at someone you don't have the faintest understanding of.

Yeah, there absolutely should be a content warning on this article. It is the right thing to do. However, social media plays similar, more damaging and more insidious psychological tricks. Big data makes it more personalized and damaging. I think many have become desensitized to the harms micro targeting on our hopes and fears has done, via social media in particular. Hence, the lack of concern and sensitivity for the need of a content warning.

I am not in favor of censorship. I am not in favor of those in favor of censorship. Good luck with your issues.

As a child at one stage of my life I was terrified of dying, and every time I learned about a new way to die, I became certain I was in the process of dying in exactly that way.

Then as I learned more about science and statistics I realized that most early deaths are rare, and not only that but evolution guarantees they are rare, because we all descend from people who made it long enough to raise a family.

Of course rare doesn't mean impossible, and if you are truly sick see a doctor ASAP, but otherwise remember you're just an experimental branch on the great tree of Life and enjoy your time in the sun. We all have our time in the light, and we all return to the earth when that time is up.

Maybe articles like these are what some people need to be reminded that life isn't all about coding.

If you or anyone else want to talk, email is in the profile.

On anxious thoughts, I find rationalising them is a better way to cope than trying to distract. Write them down somewhere and go through each labelling the possibility.

I couldn't disagree more. The idea of denying the HN community an opportunity to read a touching and deeply personal story—simply because its ending isn't palatable to you—is incredibly selfish.

Yeah, I was kind of waiting for the ‘I beat the odds’ message. Only to find that it wasn’t there...

Sometimes it's not and that should be a wake up call that life doesn't always turn out for the best like we always hope it would.

By definition, most people don't beat the odds...

True, but generally stories aren’t written about those people.

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