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Comment by esemor | Hacker News Reader

”But everybody dies, and there will always be places and experiences missing from anyone’s life – the world has too much beauty and adventure for one person to see.”

Damn gut punch...

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I remember precisely when I had this particular epiphany. I was 12 years old, in love with books, and thanks to my parents who had signed a form, I had just gotten my first library card for the real (read: non-kiddie) section of the public library. Awed by the sheer number of tall bookshelves, intoxicated by the library smell and my newfound source of knowledge, I asked the librarian how many books they had, she said more than 100,000. I was duly impressed. But then I started thinking, and did some arithmetic on a piece of scrap paper.

And I realized that even if I read one book a day for the rest of my life, I would only be able to read a fraction of all the books on the shelves. Right there in the same room with me was provably unattainable knowledge. I could decide to read any book, but I could not read all of them. If I decided to read this book, then that other book would remain forever unread. Years before I would be able to put the words on it, I had stumbled upon a kind of incompleteness theorem, and I started to understand how small one's life actually is. This thought never left me.

I felt like this but towards reading all of wikipedia.

Opportunity cost.

I was 28 when my dad died. He was 58.

It has definitely shifted how I think about life and what matters.

If I live as long as him, I've already passed the midpoint.

Really helps you put things in perspective.

Everything he says in his article is more or less true - most of which we all already know.

Maybe the insight is that we forget what's important too frequently, and need a better mechanism to be reminded?

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