A Death-Aware Career Plan | Hacker News Reader

A Death-Aware Career Plan

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75 pointsKentBeck64 comments

A little bit in the same vein, I'm a big fan of the "rich, broke, or dead" retirement calculator - in addition to telling you the odds your money will run out by age X, it includes the odds you'll be dead by then. I feel like it helps me put my retirement savings in a bit better perspective, as someone who also doesn't want to work in a corporate job until I die.

https://engaging-data.com/will-money-last-retire-early/

An important caveat: the probabilities are based on historical back-testing, and the degree to which the past accurately predicts the future is difficult to estimate.

How can I get the grey wedge to be smaller on that chart?

If that's a UI question, you can choose "healthy nonsmoker" in the mortality table drop-down, or uncheck "death" to remove it entirely and get a more-standard retirement calculator that assumes you're living at whatever age you calculate out to.

If you mean you want to decrease your odds of death, then "healthy nonsmoker" is also a good start, and there's a very deep rabbit-hole you can go into on longevity research, though no real option to uncheck "death" yet.

If you are asking about increasing longevity, it's mostly about taking care of yourself (rather than some magic pill or supplement). Don't smoke, exercise, maintain a healthy weight, get the recommended cancer screenings (e.g. mammograms and colonoscopies), find a reason to live (communities, family, purpose).

Thank you for that link. It validates my hunch that holding mostly equities and reducing spending during lean times can be better than holding equities/bonds and maintaining spending.

They should define death-aware career plan a little better. This seems to be an investment driven piece for someone with plenty of money.

I don't feel NFTs or crypto are logical choices, feels like gambling. I would rather incrementally invest in ETFs, and/or start a business that I have a little more control over. If you want work to be worthwhile, consider helping non-profits. You will be paid less, but the goal is altruistic, not money.

He’s not saying he’ll invest in NFTs. He’s saying he wants to put his writing into NFTs so people will read it. It’s kind of like teaching philosophy with TikTok videos because that’s where the audience is. (At least I think that’s what he saying!)

It took me a couple of read-throughs of this to really see what he's trying to say about NFTs, and (having been skeptical elsewhere about NFTs) I kind of understand what he's saying. He thinks that everyone is obsessed with NFTs, he thinks he has wisdom to share, by packaging up his wisdom into NFTs he can smuggle his wisdom to a wider audience. Am I getting that right? If that really is what he's doing I think it fits much better into a conversation about how you do stuff that interests you whilst still working, than in a conversation aobut financial freedom.

I feel like the thing missing or not conveyed here is a purpose. Between my last job and the current one, I took a lot of time off to figure out what I was doing and why - more broadly, what is the purpose of my life? What is the impact I want to have in my limited time here?

I found an answer to that, and it's made all the difference for me - I know why I'm doing what I'm doing, I know that my work makes a difference, and that makes the rest of this much easier. If I suddenly had $50M, I would still be working in the space I'm in.

Simultaneously, it's given me balance. I don't have the same frantic energy I had before - I'm doing meaningful work, I'm in this for the long haul, and I can't do this alone, so I can pace myself instead of panicking that I need to keep studying so I can reach my next career milestone.

The philosophers were right - find your meaning.

What are you working on now that was different between the last one and this one?

GP's comment resounds heavily with me. I took time off to consider who I am, what I want my "legacy" to be (other than bad puns), etc.

My answer to your question is: B2C consumer internet -> Cancer research.

I was a programmer and manager at a large tech co in a space that became increasingly problematic over the last ~5 years or so.

In the time off, I decided that climate change was the issue that mattered most to me - I felt I would feel guilty at the end of my life if I didn't at least try to do something in that space. Given that and my set of skills and general beliefs about the world, I wound up in SynBio, which I think has the promise of providing both the ability to significantly shift how we build our world and also the tools to repair the damage we've done so far.

I'm now working as a programmer in a company in that space, learning amazing science from amazing people, and seeing the impact of my work on helping advance their work. I'm learning a ton every day, I'm excited to go to work, and I feel like even if we don't succeed as a field as I'm hoping we will, at least I tried.

The purpose of life is whatever you give it. At the end of the day, nobody will remember you, and you will be forgotten.

That's only a given if you try for it.

The greatest lie sold to Americans (as a US citizen) is that we all can be someone. Not only is this not true, but disingenuous to tell lower class people "you can be someone! you have the same opportunities as everyone else!" I'm not saying the opportunity doesn't exist everywhere, but it definitely is glamorized by the media as though it's a very tangible path. It's survivorship bias at the very least.

If you're born of the working class, chances are you will stay there unless you can figure out a way via labor or relationships to get out. More often than not, people don't/can't.

> At the end of the day, nobody will remember you, and you will be forgotten.

Absolutely, and I think not enough people understand or internalize this.

I think there are two responses to this - one is that the grand cosmos will not remember me, but my children, friends, and those I can mentor and teach will. You may not remember your great grandparents, but your parents do, and their influence influences you.

The second is that it takes a whole crew to sail a ship - I'm not the hero of the story, but my efforts can help accomplish changes I think are worthwhile in the world. I won't see the end of the journey, but I can help it along the way.

>You may not remember your great grandparents, but your parents do, and their influence influences you.

My city made a huge family tree database and I traced back all my anscestors to the 1500's of one branch and around the 1600's of another. It was fascinating to see I had lineage to the Polish Baltics, Northern and Southern Germany, England, and French Canadian as well.

What was a revelation to me was, I never heard of these people from my family. The only significant contribution to my life these people honestly made was the simple fact that they reproduced. I had no connection, identity, or care for who they were.

So in all, it truly made me realize, life has absolutely no purpose, and your contributions most likely won't even be permanently valuable. The only true sense of permanence that one can contribute to humanity is reproducing, and hoping your offspring will do so as well.

So you're saying I should put more effort into finding a girlfriend

Side comment - the visualization linked from flowingdata is absolutely cool (and to me much more interesting than the linked article)

https://flowingdata.com/2015/09/23/years-you-have-left-to-li...

I wish there was a dashboard where you could input more data about yourself (diet, habits, family health history, location) and watch the animation change accordingly

> A dollar today is worth infinitely more to me than a dollar after I’m dead.

Either you're single or you're about to be.

Hypothetically, where would "societal collapse" fall in this framework? I'm thinking that you'd just consider it the same as "sudden death," if it happens, assign it a prior probability distribution, update that prior every year or so, and act accordingly.

There is one thing that might change the time value calculation and make a big payoff in decades be worth much more than a dollar today. That would life/health extension technology & medicine. When it starts becoming available, it will cost millions.

What the fuck is a scaler?

I'm actually slightly surprised Kent Beck is not financially independent at 60. I would have assumed he had gotten some equity somewhere along the way that would have had a big upside.

At 60, in a country and industry that has experienced unrivaled growth over his lifetime. It is surprising given that a very basic balanced stock portfolio over that time frame should have returned phenomenal results.

>equity somewhere along the way that would have had a big upside

That's more about luck than hard work and good ideas.

True, but with the amount of opportunities that come along with Being Kent Beck I would have thought he would have gotten lucky at least once over his career.

Or even just negotiated the level of salary that invested in a safe index fund would mean money wouldn't be a problem once hitting no penalty IRA withdrawal age.

This is a person whose retirement plan includes NFTs but not mutual funds. I am not surprised.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since your account has already been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, I've banned it. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The next post medium recommended to me was about him playing poker..

You can't really tell from this post that he doesn't have enough to be what most people consider financially independent. Michael Mechanic, who wrote this book called Jackpot interviewed a lot of 100m+ rich wealthy people.

He says that if you ask any of them how much money they need, they will consistently tell you they need about 1/3rd more than they have. It's a phenomena of psychology not material well being.

We are on the Hacker News forum. We probably all do well in a relative sense, but will probably all go to our grave with goals ahead.

For sure, Jeff Bezos who is the world richest man has said many times that he wants his legacy to be:

"World oldest man"

It never stops, for sure in the back of his mind he has the goal of delaying death as much as he possibly can (for obvious reasons) and on top of that it means more time to achieve goals that he has in mind (which will inevitably be measured monetarily)

Sure, people with $100M+ want more. If they didn't, there's plenty of off ramps before $100M for the people who are willing to be satisfied.

There's really not that much added utility going from say $10M to $100M. And if you didn't see that and stop accumulating, you're more worried about having more than others than having enough. Or you really want to win the America's cup or own a private jet rather than slumming it on charters.

He just mentions he doesn't have 50M vested. That doesn't preclude him having 10M or any other still very high number that would be considered financially independent

Not sure NFTs should be part of your retirement plan.

They're convex--small investment, small chance of a large return. Also, I've been curious what mechanism will fund creators creating & NFTs seem like a contender.

What do you mean by convex?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/convexity.asp

> I’m going to try minting my more popular tweets as NFTs

I totally don't get this. They're tweets meaning that they're already out there. There's no scarcity here. Am I missing something?

You're missing the fact that enough people see value there to be willing to pay for it, therefore it might be worth selling it. That's all "value" is.

I do agree that it's stupid. But it's the buyers who are stupid, not the sellers.

This is probably one thing the Chinese get right in terms of economics. Banning speculative and worthless commodities. It does nobody any good because we all know it's just a speculative market. The few who get out in time make a profit while the many that don't almost become destitute because of it. It doesn't promote tangible benefits to anyone. Nobody has a skill, nothing of value is transferred, simply money changing hands because someone else deems a worthless commodity is more valuable than it is.

There's no scarcity for any NFTs because they are all trivially replicated. The only thing you ever have is entry on the blockchain that you own the NFT. That's as true for a NFT of a tweet or an NFT of a bored ape.

Reminds me of beenie babies. Some are still valuable to the right buyers but that can be said of any collectable over the last century. However that doesn't mean beenie babies were a good investment or that selling beenie babies led to any lasting success.

It exactly reminds me of beanie babies (and Cabbage Patch Kids before them). Most of them aren't worth anything now. It seems like every generation just feels like they need repeat this mistake.

There are plenty of images of the "Mona Lisa" painting, and you can print one yourself if you wish something to hang on your wall, but there's a 'real' one. Similarly the original creator of the digital item (tweet?) makes a public statement that they're assigning it to you. Think of it as a certificate of authenticity:

* https://www.agora-gallery.com/advice/blog/2017/12/02/prepare...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_authenticity

A chain of custody from the original creator, to you, to whomever you may sell it to.

The Plain Bagel channel had a good video on the subject, 'WTF Is an NFT? (And Should You "Invest" in One?)':

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItG-W3_EvOY

Most of the stuff I'm seeing aren't anywhere near the Mona Lisa in quality.

> Similarly the original creator of the digital item (tweet?) makes a public statement that they're assigning it to you.

Ok, and what does this actually get me? How meaningful is "ownership" in this context?

> Most of the stuff I'm seeing aren't anywhere near the Mona Lisa in quality.

Most of what I see in modern art, which goes for tens of millions of dollars, doesn't look like much to me:

* https://luxurylaunches.com/auctions/9-pieces-of-art-ridiculo...

And yet it seems to be "worth" that much to someone. Heck, I don't think much of the "Mona Lisa" as a painting personally—give me a Rembrandt or Monet for my wall—but I wouldn't mind owning it, just so I could turn around and sell it, as the money would be more useful to me.

What makes someone pay tens of millions for a watch?

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/hylabauer/2017/10/26/paul-newma...

> Ok, and what does this actually get me? How meaningful is "ownership" in this context?

You get to say that you own it, and there is a seemingly legally-approved chain of custody that says you do. You can continue to keep it, or you can pass ownership to someone else.

More generally: how meaningful is the ownership of anything? I'm planning to buy a new pair of shoes for about $100 this weekend because my current pair is old. Yet people are willing to layout thousands of dollars for sneakers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneaker_collecting

What makes them "worth" that much? Why would anyone spend that kind of money to own something like that?

This is similar to Bitcoin: it's just a bunch of bits, so how meaningful is ownership of bits in the ledger? Why do people follow a certain process to exchange money so that some bits (transactions/ledger) say that I own certain other bits (wallet contents)?

To me the culture and mechanism show all the signs of a speculative bubble mixed with euphoria, memes and a severe lack of substance. In some cases I‘m worried about the mental health of the actors, because of the full blast gold-rush vibe.

Have NFTs even been legally tested as inheritance?

Why would they need to be tested? Don't get me wrong, spending thousands on a generated illustration of a zombie is ridiculous, but if someone has access to the token, they can bequeath that access. They don't need some special mechanism to do it.

Which means that anybody who gets access to the token can steal it and there is no legal recourse for the legitimate owner. That's not exactly what most people look for when they decide what to leave to their kin after they pass away.

Isn't the whole point of NFTs on a blockchain that you have a record of provenance for the token? So just "having" it isn't enough?

Your soul bears the validity of your NFTs into the afterlife, making them ill-suited for inheritance. They'll all be lining up for St. Peter covered in Nerd Chimps.

He’s talking about selling NFTs not buying them (at least as far as I can tell). Selling NFTs (or the infrastructure for others to do so) seems like a reasonably sensible plan.

It seems odd that a discussion about facing your death would contain more references to NFTs than to your family.

This is how your brain operates on big tech futurism larping.

Please don't post name-calling or shallow dismissals to HN. Even if you don't feel you owe an article better, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

anyone else getting 404 not found on the article? clicking the link redirects me to HN. not surprised if everyone who upvoted so far just saw the title and the username :)

I saw the article, but closed it when it started talking about something called “NFTweets”.

As far as I can tell, the lesson is, “I might die, so I should work on NFTweets, which has some shot at giving me financial independence before I die, so I can spend more time on my true passion, which is watching Marvel movies and drinking craft beer.”

I made the last part up… apologies for the cynicism, I just observe that the kind of people who fill up their time with hustle to make money often don’t know what to do with their time once they’ve made enough money to be independent. Retirement takes some people by surprise. No judgment for how people want to live their lives, but if you plan on spending your retirement not working, you should probably get some preview of that beforehand so you know what you like.

A lot of people want to spend more time with others after they retire. It turns out that if you spend all your time at work, and you retire, you don’t have a lot of other people in your social network to spend time with. Hence, Marvel movies and craft beer.

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Edit: when I replied, the entire text of your comment was:

I saw the article, but closed it when it started talking about something called “NFTweets”.

I appreciate that you expanded it, but please don't do stealth edits that deprive existing replies of their context. That's not fair to other users—not the replier (whose comment's meaning is now lost) nor the readers (who can no longer understand the thread properly). The simple fix is to mark your edit as an edit, like I did here.

Brusque is not the same as unsubstantive. I see value in being forewarned that there will be shilling for NFTs, and I'm certain I'm not alone in that. It changes everything about the way you read the article.

I realized it was unsubstantive. Sometimes I delete the comment and rewrite it, sometimes I decide to write in some extra text. It’s a judgment call which one I do. My thought process is, “Oh, that is a bit too unclear, now that I read it, isn’t it?” If I think it just needs a small clarification, I’ll edit in the clarification. If it needs major clarification, I’ll delete and resubmit.

I don’t always make the right call. I know that. Sometimes a minor addition blows up into a massive chunk of text, because I realize the “minor addition” isn’t enough to make the comment stand on its own, so it needs a “minor” addition, and I make another judgment call. Reminds me of “simple” changes at work that balloon into massive, quarter-long projects. It sneaks up on me. Sentences and paragraphs that look great have a way of seeming woefully deficient once you hit that “submit” button.

I firmly believe that the ephemerality of context is inevitable, and live with it. I understand that this is my personal take on context on HN… is context ephemeral? Or should we do what we can to save it? How much effort do we do to save context in the moment so it can be decided?

My personal strategy of dealing with this is on HN to quote the parent comment if I feel the context is important. On my blog, I don’t just link to web pages, but copy in quotes.

If you feel strongly about this, I would love to hear that elaborated, although I know you’re busy.

From the article - "how many of my remaining days will I wake up and ask, “What do I want to do today?” I had a stretch of almost a year pre-Gusto where I got to ask that question most days. Glorious. I want more of those"

It sounds like the author did, indeed, get a preview of their retirement life and found it fulfilling, and now they're working to get back there.

http://web.archive.org/web/20211111161025/https://medium.com...

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