Notes from the End of a Long Life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But one thing that is not said enough is that your values are not the same for every period of your life. Good luck telling a 22-year old that they must prioritize spending time with their parents because life's too short. They'll just dismiss you in seconds.
My father died when I was almost 22. I regret to this day, 20 years later, that I haven't spent more time with him during his last years but at the same time I realize it was impossible: he was too proud to admit the mistakes he made which hurt our family a lot, I was too awkward and shy back then to even initiate a conversation, and we lived in an awful and small rented apartment that me and my brother were paying for at the time. Dad couldn't look us in the eyes, he was so extremely ashamed that he couldn't pay the bills for the first time in his life that he even avoided us physically.
But, hear me out: what good would it do if any of us FORCED ourselves to interact? I am not sure if any good would come out of it; maybe it would have even brought harm. It's awful to not be able to ever get an answer but at the same time I gradually made my peace with the fact that we all grow (and hopefully get wiser) with our own pace. This pace cannot be artificially accelerated. Only a tragedy can be a strong enough force to derail us from our convenient life and force us to rebuild our values.
And that's IMO the point of the article (partially) as well: as you grow old, you experience tragedies and they realign you. Then you start appreciating the human part of life (family and close friends) more. But you can't do that before.
And I don't think we should get anxiety over the fact that we can't have the values of a 60-year old when we're 40.
That's fine and expected, and I would even go so far as to say that's optimal. 22 is when you should be making friends, studying, working, doing [harmless] stupid things that get you in trouble, etc. Spending time with your family on weekends or holiday--and certainly catching up with them over the phone if you live far away--is excellent, but different parts of your life, different seasons of your life, call for different things.
As you get older, you should "come home", so to speak. I don't mean literally, although that would be perfectly all right, but metaphorically--probably more check-ins with your family, more holidays with them, etc. But if you're 22 and spending New Years Eve with your best friends, I think that is more than acceptable.
My dad died when I was 26. We had a really good, warm relationship, though: driving in his car, sitting side by side, not talking a single word for 30-45 minutes, and both still feeling good.
(Occasionally, though, in the end, he would ask something like "So, ugh, have you considered who to become when you're an adult?" -- to which I replied, "Uh, I guess I have, yeah." In a few still seconds, he'd say, "Yeah. Good idea to think about that." Disclaimer: national stereotype of us, Estonian men, is that we speak around 6 sentences a year -- but even at that time, as a teenager, I liked this blissful silence a lot.)
Then again, losing dad at a young age has surely influenced my own parenting. Basically, I gave up all my career ambitions just to be with the kids when they were (are) preschoolers. Prior to his death, work stuff was really going uphill for the 20-something me; now, I admit really struggling to get back on track again (I may have missed the career train for good).
I have also noticed an internal mantra or meme: I need to raise my kids so they could cope (psychologically and in terms of hands-on survival skills) if one of their parents, or both of their parents, should die unexpectedly.
To the previous poster and GP: thanks a lot for sharing your experiences and thoughts. I sometimes think that maybe me and my dad had no principal misunderstandings simply because he died too early for these to develop.
I have a question for you: Do you wish you had stayed on the career train? Maybe not completely, but at least not getting off of it entirely? I am on the career train right now (not married, no children) but am wondering if it is "best" to leave if/when I start a family. Part of me feels like that would be nice, but the other part of me worries about providing materially for my [future] family, including my parents, who are not so well off financially too. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, whether you have any regrets over it.
I can’t tell you how to do that though. For me I used to do a lot of feature delivery, but now I’m more focused on team wide improvements (pipeline, CI/CD, guidelines, tooling). I’ve taken myself off the critical path, but make everyone’s life better (or aim to, anyway).
In fact, while this is probably NOT true, if it was I wouldn't be surprised, and "that" would be that it's possible that marketing companies pushed this narrative through the media, like they did with diamond rings and cigarettes, since going single means you need more stuff. More places to live (1 person instead of 1 per family), more things you'd normally be able to share (pretty much everything in your house except toothbrushes and clothing), need your own car, etc...
Some of my Asian friends were still living with their parents at 25 years old and apparently enjoying it. I've seen it in Vietnam, Taiwan, and Singapore, so it appears pretty widespread.
I know at least one guy who easily could have purchased his own apartment in Singapore. But he very much enjoyed having relatives visit with their small kids, as they would cheer up everyone by being silly. So he stayed at his parents place until he got married and started making kids of his own.
And yes, he probably saved lots of money that way, too. But I'm sure he didn't need to. He was the CEO of a well funded startup with a $50mio+ exit. Also, he sometimes invited friends (like me) and coworkers to his parents place and nobody thought that was weird.
It really is a US / western cultural difference.
I think my point is less about where you physically live and more about how you prioritize your time and focus.
Just to give another side of that, I'm 24, and chose to stay in the same city where my parents are living so that I can see them at least every week for a dinner, and sometimes more. My brother did the same after living in another city for a few years. Part of it is due to basically everyone over 30 telling how precious the time you spend with your parents is. Since I saw this everywhere, I reflected a bit more about my relationship with my parents, and found that spending time with them on a weekly basis fills me with happiness. Without lots of people insisting on it, I may have missed that. I had my studies, had to look for a job, take care of my mental health, friends, hobbies. My parents didn't always have the place they deserve within my mind, and now, partially thanks to posts and comments like that, they do.
So to everyone that talked about the importance of parents, thank you. I can't guarantee that I read your specific comment or article, but you are part of something that added some happiness and removed regrets from my life.
I was raised to prioritize work above all and it took years and many similar discussions and texts like the above to make me realize it's not what makes me happy.
One of the regrets that I’ll always have is that for a few years, my dad and I worked in the same downtown area of our city, and we only got together for lunch a maybe a half dozen times.
We had a great time when we did, but usually my schedule made it difficult. He passed away last year, and it occurred to me that the things that seemed so important at the time are trivial and forgotten today - having that hotdog together for 20 minutes would have been a much better use of time.
Sure, but that's what time traveller you brings to the table, some "future understanding".
I would hope I would listen, deflect my trajectory somewhat at least.
Mortgage the house and invest it all in MSFT.
- buy house in 2012
- buy bitcoin back then too
- buy amazon stocks
- short sell certain companies, i.e. blockbuster
But I have to say, I dearly want to hear what the elderly at the end of their lives have to say to us. Whether I act or not is up to me, but I want to hear their piece.
Reason number 100 I’m glad I watched the film Ikiru in my 20s! Helped me realize what’s actually valuable
You can't do what before? Not everyone experiences the death of others in the same way nor on the same schedule.
Two men drowned on Sunday. I jumped in but failed to get them out. They died less than a meter from me.
On Thursday my father passed away from cancer. I was with him in his last breaths.
Life is so fragile but it's going to end for all of us. Live as much as you can while you have health. Cherish the people in your life.
We are but a vapor in the wind. I'm so thankful for my time so far, I'm thankful for my Dad and miss him so much. I'm so sad for the men that died. My hope for their family is that they can go on living without them.
I was there with my dad when I was 11 and he was 46. I think about it almost daily 25 years later. I can still see him and feel his hand in my mind.
It is the most rotten gift you can receive and a pain that you could someday cherish. To think of the potential discomfort and maybe even fear as life comes to a close yet have their child there with them, for you to see your parent off, is a moment that many people don't have. A moment of which many people were robbed with the pandemic and isolation in hospitals.
Grief will come and go and time makes everything better.
None of us get out of here alive.
> Two men drowned on Sunday. I jumped in but failed to get them out. They died less than a meter from me.
This is strikingly different and has a different impact. I was a volunteer firefighter for a long time and worked accidents with multiple casualties along with weeks of multiple calls and fatalities. Please talk to someone you trust or can relate to what you experienced. My details are in my profile if I am that person. Thank you for your act of kindness.
"Yesterday we took our two dogs to the river for a walk. Two men got into trouble in the water, I jumped in to help. All I could do was help another man get free of one of the drowning men.
The fellow rescuer couldn't breathe with the panicking man grabbing him and the current pulling them both under. If I'd been first too them I'm sure I'd be dead as the other rescuer was in much better shape than me.
So I helped a man get free of another man's desperate struggle for life. I watched as two men died a few meters from me. In front of their family. A woman asked my wife why we weren't helping them. It was her husband and father.
The water was too dangerous, the men too panicked, and I was too unfit.
Emergency services recovered three bodies from that river. A woman and her daughter had drowned in the same spot a week ago. The woman's body was found by the divers looking for the two men."
Here is a new article about the event.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/01/three-bod...
It's incredibly dangerous to try to save drowning people without equipment
Stop and think. Have a plan before you jump in.
You need a way to help people float and to pull them in.
Do not let a drowning person grab you they may kill you.
If I had stopped to think I would have tied our two dog leads together and thrown them in. I could have pulled them in quickly. They were only 3 or 4 meters from the shore.
Another option would have been to link arms with the strangers there and pull them out together.
One of my favorite observations of his is that we are dying every day. Death stalks behind us and claims every moment that passes, whether well spent or squandered. Our final hour is not when we die, but the point where we finally stop dying.
Our lives are a bit like that of a candle, whether burning intensely or barely at all, every moment that passes is a moment that we are approaching the point where we run out of wax.
(I am become the Amazon of philosophy.)
I don’t think any of us can accept finiteness. At least not without descending into a spiral of “But then what’s the point?” from which there is no escape without fooling yourself or abandoning the question.
Am I understanding you that you believe that because you went from non-existence to existence once you think it will happen again? Why?
I understand reincarnation as a faith based belief (that can’t be proven or disproven) but I don’t understand it as a rational argument. Nothing in life I know of is destined to repeat.
The logic follows, and we do in fact even know of a mechanism since quantum mechanics as currently observed provides for unexpected events spontaneously occurring with a very low probability.
But that's where time probability gets weird: once you're dead time is meaningless. You can be dead for a 10^100 years, and its the same as being dead for 5 minutes.
So if the universe (or multiverse) has some mechanism which generates new configurations of matter, then eventually it'll iterate a lot of perceptually indistinguishable versions of reality that from your subjective position will look the same.
It gets even weirder because if you think about it, our universe has rules, so maybe not all configurations are allowed but this one we are currently experiencing definitely is, so it's recurrence is guaranteed provided there's no global limiting function we're unaware of.
> The result applies to isolated mechanical systems subject to some constraints, e.g., all particles must be bound to a finite volume.
If space is infinite, then I don’t think this would apply.
> So if the universe (or multiverse) has some mechanism which generates new configurations of matter, then eventually it'll iterate a lot of perceptually indistinguishable versions of reality that from your subjective position will look the same.
But that’s not really reincarnation is it? Like the Dali Lama believes they hop from body to body within this singular timeline. The multiverse would just be copies of the universe, that have no connection / impact on the other versions, no?
Because we have infinite time available to wait. Of course it's not a 100% logical argument, this sort of thing usually can't be, but to me it's more convincing than just decreeing things like religious texts do.
Do we though? With a Big Crunch, the universe is destroyed. With a Big Freeze space-time is ripped apart. I haven’t heard of a modern physics theory that allows for infinite time.
"You" are only a ship of Theseus in its form for the day. I think what parent poster is saying is, something will come next. It always does.
And then what happens?
Similar idea of being dead for a long time then reincarnated appears in the short story Divided By Infinity: https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/
It would also mean you’re not getting out of your own mess via “death” that easily. :-)
The hard science tells that we are not. Poke at a person’s brain, and their personality will change. You don’t even need to die in order to cease to exist in the sense that matters to you personally and to those around you.
In what animal cultures?