Your real biological clock is you’re going to die (2018)
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Momento Mori the Stoics way to remember we all die so make best use of time. The Hagakure tells us to always depart from others as we wish to be remembered.
FTR I run a lot now knowing that it improves quality of life and stats show time running is returned in more time alive. I value those extra hours with those whom I love.
I don’t care if I have to work until the day I die to support my kids but I do care that I have as many seconds with them that I can manage. And leave them knowing their dad ‘lived for them’.
100 years ago, it would be unhealthy - it was certainly an unavoidable outcome. I had this view going through high school and college - biology/anatomy classes never interested me. They were fairly hocus pocus in my eyes - like we were scratching the surface of a world we barely understood and wouldn’t master for dozens of generations. As if a Neanderthal discovered a computer and attempted to understand how it worked - they’d get there, but the original Neanderthal would be long dead before any real answers surfaced.
This changed recently. The hockey stick of progress is clearly forming in biology. With technology like CRISPR, we are starting to get the tools to reverse engineer and bend life to our will. Death doesn’t seem inevitable for my children anymore; our generation might actually be able to partially solve it - at least enough to buy the next generation enough time to fully solve it.
Defeating death is a great plot idea for a dystopian novel, but in reality it's the ultimate selfish pursuit.
Luckily death is really hard to defeat. Dying is always on the menu.
Also, there is something about compassion and love that we do not understand that are physiologically benefit to the person. I do believe we live in a world where niceness eventually prevails, and if someone is able to live a healthy long age, they likely have embraced death wholeheartedly, and are good and kind, (esp as they age and learn from their mistakes instead of getting stuck in behavioural patterns).
More like a recipe for an omnipresent gerontocracy, locked into the culture and values of a millennium ago, but wielding immense wealth and power ruling over everything. Sounds like a conservative's wet dream.
Sounds like the thinking of a Tier 0 civilization in regards to the ruling class of a Tier 2 civilization (if one day we can prove that such civilizations exist
The very framing of dividing "civilizations" into "tiers" where one is clearly superior to the other shows some implicit assumptions that not everyone might share, as well as the idea that there will be or should be a "ruling class". If people reject this, we do not get to thinly veil "just accept your technological superior you luddite" like some 1920s robber baron. That's been done, and they got pushed back, and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite to last forever without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
There will always be a "ruling class" the same way that there will always be dependency hierarchy in the cost structure of things (eg from compiler design to the way a solar system works).
> ... and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite ...
Indeed. But let's be pragmatic for a second. What can an individual (or a collective of people) do to not enable (ie disable) existing wealth and power (ie the status quo)? Unfortunately the answer is by gaining wealth and power themselves. (eg in the cultural-economic form or socio-politically or militarily, etc). To change the dynamics of the system. Anything else is just ignoring reality and encouraging hypernormalization [1]. The world is in a huge mess now because many highly capable people chose not to make the hard decisions. (eg with the current RU & China situations)
... and the world will only become a better place (eg in the sense of reducing suffering, and for the pursuit of universal human & animal rights, etc) when hard decisions are made and executed to bring forth a paradigm shift (that which can be measured game-theoretically e.g. compare modern day France to 18th century France)
> ... without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
Proof is useful but it is not enough in the same way the map is useful but it is not the territory.
In some sense I've just elaborated your points above but from the angle that the world is going to collapse soon if we don't reach Tier 1 as a cilivisation fast enough.
Second, I would like to point out some flaws I see in your argumentations:
On ruling class/"dependency hierarchy":no, there does not always need to be one. For a semantic example, it is perfectly possible to have no "dependency" in software systems (except the one to the underlying system, but this is not a power relationship). Closer to the subject, it is possible to structure systems such that there is no power concentration, "soft power" is effectively diffused and true consent (not necessarily concensus, just consent) is required to get anything done. Such systems still enable decision making to be delegated, but when push comes to shove, power is distributed and recalled easily. We see it in associations, we see it in anarchist social experiments, we see it in well designed teams and companies where employees have real leverage - such systems are often not as scalable yet, but they do generally perform better in terms of welfare and resilient - see the german company-union relationships which tend to be more resilient to economic downturns for example and generally treat their employees much better.
To blindly reassert "there is no other way" is to adopt as an axiom that is at best uncertain and at worst empirically wrong.
3rd, on pragmatism and the french, sure, pragmatically we can play that game while it exists, but the glory of the french revolution was not in it's pragmatic achieval of its goals (they failed after all, napoleon the post-metternich era reinstuted defacto monarchy) and but that it completely and radically did away with pragmatism and destroyed the old social order. So I'm surprised you would use it as an argument in a discussion about the inevitably of hierachy, if anything I would use it as an argument for the great good that can come from taking away power from old decision making structures.
4th, on game theory, I do my best to study game theory nowadays, and you can only prove what your assumptions allow you, so in this discussion it's out of bounds without a formal specification (I'm happy for references though if you can recommend good formalisations and studies of current political and economic systems).
5th, on the world collapsing, it is collapsing because our elite has so far not cared to save it despite the scientists warning them for decades, and its the populace and idealists (extinction rebellion et al) who are pushing for the radical solutions to save them - so again, I don't see why we should buy the argument of "oh no, actually, the elites need to be more powerful so they can save us".
Scaling and Growth at all costs without distributed power to alleviate the distributed ills has brought us here. So why should we not ask for solid proof before we give more power to a centralised few? Why should we assume a ruling class will survive the coming shifts? Why should we assume having a ruling class is inevitable when previous generations were told only the kings and royals had the divine grace to rule, that the plebs could never handle reading, women could never handle equality, colored would never be able to vote rationally?
A lot of things are going to be different if longevity tech is successful.
And so long existential time comes and goes at the whim of itself. Technology is never the cause, but merely an enabler.
And if you don't think natural selection is what powers nature, then the question becomes, why did God choose to kill his creatures?
So it would likely be pretty unchanged from our current levels. Just about everyone survives to produce children these days (with some people i wonder how).
Also i don't think when people say conquer death they mean true immortality, they mean Negligible senescence i.e. we are no more likely to die due to aging, people would still die (accidents, violence, natural disaster etc).
At some point you are just done, and if you accept that, you’ll die. It may be at 50, 100, 150, maybe 200. But I don’t think humans are mentally made for spans of time much larger than that.
But public goods like that are shared with other people; it’s not like you keep all the water in your single-family house. That house though…
But you’re going to have a hard time convincing every soul to drink the kool-aid.
That doesn't mean we can't research it, and certainly we can discover things that are useful. But there's really no reason to believe immortality is achievable. And honestly there are lots of works of fiction on why it's actually bad for humanity.
I don't think the two are comparable. Overtaking the speed of light is impossible according to our current understanding of physics.
Death on the other hand seems to be due to defects in our bodies (and most living organisms) - nature just hasn't "planned" for them to function for so long and pretty much cut corners. Those defects might be hard to fix with our current technology and/or understanding of medicine, but they're not proven to be impossible. In fact unlike the speed of light, "death" isn't even a single specific event where someone's brain just quits for good but is due to a variety of factors, some of which we can already control and resolve (it used to be that cardiac arrest is guaranteed death, nowadays it's no longer a certainty).
In addition, there are many different ways of "solving death". Even if we assume that any living body must die because of some unbreakable law of physics, if we could move someone's consciousness to a new body (or a "virtual machine" in a computer) we've effectively solved the problem anyway.
That is just the conclusion reached by the best and brightest chimps among the 8 billions chimps that dominate all the other species on the planet.
Even Einstein and Hawking might be victims of the Dunning Kruger effect, only there is nobody smarter than them who are currently around to mock them or feel pity towards them.
All the physics and science that we do should come with a huge asterisk disclaiming that it's only the conclusion reached by the brightest and most specialized chimps.
I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...
I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!”
It's basically this: https://9gag.com/gag/a815W1d and it's been noted time and time again ...
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
The result would be lots of misery and a wealth transfer from regular people to the medical and pharma industry.
I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago and would have accepted my fate. However, now my perspective has changed because we’re on the verge of a revolution in biotech (we’ll, one could argue we are in the middle) where we understand enough of the aging process - not all of it - to reverse it or at least slow it down.
However, I’m really disappointed with some of the people in the field such as David Sinclair who have become snake oil salesman and almost charlatans, pushing inconclusive science as facts (e.g. resveratrol, sirtuins, etc) and I think it hurts the field more than anything else.
Interesting years ahead, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t mind living a few more decades as long as I’m healthy and active.
I believe we are going in that direction in general. Then one day some crazy person wakes up and decides to wage a war and kill thousands for some fantasy, threatening the rest of the world with nukes.
So at the end of the day biology itself is not enough, preventing climate change is not enough. Similar to what we have in IT security, we need to have a way for coordinated global action that would correspond to new threats. As a humanity, we more or less started to learn how to deal with a global pandemic, what are the gravest mistakes, how the governments must not communicate with the public and so on. We are constantly learning and evolving.
One thing too many forget is that being alive is not the single target. Being alive but for instance in a wheelchair might not be that desirable, and that the most stupid example. So we add new category of research to push for instance old age effects in the future, and since we can't do that much we just mock them up like "hey menopause can be nice with 'treatments'" or "hey thanks to analgesics we can ignore back pain, articular pain etc" masking them under the carpet and often if we mask too much shortening our active life.
The most important fact IMVHO is living to live, enjoying their life, and that's the issue: balancing the today/short term pleasure to the longer term ones. I have no recipe for that, probably an entire life is needed to find the right balance and once found that will not apply much for a younger self so the game began again.
Even with CRISPR, how are you going to replace existing structures that doesn’t naturally grow continuously, like our very brains? They accumulate all sorts of waste materials and you have absolutely no way to replace that specific axon with a new one in its place. That would also require complete control on creating new proteins, where we are absolutely at the beginning, and not even that may be enough.
We are basically made with single-use components, not everything is just a constantly dividing bunch of cells.
We are well past earths natural carrying capacity for our species - and we have been for quite a long time. But humans have solved those problems. Yes we’ve created problems in the process, but we are solving those too. So far nothing indicates to me that humans can’t continue solving the growing pains on earth long enough to get access to the (nearly) limitless supply of resources available in the cosmos.
Nonsense. People are getting better at accessing resources that were hard to get at. But doing so is just a symptom of the low hanging fruit running out.
Degrowth has no good evidence for it because it’s false. It’s just another version of baby boomers deciding their own children aren’t allowed to inherit their wealth.
I feel if we could literally halt death a lot of hedonism would stop. That YOLO feeling that plagues most of humanity would mostly go away. We would suddenly be a species with a clear aim. To know more about the universe and ourselves. We would find meaning in our lives and hopefully wisen up a little.
It’s needlessly depressing to wallow in this mindset. I personally value being a good person and my connections with people. Sure I could focus this energy on one human I bring into the world, but that’s not objectively better than anyone else I affect positively.
And I know having a child is a transformative experience. I’m lucky enough to have lots of little cousins and Have volunteered with programs for kids for years. Kids are amazing and bring magic to the world as you grow older. I just think that wrapping all of your identity and self worth up in a single goal is asking for disappointment. It’s not fair to you or the child.
Try to appreciate your real impact on the world. Did you improve someone’s day today? Did you restore someone’s faith in humanity? Is someone comforted right now by their trust in you? That’s the good stuff. Make that happen any way you can.
If you do want a child, go for it. Time IS ticking, but if you can’t or didn’t or are considering bring one into a bad situation or relationship to quell an existential fear, don’t worry. It’s fine. You can still find meaning and have an impact through your connections with others.
This inspired me to make an android wallpaper that displays the percentage of my life that's already elapsed, so every time I look at my phone I'm reminded to think "is this really what I want to be doing right now?".
App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.machineryc...
Source code: https://github.com/ethanmdavidson/DeathProgress
Maraṇasati (mindfulness of death, death awareness) is a Buddhist meditation practice of remembering that death can strike at anytime
Came into the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay...
On a different note, no. Let's fight death. Fuck aging. We can fight it. We don't have to suffer like cattle under it. We can beat it.
There are plenty of longevity focused startups and academic research groups, and yet we're not spending nearly enough effort and money on this problem. It affects every human on earth, and the immense benefits of adding even one year of healthy lifespan to 7 billion people make it a moral imperative to act upon.
Fighting death should be a multi-national effort that we focus on with all our might, _right now_. You shouldn't have to die.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=cZYNADOHhVY
Most cattle don't suffer from aging. Beef cattle are usually killed in their first year or two. Dairy cows live longer, but tend to be killed after their milk output drops enough (which I guess you could call aging, but they could live for many more years after that).
If you're proposing fighting aging, but against a backdrop of euthenization, ala Logan's Run, I'm in, but we'll need to rebuild the Dallas mall everyone lives in. But if it's trying to get the general population to have a life expectency of 100+, I'm not sure that's a grand plan.
Even after too much psychedelics. It still doesn’t help anyone accept the deep void of not knowing.
I understand being afraid of death because self-preservation is built into us, but unless there really is some hellfire that some of us will be thrown into for all eternity (unlikely but boy would that suck), then logic dictates that it will bother us just as much as our non-existence bothered us for the billions (trillions?) of years before our births.
Humans are already well past the natural carrying capacity of the planet for our species. But we’ve figured it out an have been (mostly) successful. I don’t see why that would change between now and when we get access to off planet resources. Especially if humans live forever - priorities are able to shift quite a bit when you can think longer term (what’s 100 years of effort to solve this problem compared to infinity?).
[citation needed]
Yes, you should. Either that, or no one can have children. It's finite planet, and it's already over-flowing with people and their detritus.
Not only that, but if people don't die, then the first generation that doesn't die will end up ruling forever over everyone who has the misfortune of being born later. In a world where no one dies, someone like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un can and will rule quite literally forever. The U.S. Supreme Court will have no turnover.
Your example of King Jong Un doesn’t work either, because it’s still a dictatorship, and father and grandfather were both dictators, and they both died, so why does it matter?
The world is overflowing with detritus because the incentive structures are not there. If people lived much longer they might be more willing to spend the time to clean up.
Supreme court justices serve for life. The only way to "oust" a supreme court justice (in the U.S.) is through impeachment. In the entire history of the U.S. no supreme court justice has ever been removed against their will. The assumption of mortality is deeply embedded into the U.S. Constitution. (Yes, you could amend the Constitution. Good luck with that.)
> so why does it matter?
Because there is at least a possibility that the next generation Kim might be better. Or that a Kim might die childless.
> If people lived much longer they might be more willing to spend the time to clean up.
Yes, that's possible, but much more likely those in power would continue to do what they do now: build enclaves for themselves that keep out the riff-raff.
If we eventually become a post-scarcity, multi-plantary species then significant life extension or immortality might work. But in the near future it would be a environmental and social calamity.
Ignoring the medical risks, this throws the timing of everything off. A former coworker is paying off his kids’ student loans in retirement.
My grandmother was 47 when she had my mother. I saw my mother struggle to care for her aging mother while at the same time raising children.
While an older person gains more years of life experience, their experience of youth becomes more and more outdated.
I may know all about how to troubleshoot broken sound in DOS computer games, but I've never sent or received a 'nude selfie' in my life.
Time to fix that.
Well-written article but extremely heavy on the existential dread and questioning whether I am spending my time wisely.
As someone in this age range, I don't find it depressing, I find it clarifying. There are so many things I could say "yes" to, so many branches in my career I could chase. Reminding myself that my time is limited helps me to say "no" and maintain focus on the things that truly matter.
* ensuring my kid knows he is loved by his parents
* doing interesting work as a software dev, with some career progression
* taking care of myself adequately
The current setup feels extremely tight from a time perspective, causing the latter point to get cut consistently. This ends up wearing me out over time, making me worse at all the above slowly. So I feel the strain of time already.
Fellow parents on HN, how do you make all of this happen?
Yesterday I was on a conf call during my son's soccer practice. I was walking around the woods with my daughter at the same time. I was doing none of the above well.
It occurred to me recently that most folks who have been promoted around me don't have children, or just started to have children. There is no upside at work, only in your life.
[edit more] And this morning my daughter told me to get off my phone as I was checking emails (I'm oncall at the moment).
Kids absolutely know that you aren't paying attention to them.
I'd love to quit and just take some time off. I worry that this is the wrong example to set. I've been working regularly for 20 years, but my kids don't know that. But I dunno... thats just fear I suppose.
Frame it as a sabbatical. I think what your kids see is how you think, feel and talk about work. Taking time off does not diminish any of those things. In fact, it gives a counter-example to the mistaken belief that ages 23-60 MUST be spent working away.
I take one every seven years, not for religious reasons (though that is the exact number of years from Leviticus), but because that is an ideal cadence for me. It is not often enough for employers to get worried about it, yet it is short enough for me to not get too far off the rails.
As a guy I am not that interested in having babies, we have reached a point where we are not facing underpopulation anymore and will not face it any time soon.
But for Ecclestone having a baby at 90...that's his POE (Proof of Erection), I tip my hat to that.
In any event sex in the 80s and 90s is common for people who arrive at that age healthy enough. It's a known phenomenon in retirement homes.
Ecclestone just improved his odds of arriving at that age healthy enough due to his wealth and also the odds of having a young woman to have sex with as opposed to other octagenarians.
with a bit of luck (or bad luck according to each person POV) the end result is a baby.
For me, visualising this has helped me put things in context and made me make better decisions but that's not to say I don't fall down the whole now and again. I wrote https://www.thismuchlonger.com/ many years ago and have it as a pinned tab in my browser.
So yes, life’s end aka death is certain. I think that’s reason enough for life to be valued, cherished, and protected more than it is. And all those things which deteriorate life’s habitat should be mitigated and sought to be reversed. The cold unfeeling universe doesn’t have to win sooner than later.
Well it's both really. "Too young" varies from person to person, though. I know some people that really had their lives together in their 20s, and I know people in their 40s that are still too young to have kids.
We talk about age because it's easily measured, but we should also care about maturity.
The death rate is 100%, no-one gets out alive. So we should get as much out of this life as we can. What that means for you can differ from others, but to me that's a central question as we enter middle-age.
I've attached some resources for those who want to dig deeper, including arguments from both sides of the debate.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-there-histo...
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/...
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/historical-evidence-for...
I don't think one flows from the other. It could be argued that since the death rate is 100%, nothing really matters. Once dead, we are not going to miss the life not lived. Growing old is a sure way to have regrets.
I loved this essay, saved it even. It's how I've lived my life for all of the days since our daughter's birth. I'm reluctant to say it's how I lived all of the years before that, as I wasn't as aware of time and of my mortality. That said, I had a sense my average life would be 75 years, and privately celebrated my 37.5 year birthday.
Paul Graham has at least two essays related to this: http://paulgraham.com/vb.html http://paulgraham.com/kids.html
For me, I consider my life as a book. There's a chapter where I would read the Wizard of Oz books to our daughter most nights. We went through the set of 15 books three times, and then it stopped. There's a chapter where I was doing fashion photography as a hobby for eight years. Me?! Yes! I even had two fashion shoots in Manhattan. There are many chapters of me working as a mathemagician, working on air traffic control R&D projects, one where I had to simulate stratospheric balloon trajectories and balloon control and navigation logic. I also had to learn a lot about stratospheric weather, which our in-house meteorologists had almost no experience.
I take essays like this and the two PG essays, and realize I have the chance to live a little more. This afternoon I'll be at the library while our daughter is working from home. I'll be continuing the writing of a story, may work on the migration from Freemind to Freeplane so that I can return to my personal work on the Traveling Salesman Problem. I'll grill dinner tonight for the family, will attend an in-person luncheon on Saturday, have an on-line chat with some folks in Berkeley Sunday night (I'm outside DC.)
The clock is ticking, the sand is flowing through the sandglass (I love that from Tom Scocca's essay!). The meaning of life is what we produce and what we create in the limited time we have. It's our mortality that establishes the context for meaning; it's what we do that is the actual meaning.
My grandfather on my father’s side was born in 1906. He was 35 when my father was born in 1941.
My father was 38 when I entered this world in 1979.
I was 41 in 2020 when my son was born. Fortunately we were able to have some semblance of an 80th birthday for his grandfather last year in the midst of this pandemic.
If my son has a child as late in life as I have, there’s no telling if I’ll get to meet them, simply because of life expectancy.
I suspect this is why grandparents and grandkids seem to have a significant bond in many cultures.
The Queen turned 96. This may very well be her last year. Her life was and still is full of royalty. Her legacy will be a permanent part of history.
Ozzy is 20 years younger, and has a lifetime of drugs, alcohol, recovery, and is still kicking hard enough to make music.
If they both died today, which life do you think was a richer experience? Who will be remembered longer? Are you sure?
This will make you be more deliberate with what you do with each weekend, even a lazy do-nothing-couch-potato weekend will be a decision and you will feel great about it.
I read an article where they visualized each week of your life as a diamond. If you live to be 90 years old, all those weeks would barely be a handful of diamonds. Each week you are "giving away" that diamond to the things you do, whether it's working, hobbies, time with friends, etc. You have to consider "does this activity really deserve a diamond? is this really how I want to spend my most precious resource?".
We will all die some day. Ignoring this fact won't make it go away, but embracing it will let you take control of it.
The practical value of me after reading this (YMMV) is that I'll be a bit more present, do more meaningful things, heck even just appreciate that hug or phone call a bit more, today and probably tomorrow too.
Do you have kids? I find thinking about this stuff particularly valuable in a way I probably couldn't grasp before them. Spending 30 minutes playing blocks with a 2-year-old can be a mundane, frustrating experience. Or -- if you realize that this 30 minutes is probably one of the last dozens or so times you will EVER play blocks with this little wonder child, in all of time -- you relish it, like you would relish seeing a great movie for the first time, or (better comparison) your first kiss with someone. It's rare and precious.
Not so sure about that. Ernest Becker wrote a book on the subject titled The Denial of Death (though some take issue with psychoanalysis, whether post-Freudian or not).
Even when we tacitly admit to the seeming fact, we still hedge in that our family, religion, culture, species, knowledge, or stories will continue into an infinity that (so far as we know) doesn't exist (this ignores, of course, notions of an afterlife, which can be seen as fulfilling the same need under different constraints). The universe (again, so far as we now) is hurtling towards heat death, and ultimately, producing a billion more generations and having one big humanity party this weekend capped off with Kool-Aid all amounts to the same.
Even then, infinity isn't really such a good anti-depressive. It's just that, unlike other animals (again, so far as we know) we have to craft such psychological defenses against our own analytic mental processes in order to fulfill the more fundamental drive of biological reproduction.
Have you considered that other people may have different takeaways than you? I know that I'm going to die someday but this piece still added to my perspective on life and old age. And I'm glad it was posted. :)
Happy Friday!
I'm always thankful for the reminders. Especially this one as its actually about children. I will be sure to spend extra time with them today.
For Nietzsche and thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir it is a fact that "life has no meaning and we all die", the real question is "what do you do with this?". For both of these thinkers real nihilism is "pretending this isn't happening".
Nietzsche is often partially quoted saying "God is dead" as though it's some sort of atheistic battle cry, but it's not that at all. The full quote is:
> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Nietzsche is pointing out that the old way we used to deal with existential despair was religion. This is how meaning was created. But like it or not that system of meaning is largely gone and cannot be trivially replaced. Nietzsche's entire life's work is about confronting this existential horror and coming up with new ways to live.
de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, goes on to catalog all the strategies we have for dealing with this problem. Pointing out that nihilism ultimately leads to the rise of Nazism. Likewise far right extremism in the US can be viewed as a natural reaction to the failure of systems of meaning across the US.
The point being is that when you see articles like this, your response doesn't have to be and should not be merely to dismiss it until you feel better.
For a great overview of this perspective of nihilism I highly recommend Nolan Gertz's Nihilism from the MIT Press
You will die too. Are you going to be satisfied on your deathbed that you spent your life being angry at everything?