Hacker News Reader

Comment by goldcountry | Hacker News Reader

I hate articles like these. We all know we're going to die and that life moves too fast. In a practical sense it adds absolutely nothing of any positive value to remind people of this fact. Nobody is going to change the way they live their lives because of an article like this, all it does is make the reader's day a little more depressing.

View on HN

I once read a similar article about a guy who visited his parents once a year. He then calculated he realistically has 10 more visits with them based on their age and decided to visit more often. That hit home for me, and I've made an effort to visit more and be more patient. These articles can be a gentle prompt. The last line of this particular article made an impact too.

Exactly. Another one is to calculate how many weekends you have left, fill a jar with that many marbles, and throw away a marble every week.

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 disagree. I've found it's valuable to be reminded how short life really is; it makes you think hard about how you want to spend your finite time. This idea has really changed how I live my life, from small decisions (is scrolling twitter really worth it?) to big ones (do I really want to spend my precious life in this miserable job?).

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.

I disagree. If anything, most of us NEED reminding that our time is limited and precious, and that our circumstances can change in an instant.

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.

> We all know we're going to die

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.

> In a practical sense it adds absolutely nothing of any positive value to remind people of this fact... all it does is make the reader's day a little more depressing.

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!

Disagree. Its these reminders like this that make it so that we don't take the years we have for granted. We need these reminders all the time.

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.

If the article were really as useless as you say, I suspect it would not bother you as much as it seems to. Might be worth it to ruminate on a little longer.

Au contraire, this is already something I spend too much time thinking about and would prefer to think about less.

There is a popular definition of "nihilism" which is "the belief that life has no meaning" but for Nietzsche, and most existentialists that followed, there was a much more insidious nihilism that this comment embodies.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com