Life Is Short (2016)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I don’t remember where I heard this: “every person you see is fighting a battle that you know nothing about, so be kind, always”. I think we can extend that same kindness to ourselves.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t spend more time with your family. I’m saying that we should give our past selves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their decision making, whatever your present self decides to do. It’s just an argument against regret.
I also found it interesting that my grandmother was extremely loving and caring to me. And my grandfather (who was ever less kind to my mother than my grandmother was) was very affectionate to his great-grandchildren (but not his grandchildren). Maybe they both regretted it near the end of their lives and tried to handle things differently with the younger generations?
But yes, I agree- I would guess most people had more tact and empathy than my grandmother apparently had towards her daughter, and wouldn't say something like that even if it was true. And if they did many their kids wouldn't be too quick to recount the experience publicly?
Never felt that way. Which is why family always comes first for me.
So at the twilight of your life you might say that you wish you hadn't worked overtime for that startup or spent your weekends on side projects but at the time you were worried about paying your rent or a dead-end career path and you had to try to work harder because you had no way of knowing things would turn out fine. And maybe they turned out fine because of your efforts.
Hindsight is 20/20 and this is just as true for your future self judging your current self.
I moved away from my hometown. I see my immediate relatives twice a year now, once at Christmas and once in the summer. Most of my family is getting old. I probably have 125 or so more visits with my parents, 20-50 with my grandparents, and less than 10 with my great grandpa. I keep these numbers in mind every time I go home.
Life isn’t short. Meaningful moments are. Don’t take them for granted.
I'm 40. My parents are 75 and I recently moved back next door to them. I expect to be here until they die. Is it my favourite place to live? No. Best for my career? Couldn't be worse. But I see my folks every day. I see my childhood friends every week. I see as much of my family as I can stand - I bump into a random cousin on the daily.
Do you value closeness to family above other things and would you like your daughter to value closeness to you when she grows up? Choices are here to be made.
A large number of people I grew up with "wanted to see the world." My younger self modeled a lot of my desired outcomes on people's externally stated desires.
As I got older, I started realizing something: a lot of what people said they wanted was attainable for them and their socioeconomic status if they made different trade offs. So I started poking and offering advice on how they could "visit Paris."
What I came to learn is that they wanted to be the kind of people that wanted to visit Paris. But they never would go to Paris. It was the idea they liked.
I have well off family members who talk about wishing their son lived closer. They have the means to visit him. They're retired and live near an airport with direct flights, 3.5 hours door to door. But they never go. That's their Paris.
I don't want to live in my hometown. I don't kid myself - I value raising my family here where I live more than the extra time with family. But, at the same time, when I go back I spend that time in a way maximally meaningful to me.
I try not to have "going to Paris" wishes. I sacrifice protecting my ego from my own decisions but it makes me reconcile my decisions with my desires before reaching the state of irreversible regret.
-Move to the nearest city that will support your interests and allow for weekly visits. Make Saturday or Sunday a family day.
-Work from your parents' town during the week and escape to a place in the city on the weekend.
-Spend different seasons in different places. I'm moving to Tokyo for 3 months next year as a breather.
There are no answers that don't require sacrifice but life design is ripe for parallel thinking. Don't settle for preconceived options without having a go at some different ways of being.
As I was a teacher, this is what I did before I moved countries. I'd spend a month or two of the summer holiday in a different country doing language courses (I love languages and linguistics as well). It was a great way to have structure in a place as well as stuff to do, plus I've found they often arranged guided tours cheaply, so it always worked out well.
Might consider doing that again, but I'd likely need some extra income streams, which could be doable.
Since finding a fully remote job, I've been going back and forth. I stay one month in my city where I am independent, go out with friends, basically where I live my life.
Then I stay 2-4 full weeks with my folks. I bought new office equipment to work as comfortably as in the city, and nice things to make my space really mine.
It's an interesting cycle that I've learned to accept and enjoy. When I'm with them, I work a bit more because I have less social distractions, I go to the gym every day, and I see them all day. When I go back to my place, I go out with everyone, eat less meat, go to events, and do my regular activities that make me feel myself.
It's a 6 hour cheap trip, which is not bad considering I stay in one place for weeks. It's not perfect, and maybe not permanent, but I can see my folks. Half the year at least, even if they never visit me. They're getting older. If they leave this world today, I will be devastated, but happy that my present self is doing the best it can to be with them.
Yeah, this is what's bothering me, just turning 30. Even moreso in that if something were to happen where they were to leave the world tomorrow, I don't know if I'd be able to make it because of the way flights work overseas. It's a lot to think about, honestly, though I feel it'll at least be 2024 before I come back as there's a masters programme I want to do I think I'll always regret if I don't. Then maybe a PhD. Maybe getting a remote job would be the best, or just returning to teaching here. Thanks for your input!
Even the luckiest ones among us get to do a tiny fraction of personally meaningful activities.
As I am piggybacking my youngest one up the stairs, I am enjoying the trek as much as she does. I have this illusion of immortality, surely nothing bad could happen to us this very moment.
Surely that is my elephant/lizard part of the brain. My rider part keeps telling me I could be doing other more egoistical hedonistic activities instead.
> "After the larva stage, female mayflies usually live less than five minutes, while males can live a whopping two days. But they don't waste a single minute, spending that short period of time mating and reproducing"
I'm able to lengthen it by deliberately, reflectively doing anything (thinking, programming, breathing, etc.).
I spent almost three decades in school -- grading and getting graded. I made that time race by as much as I could so I could get to the part where I have kids and a job that I can actually enjoy.
Now I'm savoring every minute. I feel the natural compression of time that comes with age, of course, but I'm more than able to counter it by consciously enjoying life.
It’s not that I worry about the accuracy of the memories I’ve retained. I am saddened by the gaps in what I remember.
Life Is Short (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24313158 - Aug 2020 (164 comments)
Life is Short (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729555 - April 2018 (184 comments)
Life is Short - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845945 - Nov 2016 (11 comments)
Life is Short - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917446 - Jan 2016 (408 comments)
"""
Vīta brevis,
ars longa,
occāsiō praeceps,
experīmentum perīculōsum,
iūdicium difficile.
"""
"""
Life is short,
and art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experimentations perilous,
and judgment difficult.
"""
If you succeed in developing a good or at least occasionally enjoyable life, your perspective on life is different than others barely enduring it at all.
In general, it is short in the way of a bell curve. It is long when you are a child or at the end of a long life enduring hardships of old age.
This have been proven true to me so many times!
It’s a perfect metaphor in so many ways, there’s some fundamental truth glowing behind it like a lightbulb.
"I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was."
I read this the last time it was posted and this scared the living hell out of me. It has reminded me to never take people, especially my family, for granted. I used to be much more reluctant to go home, but as I've grown older I now appreciate the finiteness of life.
My dad died this year and the result of all those visits is that I have zero regrets. I'm grateful I stuck with them because having regrets now, when it's too late, would be awful.
> After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her.
Sometimes I wonder this about my own parents. I haven't seen them in over a year. I have no desire to see them either, and am dreading the obligatory Christmas call.
I see a ton of advice floating around these days about "make sure to visit your parents a lot, because you'll regret it after they die if you don't". But there's another side to the "life is short" coin: maybe it's not worth spending time with people that make you intensely unhappy, even if those people are your parents.
This year I sold my company, and as exciting as that has been, I wish I could have told him about it. :(
My life would improve immensely if I didn't ever visit my family. I see them once a year and it is once a year to much. I love them, but ideally it would be from very far away for the rest of our lives.
The ones closest to you can hurt you the most.
This. He is right about this.
Guilt-tripping someone who shares that they're not always having a good time as a parent is not cool. Your comment is over-generalizing, and IMO quite mean.
Childcare is easier when you have a group of adults taking care of a group of kids. And of course, parents have the primary responsibility, but it is not a 24 hour duty.
The upshot is that we have to do everything we can to give our children more of our time; we aren't a desperately poor society, we can do more. We have wandered far from our "species essence" and now wonder why so much is going wrong.
Anthropology studies past societies as much as modern ones, although the evidence is thinner.
https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids
I don't think nomadic parenting time is really a useful comparison.
It's not that my kids never are unruly. But I can almost always track it down to some failure from my side. I was too busy with something, or simply distracted, so I forgot to give them their snack in time, or they got to bed too late the day before, or I didn't pay attention when they tried to tell me something they felt was important, etc.
And while I'm aware that my experiences aren't universal. The opposite notion that I often hear that tantrums are some kind of unavoidable natural disaster is even more absurd. Yeah, if I bring my kids to the store at 5pm to buy dinner without giving them any snack, while I'm hangry yourself, stressed, and trying to think of something not horribly unhealthy to eat, they might end up screaming on the floor in front of the candy shelves. But my thought then isn't "why am I cursed with such horrible kids". My thought is "ok, I screwed up today, because this was predictable and preventable, and by now I certainly know better than putting ourselves in situations like this."
The reality is, kids trigger happiness centers in our lizard brains. Enjoy the short time with them, but let’s not fool ourselves that children fundamentally change your life view in any way. If anything the person you should be working to prioritize is your partner, who if you do it right will be with you fairly unchanged all your life. Given the divorce rates though, most people don’t seem to have gotten that memo however.
Most of the time, the things that are screaming for our attention are not the truly important things, so it's easy to get distracted and waste time. When we have little kids, they happen to be both important and screaming for our attention, which makes it much easier for us to focus on what's important. That's the point he was making.
I actually observed this in my life a week ago. We just moved our toddler from the crib to a bed and he's been waking up in the middle of the night asking for attention. When this happened, my first instinct was like "ugh. I have to go lay down w him rather than doing advent of code". Then I realized that laying down w my 2 year old is so much cooler and meaningful than anything else I could be doing w that time.
I heard the phrase sometimes "you don't have to do this, you get to do this". That's what I think the quote is about.
Second, I haven't met many people who are "happy long term" who don't have children front and center in their lives. Have you? What is the thing that is giving your life meaning that during your days and on your death bed you will feel great about?
Sample size of 1, but there is a noticeable difference in my friend and family group between people with kids and without kids. Particularly around “having it together.” Children are little logistical nightmares, more so the younger they are. From scheduling around the kids schedules (I.e when they wake up, have dinner, swimming lessons, when the bedtime routine starts, etc) to being prepared to leave the house for mundane things like grocery shopping (is the diaper bag packed, do we have milk, will we be gone long enough to need to pump, etc.). There is also much less agency as a parent, a good portion of every day is on the rails dictated by your kids schedule. You are also chronically sleep deprived for a window of 6-24 months around each pregnancy and the mother has a tonne of discomfort, weight, and a new balance of hormones for a large window around the pregnancy. You’re operating in this degraded state and have to juggle the logistics of parenthood on top of the family budget because you still have bills to pay. Your kids finally go to bed, but you can’t leave them at home alone (morally or legally) so unless you pay someone to sit on your couch for the night or find a relative who can pitch in, you are literally trapped in the house and can’t leave until they wake up.
People without kids say “thank god it’s Friday!” at the office, people with large families call the weekend two days without child care. People without kids mention going to the movies, people with kids haven’t been to the movies since their first kid was born unless they scheduled it a week in advance with their grandparents, and that movie had to be weighed against every other possible option for date night because you might not get to go out together again for months.
I don’t know how this _couldn’t_ impact a human’s behavior. To conflate it with “wisdom” might be incorrect but, at least from my personal observations, parents operate VERY differently in their day to day lives than their counterparts without children.
To your point of that having a lasting impact, it’s clear grandparents to these families have forgotten a lot of what it meant to be parents. Often suggesting unreasonable things in the face of the logistics of parenthood (like staying up late for a social gathering - as if they’ve forgotten what an over tired 20 month old is like).
It sounds like the parents, quite understandably, develop common traits specific to the circumstances they share (that is, "raising human offspring"). To conflate those role-specific adaptations with any innate or generalised "superiority" or "special class" in any wider sense would be a mistake, I think.
We're all relative experts in the specific roles of our individual lives, and the very complex journeys they take us on.
As a parent we can only truly compare ourselves to our own past self. That is not the same thing as comparing ourselves to other people, who are on quite different, but similarly complex journeys. It's important to recognise the difference.
Reg. Your grandparents forgetting the problems you have, consider that maybe they never had your problems to begin with! It’s a known fact that parenting has become a self inflicting masochistic venture in the recent generations, compounded by the increasingly nuclear nature of family structures.
I would still like to have kids but sincerely hope to not screw up my life in that endeavor (saving up for a night nanny and hoping to have our parents around to help out).
A lot of relationships go sour, and IMO I think it's fairly difficult for even the married-forevers to say if their relationship stays good. There is also more conflicts of interest with your spousal partner than there are with children in many ways. Your partner is major, but so is your friends, your kids, your family and there isn't a silver bullet for any of them.
"The days are long but the decades are short"
https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...
- It is is unlikely anything you do will “matter”. Out of ~117 billion people to have ever lived over countless millennia, the lives of note throughout history are what? 10k? 100k? Even if it’s 1b meaningful lives that weren’t just an aggregate in the wave of babies, you’ve got a worse than 1% chance of being meaningful. Or, perhaps all lives are significant on a level we are incapable of comprehending. If it defies comprehension, what is the use in crafting a meaningful life?
- you have only the present, and your unreliable recollection of the past to mark your existence. The present is ephemeral, the past is mutable, and neither carry any clear indication that the experience of either matters beyond themselves. Time is sending us all beyond the threshold of both, as best we can tell. With such imperfect information, what planning can you rationally do? To quote Stephen Covey, if it is out of your hands, why worry?
- some of the largest structural entities mankind has ever built are based on the “afterlife” (ie religion), and many possess a concept of heaven and hell. In addition, there are more modern attempts to inspect the qualia of death. The notion of going to heaven or hell intersects with the notion of having a good trip or a bad trip. And of course now I have my shining Joe Rogan moment where I cite the huge DMT trip awaiting most of us (assuming your death not by complete annihilation, such as nuclear explosion, or other).
Therefore, the only thing that you really need to plan for is getting to the end of your road, and not having your exit DMT trip be sponsored by the ninth circle of hell, if you can.
In conclusion it really doesn’t matter. Time eternally marches forward, there are no actual stakes because everybody is damned. Include the notion that we as a society do a pretty dog job of (1) not producing fucked up people (2) not fucking people up as it all goes and (3) pledging to change that, so it’s basically just a daydream that mankind will ever transcend to be anything of transcendent/indisputable value. Don’t know how to phrase the last part.
Example. A few years ago I was laid off right after my kid was born. Bad thing that happened to me, right?
In retrospect, if I didn't get laid off from there, I would end up living in a different state, and my kids wouldn't live next door to their cousins. And I am fine work wise as well.
So I retrospect, getting laid off from that job was the best thing that could have happened because it was a critical junction to my current life which I love.
Yeah, "doing for others" is the point of life. I would argue it is an avenue in life, a very good avenue, and I don't discredit its morality, or correctness. But it is not the point of life, per se.
You do for others for your own peace of mind, so that you can live, day to day, as you approach your death bed. Your doing for others is your avenue to a clear conscience. Play the "why" game on that one for long enough and it ends in "because bad is bad, and I don't want to feel bad infinitely". This is why I argue that your death is the point of life. It's your destination, it's why people freak out about leaving a legacy. Death is the great motivator.
You wouldn't "do for others" if it was established wisdom that "doing for others" meant some experiential equivalent of eternal damnation. It's not that doing for others is wrong or something, it's just that it has an ontological derivative.
If we did for others despite our deaths, I think that Adam Smith would have been lambasted as a heretic, and I think communism would actually work.
Forward few million years to the future. It turned nobody mattered, talented or not, recorded in history or not. High chances the whole civilization will disappear without any trace. So, essentially, nothing ever matters except now.
As a European, I studied in the UK and got a masters, tutions fees paid by the European Union. My children cannot do this anymore.
My young is 17 and spend his free time in the gym, and he is not alone. It is true I could not do this at his age, but I do not understand it.
I'm also perusing of doing a pilgrimage, not because I'm religious, but because it has a lot of facilities along the way. The real thing stopping me is to take the time off to do it.
You can't go back only forward, find peace with your past. A therapist can help. Put another pearl on the string of life and move forward.
My biggest regret is not going to therapy sooner. I would've been so much happier sooner. Now I laugh at the irony of that statement.
For example, if you dated more and had more good relationships can do some good for your self esteem, but you'll still miss these things now if you don't have them.
And the end of the day only the current moment really matters.
That is why life is short. The barriers to young people are growing bigger and bigger. Their adult lives keep getting shorter faster than their lifespan increases.
80 years is not a short period of time by any stretch of the imagination.
My wife would get annoyed when we would pass someone walking and they would see our kids and say "enjoy your time with them while they are young!" Because she hadn't slept and was stressed out. She would think "you enjoy your freedom and your full night of sleep!"
"The days are long but the years are short" is a quote I think about a lot.
I think the key is the same whether you have kids or not: peace of mind in the present moment. If you are happy now you won't regret it later.
I find this argument strange, especially since he uses the word "seem". "Seem" does not mean "is".
If you really want to make life seem short, measure it in millennia. You only get a fraction of one.
Personally, I feel it's about your state of mind. If you're depressed, life feels unbelievably long. If things are going well, then you don't want the good times to ever end, and it seems short.
I don't really know how to conclude whether life is or isn't short. All I can conclude from the article is that PG is quite happy with his!
A great sign that we should pay attention to his advice :)
As he writes in the beginning, there is no objective truth to answer this question. Since it is subjective "seeming" is all that matters. If life seems short to you, it is (for you). If not, it isn't.
I love the reference to children and their helpfulness in bullshit-shedding. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes, from a somewhat sick bird who nonetheless really got the value of both time with children and avoiding bullshit:
"A man's maturity consists in his finding, once again, the seriousness that he had as a child at play" -Friedrich Nietzsche
No you won’t be able to do everything. But you have enough time to do the things you care about.
And the things that run out? Enjoy them! Running out is what makes them special.
This is a great sentence and I want to see it expanded on. I crave being in that flow state and enjoy what I do but it makes me very irritable to be interrupted and I realize needing this level of focus potentially takes me away from other aspects of life like spending time with my family. I’m wondering if others have dealt with these sorts of feelings. I love what I work on, sometimes to the detriment of other things and difficult for me to zoom out in the way described in the essay.
After reading the word "bullshit" about 10 times in 5 paragraphs, a beautiful piece of advice emerged.
The "bullshit" avoided in life should be replaced with something meaningful to you! At the end of the day, a proud man has the realities of his past: meaningful work done, love loved, and suffering bravely suffered. Replace the nonsense avoided with things that matter in a 1 to 1 ratio.
These are recommendations from a philosophy newbie.
This whole article seems a bit self-centered, in that it suggests you should first and foremost care about how things will affect you in the future, rather than caring about others.
It seems to me like you should spend less time trying to prevent future regret, and more time trying to do right by other people.
PG's writing style is excellent, conversational and clear expression of ideas.
Profoundly written.
Relentlessly pruning bullshit gets better with practice and age.
Education is the single most important reason we're born, lived, because it requires each of us to inherit human knowledge, and develop new knowledge for further generation.
What a pity, that, the education system is mostly broken in several places.
""" The tautological emptiness of a Master's Wisdom is exemplified in the inherent stupidity of proverbs. Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If ones says, "Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it's the only life you've got!" it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite ("Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air - think about eternity!"), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides ("Bring Eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!"), we get another profound thought. Needless to add, the same goes for it's inversion: "Do not try in vain to bring together Eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!" If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: "Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!" the result is, again, no less profound than its reversal: "Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple - it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!" Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: "The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life." """
It's still not enough.
One of the reasons I got into software development was to try to make enough money to contribute to these causes, or to work on the problems directly in bioinformatics. Unfortunately I haven't reached the point where I would make much of a difference, but who knows what will happen in the next 10-20 years.
I’ve never understood the philosophy behind life extension research, because to me it seems like a case of spending a lot of resources in the hope of improving something that isn’t really broken. However I love people with passion and I value freedom, so I’m glad that people get to work on it even if I feel like it’s probably a bit of a waste.
Immediately when I first heard about it I thought, wow, this is fantastic, because death is a really bad thing. I believe it was mostly reading the book Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey, although I may have heard about some related ideas on various websites before that.
> And how long would you want to live for?
Certainly at least a couple hundred years, and by that point I'd have time to think about how much longer I'd want. I don't really see a reason why I'd want less than infinite time if it were possible.
> I’ve never understood the philosophy behind life extension research, because to me it seems like a case of spending a lot of resources in the hope of improving something that isn’t really broken.
I've spent several decades working really hard, or studying. Although I hope I'll have a great time in the next several decades, I sure do want more.
Also, I have many things I want to do that I know I won't have time to do in one currently normal lifetime. There are several projects like books I'd write that I will probably not get a chance to do, because there are so many other things I want to do also.
Basically the rough outline of my schedule for the next 40-50 years is pretty packed. Obviously I'm going to prioritize and so a bunch of things will be pushed off the list, but I'd really like to do all the things on the list, plus have plenty of time for general entertainment, social life, and so on.
What's the point of extending our life? The same as the point of eating and breathing. I want to keep on existing.
E.g. life extension may accelerate resource extraction to the point that your descendants die out sooner than they would have if you had died normally. Although you are living longer, your lineage isn’t.
Also, I suspect that the cycle of life and death is like a computer reboot in that it is a reset of state. Leaving it too long without a reboot might cause existential level issues.
Don’t get me wrong, I support life extension research, but I’m just skeptical of how ‘good’ it would actually be for society and the life extender themselves. Hopeful, but cautious.
This puzzles me. Ageing is extremely expensive to society. Healthcare and care for the elderly is often >10% of total expenditure. Surely that's pretty broken?
And of course there's all the pain they're in, the things they wish to enjoy but can't (like football) and things like covid lockdowns that have to be done because the elderly are at risk (a 20 year old has a risk of death from covid under 0.005%). Lockdowns severely damaged the mental health of many people I know and being housebound due to age related infirmity causes depression in the elderly.
I still have concerns that it would be used in such a way that people would live long despite intense suffering, thus increasing suffering overall. But hopefully that isn’t the case.
Specifically, longevity escape velocity being achieved, meaning for each year you live the technology improves fast enough that you get another year.
Whatever can be done to raise the odds is obviously preferable, because there’s also a chance it won’t happen in our lifetime and that would be really bad.
I don't know what the above youtube short means for Gettier problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
Any thoughts?
Eliminating all existential angst of the human animal is likely impossible as various absurd religious constructs (after life, reincarnation etc) testify. But modern society performs significantly below par by failing in more basic ways.
Excessive individualism, disconnecting and disregarding those living next to us, before us and those living in our future hence not living also through them is the main cause.
Well, yes and no. That we live longer than our ancestors seems obvious and is a very common belief.
And average life expectancy has indeed increased.
But it really isn’t that clear cut.
For example: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
Although the max age hasn't increased, the proportion of people who reach it has.
We have tech community (some of them YC alumni) delivering essential equipment (trucks, generators) to the chrisis zone for example. Today west seems to be already tired of the news and this is exactly what the conflict starter counts on.
Humans got frequently born with disabilities because malnutrition in pregnancy (like a lack of iodine) that just don't happen anymore in West.
There were whole classes of these issues that killed people and just don't exist anymore.
Actually even now these early years are most risky ones, just the scale is different. Now I have witnesses bias here also - in my 40ies I can expect to live 50 years more, very different from a newborn with immediate terminal condition. So lifespan does have different meaning for us.
> Actually even now these early years are most risky ones, just the scale is different.
Babies mortality used to be huge too. And maternal mortality used to be huge by our standards too.
Then again, I'd rather be young for 50 years than old for 70.
Why do people so aggressively deny that things have been getting better in the past 100 years?
In the meantime, I will gladly point out that anyone who actually read said garbage article couldn’t have helped but notice how the author, very quickly establishes the difference between life expectancy and lifespan, before also pointing out how the data presents multiple huge biases.
Most people don’t want to die tomorrow, at the same time we need to come to terms with the fact that we age and that our time is ultimately limited.
Which is an objective reality.
As I grow older, I am discovering that life has different chapters. Each with their benefits and challenges. The other comment is talking about us as a society failing to integrate and value each chapter and instead focusing on youth and youth alone. There is nothing desirable in age for western societies (probably others too, I just don’t know enough).
As for the feeling that life is too short; I’ll offer a comparison to the early biblical figures: Adam and his sons lived almost a thousand years. Noah the same. Isaac lived almost 200 years. Compared to biblical figures, we live very short lifespans.
TLDR: the mystery isn’t the absurdity but our reaction to it might be absurd.
Are there any beliefs in particular you were thinking of?
The disbeliever tries to ridicule the concept of an afterlife as to allievate the dread of being held accountable for their deeds on the day of judgement which would likely lead them to an eternal and painful hell.
In Islam, it's very clearly mentioned that each individual will be judged according to their deeds. There are two destinations possible paradise or hellfire.
Other religions that came before have often tried to tone down this reality by either removing accountability like Chrisitanity with the concept of Jesus (peace be upon him) having died for our sins or by simply removing the concept of an afterlife all together.
The Quran clearly tells us that many prophets were sent in the past with revelation but as time passed on they were falsified by people. In light of this, one could easily see how polytheistic religions came about.
In the end Islam is the last religion and it was intended to be preserved which makes it unlike any other religion in the world today. It has one book there a no multiple different versions. It is perfectly constructed and there are 0 inconsistencies and errors. No arab linguist can deny that.
Allah sent the previous prophets specifically for their nations however the last prophet Muhammad peace be upon him was sent for all mankind until the end of times.
Give the quran a read. https://quran.com Do some research on the topic. YouTube is a great ressource for this. Make your own opinion.
In light of this, I still want to invite you to become muslim. Islam answers all the questions Chrisitanity and other religions couldn't. Most importantly it will save you in the hereafter. I'd suggest putting your hand on a hot stove (not too hot) and ponder. Do you really want something like this for yourself and for eternity?
I tried to read some of the Quran but couldn’t find anything that spoke to me. Can you recommend any good sections or translations? Maybe the parts that make you so certain of the afterlife?
I will criticise one of your points since it seems fairly objective. Aren’t there many versions of Quran and countless hadiths? https://answering-islam.org/Green/seven.htm
The Quran is multi form. Oral texts tradition and from the Hadith we know that the Quran was recited in different modes by the Prophet Muhammad pbuh. But these are all valid revelation. Actually one of the “miracles” linguistically about the Quran is how the authentic Qiraa’aat (the reading-out of the Quran) can be traced back to a chain of reciters authentically. And each Qiraa’aat adds eloquence to the Quran and it also speaks to the people of a certain dialect. Think about British English and American English and how the same word can be pronounced differently, and you begin to approach an understanding of Qiraa’aat.
Actually, different Qiraa’aat are essential to the revelation of the Quran and giving evidence about how it has been revealed as an “Arabic Quran” in which many examples of mankind and prophets are related.
These qiraa’aat add enhancement to the meaning of the Quran. For example, if you look up tafsir Al-Qurtubi [not sure if there is an English translation but you can find the Arabic text on Quran.com] (tafsir is an explanation of the Quran), of (verse 87 from chapter 20)[https://quran.com/20/87 ] you will find that the word ملكنا has three different readings مِلكنا ، مُلكنا، مَلكنا which when we transliterate to English we get: mulkinaa, milkinaa, malkinaa. Malkinaa and milkinaa translate to “our will”. Mulkinaa translates to “our power”.
And all together in the verse it enhances the meaning that shows that the Children of Israel were made to carry the burdens of weight of the jewelwery/ornaments from the Pharoah’s people.
Also in this verse, we have two readings for حملنا which are: حُمِّلنا and حَمَلنا which is hummilnaa, and hamalnaa, respectively. Hummilnaa is the passive voice and means “we were forced to carry”. While “Hamalnaa” translates to “we carried”.
Both of these convey a similar meaning of carrying, they enhance aspects of what is happening in the verse. Passive voice focuses on how people were forced to Carry while the active voice focuses on how people indeed did carry.
This is just one example of how important and helpful knowing Qiraa’aat are and Arabic.
So given this background absurdity, how do you even delineate what's absurd and what's not, when it comes to concepts relating to the nature of existence itself? It's certainly fashionable to attempt putting everything in terms such as "cognitive distortions", but it's not clear it's sound reasoning when it comes to things like this.
And I say this as a rather staunch irreligious person.
I like the Zen approach to mystery, which is to accept it and resist the temptation to rationalize the mystery away. Thus no absurd concepts are needed, since concepts are not needed. (I’m relatively new to Zen so I may be off the mark a bit here, but I think I got the essence correct)
Answering questions like "where did we come from" and "where are we going" have always existed. Passing knowledge down through generations has always existed. Treating these stories as gospel makes little sense to me.
WTF? "Skeptical", probably not "accurate"?
You have to be absolutely nuts to think that they're even remotely true.
I don't believe Noah lived for 1000 years and had 2 of every animal on a boat. But I could believe there was a tsunami that killed thousands. I could also believe it was rationalised as a an act of god and eventually became the great flood that appears in the Bible.
Citation needed, massively!
If anything, the powerful technology and knowledge we now wield (weapons of mass destruction, mass surveillance, modern logistics and coordination, global communications) only makes it more important that we don't forget the hard-earned scoial and moral lessons of our pre-scientific ancestors - lessons that were often encoded in evolving cultural systems like religion.
Of course it's not everything, but I don't think humanism on its own would work without an older religion as its "bootstrap".
I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion.
A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.
UsefulChart's video on humanism may help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg
Absolutely not, because the fitness, in an evolutionary sense, of those memes does not correlate with their truthfulness but with how easy they are to believe because they appeal to our fears, hopes and dreams.
Take that "life after death" trope. The hard truth is that there isn't any, when you die, everything that made up "you" will be gone for good. But no religion based on that truth would ever thrive because the thought is just too scary and bleak.
If he isn't, then he's a powerful (yet imaginary) social construct that has evolved over the past 4,000 years to encode the wisdom of many past generations through a set of rules and stories that happen to match up with the stories and rules of many other cultures. It's also an incredibly fast and low-cost way to reach a solution.
Either way, there's definitely some validity to the claims of any major religion.
The Atlantic slave trade started in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s. Even then, it was controversial and faces opposition from certain Church groups (while getting support from others).
Vilification of gays based on Christian religious grounds apparently goes back to the 11th century (based on a quick read of Wikipedia, TBF), and is only starting to come undone now. I don't really have an answer for this, it was unfortunate.
Nobody was making the argument that extremely specific religious quirks like this are encode knowledge important to the wise use of modern technology.
It doesn't make the discourse more interesting or enlightening, and frankly doesn't belong on this site.
A lot of the more specific day-to-day life advice in those texts are outdated because they're based on societal circumstances of the time, which have changed by now. Or they are explanations of phenomena that we have a much better grasp on now. Or they make claims that are implausible given today's understanding.
Religions teach us some valuable high-level concepts, like love and compassion. Those values are extremely important, but also not terribly interesting. You can totally arrive at them through other means.
I don't see how those high-level values help at solving modern crises of global scale. Believers searching for specific advise on modern day problems need to work hard and read though a lot of "code" to find a few nuggets - ultimately failing to get specific enough answers.
If I do a web search on what the bible says to homosexuality, for instance, I get walls of text discussing precious few bible verses. In effect the bible, being what it is, allows those in charge to impose their individual preferences and opinions on their believers by means of laying out suitable interpretations of the code.
I am tempted to conclude that there is less collected wisdom in the bible than you might think, and more potential for harm than you like to admit.
The other context is as a tribal marker, for practical purposes. In this context, the “religiousness” is not about agreeing with the set of assumptions, but pretending to agree and/or going through the motions of various customs as a signal of how committed they are to the tribe.
In societies where individuals need to rely less on the tribe, it might be posited that there is less reason for people to put on a show for the latter reason, so they can afford to be less “religious”. So if, on average, children of Christians are more likely to be economically independent, then they may tend to being less religious, and children of Muslims, who are more likely to be economically dependent on each other, tend to be more religious.
"Humanism" highly correlates with lock sales worldwide as far as I can tell. It's not defense at all vs drug addiction. Humans feel great when drugged up.
Buddhism claims that nothing created us. Samsara is beginningless and wasn’t architected by anything. And that’s just 500 billion people or so.
* million
It's just a common saying that's meant to remind us that we have a tendency to spend huge amounts of time and emergy on things that ultimately don't matter, and hopefully sometimes short-circuit the thought process that causes us to do this.
People realized they don't have time for bullshit.
If they have either of those "cultural challenges", then they are literally dropping even more work and isolation on their wifes. That is why it is egoism.
Because when they do this, their partner has no choice but to do it all. And the partner is getting no break.
I do knows guys like that. They walk around happy. Their wife's walk around stressed, tired, loosing themselves while talking about how much their husbands need to work. While I know they slack around in work padding time cause chatting with friends is fun.
No, I mean the breadwinner may be stressed because their SO has such an attitude. Therefore the kids are basically always home, and no one ever gets a break. Some folks also decide to have kids and agree to parenting strategies, only later to realize they're not working. If the stay-home partner insists on "the one true way" then even counseling may not be enough.
Again, the broader point is you may not have the whole picture. Try to assume good intentions, and if circumstances are undeniably out of balance look for constructive ways to help.
I encountered this sentiment most of all - 40 year old dads who were suddenly stuck at home with the wife and kids, working from an improvised home office.
When I asked about returning to the office, most of them were clearly looking forward to it, with a sentiment of "Of course working from home is less efficient and comfortable, what do you mean?".
It was quite a surprise for me, who had finally gotten away from the noisy open-plan offices and meetings where everyone shouted at each other until the loudest person "won".
Meanwhile me and other young dads who did plan for remote work have now a designated room for an office and children at daycare/kindergarten for most of the day.
Until my child was old enough to attend daycare it was indeed chaos, but with just one you can get used to this. It's much like having a co-worker who likes to chat a little bit too much.
And it inevitably it gives ammo to those who want to take away remote work for everyone.
“See, they don’t actually want to work remotely!”
A job that provides an income to a worker, and generates wealth for society, is not bullshit -- even if all it involves is making crappy consumer products, or working on an assembly line, or doing paperwork all day. In fact, such jobs are the reason the majority of people no longer live in 19th-century conditions -- and the lack of such jobs in regions that used to have a lot of them is a primary driver of populist politics.
Entrepreneurs I know are reluctant to hire because it does not scale. Yet they do hire, slowly and surely. They need these jobs, as they cannot grow without it.
Similarly they complain about the lack of talent. Most of the people they value do not want the regular job that they offer. They need the people who want the regular jobs.
I am sure this will change. Yet today it is the reality.
...of people I want to have around me...
It's been my experience that "cultural fit" has been a much more important coefficient, than "talent."
In my case, it's a bit of sour grapes, and I'll be the first to admit it. I have the talent and experience to pretty much singlehandedly "make" a smallish startup (I'm doing exactly that, right now, but for a nonprofit, for free), but found that my gray hair terrified prospective employers so much, that they ran screaming.
There's plenty of talent out there, but it may come with things like self-assurance, confidence, and an unwillingness to put up with childish BS, or be a galley slave.
I can't understand how educated people can still gobble ubi propaganda up when it's proven that such model is completely unsustainable economically and socially
How exactly has it been proven? That's a very strong word to use for something that has never been tried on anything but very small scale limited pilots.
-free housing
-free money
-money for children (that they use for themselves)
-various other help (clothes, coal, christmas packages)
This had an unfortunate effect of creating a group of people who never worked and all they did was raise 3-5 children. Despite the parents not working (so having time to take care of their children) those children did not really get any education, often did not even finish high school. And guess what those children often got their own set of children early - who also will never work, live of social benefits and small time theft.
You dont exactly have to be a right winger to notice that the model is not sustainable. Especially as this group of people only demands more and they think that they "deserve" it. Also if you would try to teach the children that everyone should contribute to society by working, their parents/grandparents/even grand grandparents will protest. Since they lived this "parasite" lives forever and dont know better. How can someone demand that they work? They deserve higher social benefits and they deserve better housing. (While you are supposed to get a mortgage and slave to get a house). Also at some point the group will become so big that they can vote for politicians that will give them more (at the expense of those who work).
Of course perhaps maybe UBI can work and it will be all rosy, but it is just wishful thinking. Communism was also supposed to work.
Different problem with UBI is that middle class becomes nobodies - you are supposed to shut up because you get your dole. While I bet the rich people will still be rich.
Countries such as Australia with robust (compared to the US) welfare safety nets (not perfect by any means, but not to shabby overall) have proven to have strong long term GDP growth and to be resilient in the face of various global crisis events.
Good safety nets provide a place to regroup and do better - without being reduced to homeless and struggling to meet basic food and clothing needs.
[1] https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/handle/10024/161361
[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector...
[3] https://www.bruegel.org/blog-post/universal-basic-income-and...
[4] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer...
You dont seem to be aware that such programs are designed to have people raise such 5-6 children while doing nothing else in order to bump up the declining population. And if you think raising 6 children is not work... boy...
(2) if you are in middle class, or low class (but still working) you are contributing for others and dont get anything in return from them. I would argue that if you didnt have to contribute so much then those middle/low class families would have 2 children instead of 1. Children of parents that work and will raise them right.
You seem to think that those low life people work hard raising their children? Lol, they dont care about their children.. those kids are raised by the streets.
It is the same in UK where some families mass manufacture inbred children (seriously read about it) and same in Slovakia where alcoholics get more kids since they dont use contraception and having a kid allows more money for vodka.
You assume that everyone wants the best for their kids, nope those people just have a strategy to pump few kids, who maybe will pump more kids. At thr expense of taxpayers.
The problem is that (1) that is patently false.
Take the case of Germany. So many Turkish immigrants. So many used those programs and had many children. So many complained. Yet, Germany's most famous footballer, the makers of Crysis, the inventor of the Biontech vaccine (the one that you know as Pfizer) are all such kids born to such families.
Since your initial propositon is flat out false, I dont see the need to address the others.
This is exactly what happens in Argentina now.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-...
That's the objectively proven human nature. Not the randian nonsense. And that's what 3rd worlders see every day.
Don't invent false realities. Nobody proved nothing as such. The Finnish experiment and others showed that there is no relation in between ubi and unemployment.
For now it rather seems that it has created two sorts of populations: Those who live off it, and those who work, the two forever opposing each other, the latter literally enslaved by the masses of the former. The enslavement in a society which is ever-more reliant on the remaining workers meets another phenomenon: Shunning the workers who protest, because looks at all this poverty, why would you not accept to fund them.
A similar thing exists in other country like UK or Germany
We could have 75% of the population stop working now and the taxes on 25% could provide basic sustenance for everyone.. at 1910 levels.
Same thing would happen with automation, some people would keep working, get 2-3x the wealth and everything that comes with and we’re in the same spot we’re in today.
If I don't have to work, I will probably enjoy my work more.
The society today already has the means to make only 1% of the population work, and still keep the comfort level for everyone as it is.
We are making people waste their lives away creating imaginary wealth to bump up the stored imaginary wealth in financial institutions only to keep the existing economic system going.
Sure, we may have enough "money" to redistribute it. But if 99% of the population stops working, who is going to make everything we use, produce food, run power stations, and transport everything to us. Automation is great, but it doesn't cover anywhere near 99% of necessary jobs yet.
Do you know how you make those? Mostly with those "bullshit" corporate jobs.
It’s the bullshit software startup jobs that typically serve no purpose besides shuffling investor money from one place to another. Yes dear reader, that’s probably you.