Life lessons from the death bed
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isonomiaquarterly.com
If I knew I'll die next week, would I try crack? Well, maybe - there's nothing to lose and they say the highs are pretty high. But if I found myself in a hospice tomorrow, would I regret all the crack I didn't try? No - the pluses I got from living a not-crack-addicted life seem pretty solid from where I stand.
For a less dramatic example: I think that, when the time comes, I won't regret most of the time I spent programming. By being aware of how often people regret the time they spent on a dead-end job I've made the kind of choices that gave me a good life-work balance while keeping me working on interesting stuff. Of course I'm also severely underpaid, but middle class and happy seems better than rich and miserable.
In every moment of my life there has been some "cake" I could have "eaten" that would have been more enjoyable than all the hours I spent up in the middle of the night with screaming babies. But on my deathbed I'm certain it will be my investment of time in my children that I'm glad of, not the foregone "cake" I'm regretting.
To me, this is the goal; to be able to look up towards the sun every day, sore muscles and sweat dripping, and say, "thank you for this day."
Metaphorically, I mean. In truth I'm a cave-dwelling grug-minded developer.
It's a belief I find hugely depressing.
>reduces humanity back down to level of any other simpler life form. Eat, fuck, die, repeat.
It's a little more than that but though humans (most) are civilized and intelligent, we're still a great ape.
>It's a belief I find hugely depressing.
Why? It's our nature. Jonas Salk is probably the finest human I can think of and he was certainly motivated by all those things.
Just as a top-of-mind example: All through my adulthood, I really disliked Halloween. Just not my thing, too much pressure to pick a creative costume, then go to a tedious party. But last night I had such a great time taking my five-year-old trick-or-treating. Because it's so new and exciting and fun for her, and that's infectious! But that sort of thing happens a lot.
That's what the metaphorical "cake" is. But that doesn't mean "that's it, there is no other joy to seek in life now", like the parent comment seems to be inferring. It's just one source of joy, but one that is hard to capture any other way.
None of the rest of what you seem to have read into it is written there.
I suspect their intent is more along the traditional lines of encouraging readers to not put off something into the “long term goal” category that would just as easily fit in the “short term goal” category.
If anything, I see it as complimentary to your thoughts because many folks will use momentary pleasures as a way to put off a highly rewarding yet difficult life challenge.
A lot of the treadmills that society places upon us are just bullshit. It's packaged as "long term goals" to make it sound more plausible (you'll either forget you were conned or get used to it in some kind of Stockholm syndrome). But in those cases there's actually no trading short for long, it's just purely bullshit. Like, the high school geometry assignment for the author. It is literally wasting her time if she didn't enjoy learning it.
I guess "bullshit" might be objectively too strong a word -- given that "one man's trash is another man's treasure", whether it's trash or treasure depends on who/what person you are. But subjectively, for the wrong person, a lot of stuff is just that.
I didn't enjoy several classes which were prerequisites for my career which I enjoy very much.
My father used to give me the advice "live life such that if you were to write your own autobiography you'd find it interesting." Yet when he was beginning the process of dying he told me about his regrets in not traveling to see more of the world. The regret was so profound that it immobilized him to the point that even though he wasn't yet sick enough to need daily care, and could have gone to one or two of the places on his bucket list, he couldn't manage it.
I was struck one-time while on vacation in Europe with a tour group, an elderly woman in a mobility chair had become very frustrated with the amount of difficulty she had with getting around to see various sites we were stopping at. She lamented that she had wasted her life waiting to retirement to come see these places and by then was in such poor physical shape she spent more time on or near the bus than seeing things. At the foot of a rather simple cobblestone incline she finally broke down in sobs because there just wasn't a reasonable way for her or her caregivers to get her up the thousands of uneven stones in the street.
Yet I also know people who gravitate and prioritize immediately emotionally satisfying experiences and choices over long-term planning. They all have money problems, unstable housing situations, and nothing saved for when they can no longer work. Yet the moment the next emotionally satisfying opportunity arises they leap at it even if it again causes them to fall back into the steep pit of daily and long-term struggles they can't escape from.
I'm happy where I've arrived and the balance I've struck. But I know that it also wouldn't make other people satisfied as they have a different way of optimizing this problem. For me? Take care of the short, medium and long-term problems, live below my means, use the excess to buy experiences not things, and check that bucket list off while I'm young enough to enjoy it. That way, while I sit old and secure in my retirement I can be satisfied that I did what I wished, but still ended up well enough to take care of what I needed to do.
Although, in my view, there is no reason to perceive a dying person as having special insight. If insight matters it can be achieved at any age. Literally the best strategy I've seen in the face of death is just to relax, go with it and try not to get too attached to life. And that mindset offers no guidance at all on what is good to do with the time we have.
Have you ever had a near-death experience? Those often seem to be followed by a sense of clarity that inspires some people to live better. They seem to cut through the crud and reveal the unimportance of certain things, and highlight the value of other things
Why do you think it would not be useful? Aren't you more productive, when you are relaxed, compared to stressed out, where one does make misstakes easy?
> 1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
> 2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
> 3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
> 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
> 5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I've (so far) concluded that the way to frame it is "If I were to go today, would I be — on balance — happy that I've done what I could with what I had?".
Life is a partial knowledge game.
Everything is a bet on some future outcome, whether it is "will I enjoy this menu choice in 5 minutes?" or "will this education/career choice make me healthier/wealthier/sizer in three decades?"
We live in times where we can more reliably live 8-10 decades and have a plausible chance of living long enough to see substantial healthspan extension science to indefinite lifespans, yet we could also not see the next sunrise...
So, it's just as valid a bet to go all-in on the Hedonic treadmill or organize every hour around life extension, or anything in between. Enjoy it all now and be hated by your future self (unless you're lucky like Keith Richards, still rockin' at 79), or spend less-enjoyable effort now and enjoy being in shape later, etc., etc., etc.
It is all place your bets, take your chances... (& we can often change course later as we learn about life and ourselves).
I first saw tacked to a door in a rock climbing school, one of my favorite aphorisms:
Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgement.
it doesn't have to be a cake, but ffs, stop refusing yourself what's better when that option is literally just there. and sometimes those options are free.
(and hey, if 'better' is actually 'not having cake' - maybe it is just that for you. sometimes that death recontextualization makes things seem irrelevant in that way - why do something at all when it literally will not matter, and doesn't matter on any scale of the days really)
The extreme of living for today only or living for tomorrow only will mean you are under serving your present or future self. Time is short so it’s wise to give to your present day self. Also you don’t want to rob your future self, so investing in your future is also important. Extremes are easier to manage. With balance you’ll have the choice and its burden to decide between today and tomorrow.
It could be middle age tainting my perspective... but sometimes I feel this sort of... not visceral, but very close and undeniable... experience with death is easier for people who are young.
Death isn't real for most people at 17, no matter how much they have seen, many see the death of a grandparent, or two, or perhaps even four, before reaching 17, but most still enter their late teens, feeling invincible and like death is a whole lifetime away... because on a sort of undeniable personal narrative level is is... it is a lifetime away... and things that feel a lifetime away are much easier to think about than things that feel like they get closer every year. In middle age you know your to some statistical average "about half way there"... and that's a very different place from which to begin having this kind of life experience.
The realisation I was probably born a bit too early for technology to give me immortality saddens me; I only have so many weekends left to do hobbies and even fewer blocks of a few thousand hours to master something new... So I have to prioritise which is annoying.
I’d simply advise to get on getting on. It is. You are you so see what you can do with it in the way you feel you can.
You can always find a reason to be grateful (just as, I suppose, we can always find a reason to be saddened ... and probably our future counterparts will as well.)
Enjoy rather current times, we have it easy and pretty compared to whats coming
So the result will likely be immortal overlords and mortal peasants. Hard to see any other outcome.
I then realized what death is: a switch is flipped off and you are done. No memories, nothing. You just stop to exist.
From then on I do not worry anymore and stopped wondering about death altogether.
You have everything, and then you are not there anymore to feel that your lost something.
But I can relate to what you are saying, I see it rather like a form of "future nostalgia": it is Sunday afternoon and your are sad that it is going to be over. This is something I learnt to actively fight and live in the present.
But now is not then.
The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen. You'll never be aware of having died or lost anything through your own death. It's just insanely difficult for us to internalize that idea because we're animals, we avoid death instinctively and fear loss instinctively.
[EDIT] Oh, also:
> The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen.
Ceasing to exist will happen. It's guaranteed to happen.
The fact of anxiety being useless doesn't do much to get rid of it. If it did, there wouldn't be much of it at all.
Not from your point of view! You can experience every moment leading up to your death and may be lucky enough to realize you're about to die, but it's not possible to be aware of the end of your own existence. It is always a future event. (Based on our best models, that is. Obviously the living can't possibly know what it's like to be permanently dead.)
> The fact of anxiety being useless doesn't do much to get rid of it.
I don't agree; it's valuable to be aware of the unconscious motivations of anxiety - it's just that awareness alone isn't sufficient to cure the anxiety.
> None of that does anything to mitigate the feeling when the yawning expanse of inevitable non-existence comes into one's mind
Again, I don't agree! Being able to think about "the event" from different angles gives the brain an escape hatch from anxiety traps. The anxiety might come, but now you have tools to handle it instead of be dominated by it.
You must be quite old, then!
> I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point.
What is the point then?
> The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen. You'll never be aware of having died or lost anything through your own death.
Isn't addressing the thing that (I think?) most people are worried about when they worry about death. I don't think most are worried about how bad they will feel after they die, which is what this is concerned with. It's totally beside the point.
The point is that we are conscious, now, and imagining what it means for that consciousness to end and for the entire future of the universe to not exist to us at all—really imagining it—can be rather unpleasant. Upsetting, even. It's subjectively identical to the end of the universe.
"But you used to not exist"—irrelevant, because 1) I do now, and 2) I at least get some kind of window into what all that was, since it's... the past.
"But you'll experience nothing, so it won't be unpleasant"—even less relevant. I'm not worried about that state of (not) being, being unpleasant. I'm not worried about existing with an awareness of having died, as mentioned in the quoted bit.
It's unpleasant, and it's difficult to imagine, that doesn't mean you should be anxious about your own death.
Again... from your subjective experience, I'm not sure it's even meaningful to say that you will die. You will only ever experience being alive.
You can't even be sure that the universe will continue after your death, either. Does it seem most likely that it will? In some models of the universe, it's actually infinitely more likely that it won't, because it all exists inside your (Boltzmann) brain.
Like what is the specific thing that causes anxiety? That's still not clear to me. Not-knowing, yeah, that can cause anxiety. And it can be soothed by changing your perspective, taking delight in the mysteries of existence. We all have a visceral anxiety about death which our bodies evolved to have, because it's quite useful for a living thing to want to stay alive. But that's not based in reason, and we can use reason to alleviate our anxiety.
I’m not worried about the nothingness after I die. I’m anxious about the impending loss of enjoying my wine.
Have you ever been to a party and it started winding down and people left and you wanted them to stay and the fun to continue? That’s the anxiety.
What I believe is, you probably won't actually ever have to stop drinking wine. From your perspective, I'm not sure it's meaningful to say you'll ever stop existing, because you can't experience it. You'll (probably) just stop existing for me, and I for you.
It's fair to be sad about it just like I'm sad that the elves left Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age. But neither my own death nor the leaving of the elves is something I can ever actually live through - they're both just stories to me.
Inevitably, the distinction lies in the belief of, whether the world continues to exist once you die - because if it does, then your non-existence is still a loss for your peers and the rest of the world.
On other hand, your qualia (sense/experience) of the world is all you have - i.e. your sense of sound, sight, touch etc. So, at most, this sense of experience is what you can call your "world" - nothing more, nothing less. And once that ceases there is no "world" anymore.
But it's definitely true, worrying about death is a privilege granted only to the living.
“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”
I can't honestly say whether I find eternal life more appealing than permanent death.
Recently, my two-year-old daughter asked me where she was in a picture of me and her mom. I made the mistake of saying she "didn't exist yet". She seemed horrified by the idea of non-existence. I had never considered before that the eternity of non-existence before birth could be just as horrifying as the eternal death afterwords. I actually find it kind of comforting that death will be no different than before I was born.
Unless you believe in some sort of immortal soul which might blossom into something other than a human consciousness after death, immortality is horrifying. A human mind wasn't evolved to live eternally, and doing so may well be a nightmare. Or maybe we'd just start to forget at some point and hemorrhage past centuries... that would be an extraordinary sadness to me.
I used to feel this way, but looking at how things are going, particularly in regard to climate change, I no longer envy children born today for the world they will live to see. I try to be more optimistic, but that isn't exactly my nature, and events seem to be moving even faster than my pessimism would have predicted.
I also don't worry about not existing almost every place and at every time that I could have existed. There is no direct pain or suffering associated with it.
That's why my mental bandage for the very likely torture at the end of the line is medically assisted suicide. I don't delude myself that I will never need that, in fact I'm almost certain I'll get to a point where it will be the humane option. Everyone I got to know in my family died agonizing deaths after oftentimes long period of illnesses.
Of course in my country, Retardia, this medical euthanasia isn't an option but as an EU citizen with enough money I will get it in Netherlands or Switzerland if and when I'll need it.
Aren't there plenty good open source alternatives to achieve this without aid from the government? Like something as simple as CO poisoning would do the job convincingly and cheaply.
I'm still in my 20s, so maybe I still have some youthful arrogance and distance rattling about up in my noggin that makes this an easy and useless thing to say. I have witnessed the death of my father, and a couple of my friends from childhood are already dead. But I come from suicidal stock, so maybe that's part of it too.
I think at this point I fear more the nature of getting older, having seen some of the early, innocuous signs of it in myself. Still at the age where in another life I could die in some glorious way, valorizing youth. But I'm set up for the long haul in this life, even as I want to do something reckless.
Pick how you wanna live it.
Now there are less of them, but I don't know what the future will bring. I think russia is preparing their winter campaign of terror again, so we will see.
When it is 3 in the morning and you hear explosions and you are really really fcking happy that it didn't hit you.
You can also have no electricity and heat in the middle of the winter, but it sort of sortable if you go somewhere public where business have electricity generators.
At first you get used to living like this, but after some time your natural resilience start to break and it can become quite difficult to live.
So I've got a lot of time to think about life and death sort of things in this setting.
I've got to understand one really simple thing. I should live my life in such a way that when it really hits me, there be no regrets for my time in this world.
I need a bazzilion friends and experience love, I need that people think of sunshine when they remember me. Because I am love for every living thing. Everything will be the best way it could possibly be, every hard thing in life is there for a reason.
That what lead to gender transition, but that the whole another story, lol
It helps that I live in a suburban city, so getting around is easy and fast.
If a concept like this is widely held to be profound on HN, then perhaps -- and I mean this as gently as possible -- that could be a sign that the average engineer's career is a little too much of a treadmill, and would benefit from a little more downtime.
Or they could, if they care about you, respectfully attend to your needs and listen to you.
>Loneliness is the state of distress or discomfort that results when one perceives a gap between one’s desires for social connection and actual experiences of it. Even some people who are surrounded by others throughout the day—or are in a long-lasting marriage—still experience a deep and pervasive loneliness. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/loneliness
One thing I didn't know at the time was about hallucinations. Dad said he saw a wooly mammoth outside his room in the garden. Dad liked to joke and so we though nothing of it. Later I found out that meant a person was near death. It's often a silly thing they see or a loved one not death or bad things.
Dad had been sick for nearly 20 years it was slow at first tiredness, he retired three years early, but then came the diagnosis of IPF and then five really rough years and one last bad six months. Such a long illness it seemed like a good thing to have time with him but sadness dragged on relationships. Mom was in denial until the moment he died (she went home no clue of how imminent death was). I didn't realize how much of my life it affected really about half my life.
Not even a month into hospice Dad died a 8:40pm on my birthday April 21 in 2012 as Rick Steves Travel was on PBS TV channel showing Rome. If anything I say anxiety is what killed my Dad he was much better physically in hospice but the weight of being there in that place as good as it was is incredibly heavy and hard to bear.
I am now astonished at how people older than Dad are walking around living their life no issues. Life is amazing we take it for granted.
Eg: https://www.catholicchorale.org/schedule/cuf1ozg4xdcyrasujwg...
Regrets of the Dying https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/
(as I get ready for work to sit at a desk for 8 hours)
I think this belief will stick with me for life and I don't see it changing but I'm open to it.
And if it felt good why other thoughts or lack of thought couldn’t make you happy?
And of course if you are happy why couldn’t you find a way to be happy all the time?
Makes sense?
The rest of your comment is far more interesting. It's fair to point out that even in feeling existential angst, there is a sense of "pleasure" in feeling that angst as a kind of knowledge, where that knowledge brings comfort and a sense of security in understanding the world as it is. But I'd argue that "if you are happy why couldn’t you find a way to be happy all the time?" is probably taking it too far and not really hitting at the precise issue.
The precise issue, as it strikes me (just one guy's opinion, so take it with a grain of salt) is the gap between the present moment and whatever one is preoccupied with. Life can be "suffering" and "have no point" but is there really anything wrong with that? If you sit down at a blank page with a pencil, is the blankness of the page a lack of guidelines that is scary and insurmountable, or is it a world of freedom that gives you freedom and agency to bring your dreams to life?
My question is that it doesn't matter. If you focus on the moment, on the pencil on the paper, and start moving it, and fully focus on the moment and the movement of the pencil to let it take on a life-in-and-of-itself where there is no conceptual gap between it and you, then you will have already succeeded. And a lot of things are like that. That's part of why weightlifting feels pleasant to me, and practicing an instrument feels pleasant to me -- you are fully in the moment. Is it suffering when you don't get to do it the right way, when you're not as strong or as technically skilled as you'd like to be? Maybe, but it also feels good too, because the pain also means you are growing and that you are learning.
Just my unsolicited two cents.
I believe a blissful life is possible, even if it seems implausible.
I’m OK with my words causing some discomfort, even some hate towards me if people become happier in the long run.
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Heartbreaking story. Life and death
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Tear-jerking story. Humanity and purpose.
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Optimistic summary that makes you rethink your life.
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So it's quite normal to fear death. My trick to not fear death too much is this: perhaps in theory I own what is mine, but in practice I just have some assets that were lent to me, and that will be lent to others after my death. I see myself as just some manager of what I have.
You don't live in the squalor and suffer. You are DEAD.
Death is the true absence of all, not a lacking of anything.
I hold to this mindset. I no longer fear death.
As with everything, balance is key. But I’ve never heard of anyone on their deathbed wishing they’d spent less time with family and friends, and more time grinding away at work.
Just to take the most extreme kind of example, I think scientists who have really hit on breakthroughs in their field feel more strongly that they wish they could have kept that up, done more of that, for longer.
But I don't think that pattern is unusual at all. Lots of people find work that they believe they believe is valuable and that they are effective at, and only regret that there are not enough hours in the day to do all the things they value and find joy in, including their work.
Your point about time being zero-sum is a poignant one. Everyone wishes they had more hours in the day to spend doing things they like. But the question is about how we spend that marginal hour, and I think oftentimes it is better spent on family, friends or hobbies than our day jobs.
But it's probably true that more people end up regretting that choice to spend that marginal hour on work for more of their hours that the opposite.
Sampling bias? Those wishing to have spent more time with family & friends likely have family & friends to posthumously share their deathbed story.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-fiv...
Reminded me of a small lyric of a song that very roughly translates to "Drink and empty your glasses, because this is the moment. You can never be sure if you're here tomorrow".
Enjoy life while and when you can my fellow earthlings.
Live life, minimize regrets, have fun, enjoy it while lasts. I have discussed end of life issues with my kids, so they have an idea of what to expect. Even though I'm not looking forward to it, I'm not afraid of it.
I take our caskets and hearses out to public events to provide insight and hopefully get people to think about and openly talk about death, trying to make it less taboo.
Personally, I participate in a monthly death cafe, help preserve history by volunteering at our local cemetery, helping to run events, assist taking care of the grounds, repair and preserve headstones.
Some really interesting stories and lessons.
I took such advice to heart at 22, and have lived a VERY colorful life for the past 26 years after vowing to never have regrets over what I DIDN'T do.
Good lecture by a Greek/Rome Historian: https://youtu.be/cDa4vpkNKeQ
Saying you can’t take you money with you (quote at the top) is a platitude. You can’t take anything with you, be it money, memories, good deeds, or consequences. You’ll be dead. You’ll lose everything equally. Your actions will no longer matter to you. They will matter to the ones left behind, but only for a little while. Eventually everyone you touched will die. Not even Jesus, Shakespeare, and Newton can survive this fate at the heat death of the Universe.
In a way, you experience death every night when you go to sleep, and a new birth every morning. As I programmer - I need to remember to close my open connections every time, else my brain will run out of memory and crash.
Neither do people on their death beds.
> because you don’t experience it’s ‘ground rush’.
Death isn’t a spectrum. By that logic, someone who almost died because of a car accident has better insights than someone in a hospice withering over months or years. A person who began pondering their own mortality a week ago because they got terminally ill doesn’t have more valid insights on life and death than a moderately healthy person who has been thinking about the subject every day for two decades.
Try climbing. Top ropes, sport and traditional. All the same things but with wholly different consequences. The experience is entirely different.
The person who had a near death experience versus dying is on a spectrum. One being acute, the other being chronic. Both would have different views.
No, I am not. You keep making wrong assumptions about me and disagreeing on the surface while (seemingly) agreeing where it matters.
> Both would have different views.
Yes, exactly. Thus the views of the person on their death bed aren’t more universally valid. That’s the whole point I’m making.
Per Aristotle, there is a difference between having fear and being a coward, and also between being brave and being a fool.
Condescending from the first phrase.
It is hard and maybe pretentious to think I could know how to live today in order to satisfy my future self, but I think we can do very well if we tackle the subject head on. That means inviting both life and death to our lives.
I invite life by intending to be present. It is not just meditating (if you enjoy it go for it, but do so because you actually enjoy it, not to become a master meditator in the future, that might eventually come naturally). It is savoring the moment. Shutting off things that require my attention right then and there and just being with myself, not really wanting to be anywhere else.
I invite death by saying goodby to myself. By denying participating in the cult of nostalgia. That is not to say that I don't take pictures or I don't enjoy remembering good moments, but when I do so that is an act in itself, and not wanting to relive the moment. It is remembering the moment as an opportunity to both be grateful it happened and to also say goodbye to it.
Saying goodbye to myself is also acknowledging that I will be different in another moment, as I was different in the past. My past self made mistakes and also made great (I still feel a little envious as how much I could enjoy computer games when I was a teenager). This unloads a huge burden that is to require myself to be consistent throughout my entire life.
I change, I evolve. I die a lot, long before I die physically.
Doing so I think frees me to pursue what I think makes me feel good. In my case that is to write computer programs, compose poetry, play my guitar. Study philosophy (if you like it too, I would refer to concepts like the Nietzschean demon or epicurean static and dynamic pleasures, as well as Simone Weil's attention). I also love my friends and family. I believe we are better off relinquishing a little bit of individuality in lieu of being more involved in our community.
It is also nice to listen to our elders. They suffer from survivors bias the most and thus have a lot to teach us if we let them, and if we are able to abandon a little bit of the cult of the yound and new and perfect we are immersed in.
This is not just a comment for you, it is also for me. Using this opportunity to take a snapshot of myself thinking about life and death while also sharing it.
Edit: I would like to mention that this does not encompass every form of human existence. This would be insane, but I think I should say it. There is no peace of mind on an empty stomach or under the barrel of a gun. This comment does not try to encompass the extremes of human suffering. I can't say nothing about this other than that we as a society are failing to reduce human suffering. I think I would go to my deathbed regretting not being able to do more to make other humans suffer less.
And the most important for me of all - gratitude. I’m finding that if I apply gratitude to thoughts and actions throughout the day, very little if anything can shake me now. It feels like a superhuman power. Motorist cuts me up… meh.. at least I’m not in a hurry like that guy. Grumpy because I had a bad night sleep… I’m thankful I had a warm bed and roof over my head and warm shower to jump in. Injured myself running… at least I have legs to run. The effect of the above on my life has been profound. My happiness levels are through the roof and I’m achieving and doing things I never thought possible as I’m not allowing negative emotions and thoughts any space in my life.
Not saying this will work for anyone else, but it does for me.
But recently I have been perusing "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", and finding that a huge amount of it also strikes me as being just mass-market stoicism.
So it has made me curious whether it's a direct influence, or whether it's just a case of multiple people or philosophies coming to basically the same conclusions independently.
So I'm curious whether your philosophy of grateful contentment for what you have comes via a direct influence, or was arrived at independently.
In any case, it's an excellent practice, but one I nonetheless often have trouble executing myself :)
It’s a common idea (which isn’t to say it’s invalid or wrong). If you’re interested in studies on happiness or living a “good” life you’re bound to bump into it more than once. Quick example: do a web search for “TED talk gratitude” and you’ll find more links than you know what to do with.
The best parents are the ones that instill that into their kids. Some will scoff and say that it’s teaching to accept mediocrity. Not at all, it’s about making the most of what you have, nothing to do with striving for more.
Hearing that parable at Sunday mass multiple times as a youngster is one of the reasons why I stopped going to church at age 14 and have never been back.
>American’s default view of ‘fairness’ can be incredibly corrosive.
Can you elaborate on what this default view is? For example, Americans seem to have no problem with someone becoming a near-billionaire overnight from winning a multi-state lottery (Powerball, Mega Millions).
American’s view of fairness breeds envy. Across every income level a vast majority want 10% more to be ‘happier.’ Once you have this ego death of sorts, it lets you easily step off the hedonistic treadmill, thus improving one’s life :)
And then I got to work more on those.
> Human beings are undeniably complex, and what motivates us can often be a mystery, even to ourselves. So, how do we go about gathering and analyzing the data that will help us answer the most fundamental questions about our lives and our purpose? The answers may lie in an unexpectedly rich source of knowledge, our regrets. While regret is likely to have a decidedly negative connotation for most of us, it is also extremely powerful and can teach us a great deal about ourselves and what we value. It is an emotion that is present in all of us, and social scientists (like anthropologists and sociologists) have been fascinated by the subject for decades. Today on the show, we are joined by one such expert, Daniel Pink, author of the book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. In our conversation, Daniel shares details about the research he conducted for his book, how he determined the four main categories of regret, and what we can learn from our regrets by confronting them head-on. We also discuss Daniel’s 2011 New York Times Bestselling title, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and what he thinks about working from home in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daniel is an exceptional storyteller and is highly knowledgeable on the subjects of regret, motivation, and the important role they play in our lives. To learn more about the many facets of regret and how it can help you thrive, be sure to tune in today!
* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/246
Harvard has also been running a multi-decade (since 1938), and now multi-generational, studies on happiness and the current directors (there have been a few over the years) recently published a book with their current understanding of the data, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/harvard-ha...
From a 2012 book from another director:
> According to The Atlantic, George Vaillant's main conclusion is that the warmth of relationships throughout life has the greatest positive impact on life satisfaction. Put differently, Vaillant says the study shows: "Happiness is love. Full stop."[8]
It shouldn't be a surprise that, as a result, many people prioritize having enough money to not have to care about not having money.
What I have landed on is that achieving "financial independence" is important to me because it buys time, but beyond that point I don't care. Or maybe a better, though jargon-y, way to put it is that it buys optionality, and that I value that very highly (and I think most people do).
I really like working. And I really like spending time with my family. What I really dislike is when I have to spend more time working, rather than being with my family, than I want to, in order to avoid that asceticism that I hate. And, having not yet achieved financial independence, that's pretty much always the case, because I need to work full time, and that's more than I want to work.
Financial independence also buys optionality in what kind of work I can do. Right now there is some stuff I'm really interested in that I would love to be working on in an academic setting, rather than a commercial setting. But I can't afford to do that, because the pay would not be good enough. And at other times, I've really wished I could afford to do work I would find valuable but which is just not well compensated; teaching, tutoring, community / public sector work, etc. But I haven't been able to afford to, thus far.
But of course the problem with all this is that "financial independence" is a very fuzzy line, and is a function of spending, and spending is often itself a function of income. So avoiding that trap is also important to me, and I'm not as good at that as I'd like to be.