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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. We act as if people on their death beds have some unique insight on how to live a good life. They don’t. The same thoughts will reach you if you think enough about your death while you’re alive and healthy.

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.

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I agree. Its not what they say on their deathbeds, but what brought them peace and acceptance ultimately (if at all).

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.

You can conceptually understand death but you do not know it because you don’t experience it’s ‘ground rush’. So I disagree.

> but you do not know it

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.

You are missing the subjectivity of the life experience. Death is binary and beyond the event horizon therefore out of the equation. The experience of it is not.

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.

> You are missing the subjectivity of the life experience.

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.

I am not making any assumptions about you. Simply posting my opinion.

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