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Comment by yyyfb | Hacker News Reader

Next time you're thinking "I wish I was the one who had made a billion dollars with my startup idea", remember that only health and family matter, and to have fun while you're alive. RIP.

Edit: some people misinterpreted my comment. I'm just one anonymous voice on the Internet, but am deeply saddened by the passing of Susan Wojcicki, who meant a lot to me as one of the many people who crossed paths with her professionally. I wish her family strength in a very trying moment. She did not deserve this. I've not met another business leader demonstrate everyday kindness to the degree that she did.

Her untimely passing is also a reminder to those of us who sometimes look up to such successful businesspeople that we should all appreciate our luck to be alive and enjoy it to the fullest, as I hope that she did as well, and as I'm sure that she'd prefer we did. RIP

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This has nothing to do with business or entrepreneurship. It's cancer, it's a bitch. It can take a 10 year old boy, or an elite athlete.

You can’t really say it does or doesn’t. Research shows stress can be a contributor though.

https://med.stanford.edu/survivingcancer/cancer-and-stress/s....

Well, yeah. For the sort of people who have "Title: CEO" on their Wikipedia page I suspect we're overdrawing from the pool of people where mission implicitly matters a little more than taking it easy. One way or the other you're going to die, but if your response to that is to relax and try to eke out a few years by keeping your stress down then CEOing is probably not for you.

You can change it if you want to. An extra 25 years seems worth it to me.

Being on the wrong side of the wealth-gap can also induce stress ...

Main factors are sleep, sunlight, diet and exercise as well as stress. You can see her schedule here:

https://press.farm/susan-wojcickis-daily-routine-youtubes-ce...

Sleep about 6hr, which isnt ideal. Not much chance to get sunlight which significantly reduces cancer incidence. Not much relaxing time.

The question becomes, is the work worth it?

That's probably not her real schedule. It looks like clickbait and was probably invented by the author. (Who might be our prolific friend Chat-GPT.)

Besides 10:00pm to 5:30am is 7.5 hours, which is either optimal or (arguably) too much.

Lastly, there's no clear evidence tying sleep duration to cancer incidence. See, e.g.: https://bmccancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12885-...

She starts exercising at 530 and goes to bed at 10. Im assuming she wakes up 30 mins before, and it takes her an hour to get to sleep.

They weren’t arguing the specific times, but the article itself reads as if AI generated and not as a real report of someone’s schedule, by someone who would know that person’s schedule.

The follow-on conclusion from that is that the times are highly suspect.

Yes, i think youre correct. I cant find an original source.

Why would you assume an hour? That’s considered to be quite a long sleep latency. Your average individual is at like between 10-20 minutes.

Yes, me too. I was just referring to the time between entering the bedroom and actually sleeping.

arguably too much sleep? what world are you living in that seven and a half hours of sleep is too much?

6hr, as per my comment. Its enough for some people, but average is 7-8. I go to sleep 45-60 mins after going to bed, and i wake 30mins before exercising. Im assuming that is fairly typical.

Yeah, that article definitely looks like ChatGPT imagination.

Funny that watching YouTube was not one of the things she did, whereas most people spend hours on YouTube/social media.

Where’s your scientific report that says sunlight significantly reduces lung cancer?

We shouldn’t have people making such claims on HN without providing references.

She was also home having dinner with her family by 6:30pm.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.12251

This seems key:

“ Following sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women's health.”

Thanks for the link. Now we know with certainty that lack of sunlight wasn’t a cause.

I think you have misinterpreted that sentence. It is saying that too little sun exposure is harmful to health in women. See also this study which found the same for men in Norway:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

Yes, we agree. Very restrictive exposure in countries with low solar intensity “

Susan lived in Northern California. How’s the solar intensity where she lived?

“ sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women's health

Oslo is about half the UV of SF, so you would need to spend half as much time in the sun for the same benefit. If you are not outside much during the day, its still a risk factor no matter where you live. This would apply to most office workers.

“ Research on a link between vitamin D and cancer is mixed. Some studies have shown a link between low vitamin D levels in the body and a higher risk of getting cancer or dying from cancer. However, it’s not clear if taking vitamin D or having certain vitamin D levels might help prevent cancer. It’s also not clear if vitamin D can help control the growth and spread of cancer. More research is needed to know what role vitamin D does or does not play in helping to prevent or control cancer.”

https://amp.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/sun-and-uv/sun...

Yes indeed, it is sunlight that has the most evidence. Sun also releases nitric oxide in the skin, which reduces blood pressure, and high bp is associated with increased lung cancer hazard ratio, even for nonsmokers.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12936899/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13399-4

I’ve tried to google with no success but is it known if she smoked or ever did? Or is she part of the unlucky cohort (~12.5%) of non-smokers that get lung cancer?

But it is more likely when you are old. It is you your immune system unable to kill mutations.

I took that to be OPs point in a way. Death comes to us all, rich and poor. True wealth is your good health and the relationships it lets you foster.

Absolutely this.

Health is only temporary, and everyone in your family is going to die, until someone makes a trillion dollar startup to cure aging. So it is fundamentally wrong to put health, family, and work as things opposing each other, ultimately they are all needed on a way to get all of the galaxy filled with life. And as Susan have shown one can both do great work, and have a big family with 5 children.

High levels of stress (often related to work) have been shown to impact health. So I think it’s a fair thing to oppose them.

Isn't that person and stress source dependent. Also working until late in life actually improves mental acuity and fights off dementia.

So maybe work but not in excessively high stress loads is your point?

Though i think your implied underlying assumption that because she was a leader in tech and under a high workload somehow caused this is unfounded and unnecessary.

There must be a difference between the stress experienced by a financially independent CEO and a marginally-employed gig worker.

One is the stress of essentially playing a game or working on a challenge and the other is existential.

This sample size of one would seem to disagree. Stress is stress, and the outcome can certainly be the same in the end. RIP

Why it's a good idea to fill galaxy with life? Why should we care about it? Also, seeing that our current civilization-system is already at the brink of catastrophe, we should focus on less ambitious goals, such as preserving life on Earth.

Absolutely worth it. We wont fill the galaxy filled with life because the galaxy is huge and we are but one tiny tiny portion of it. For us to survive and do anything impressive takes all of human ingenuity.

Also those two items aren't mutually exclusive. Both can and should happen in tandem. Anyone arguing otherwise is just a mentally lazy person.

Whenever you have two goals competing for the same resources, you need to prioritize. I'm for preserving life on Earth first, and spreading it to other places as a distant second.

Again you aren't competing for the same resources. Our global resources are plenty. You are unnecessarily making a dichotomy.

Of course preservation of life on our planet should be paramount. We can also pursue space travel. Space travel research isn't whats killing our planet.

1. I don't want my children to die. And i don't want all the life on earth to be eliminated by a random asteroid.

2. Imagine two planets, people on one of them believe that expanding is the moral imperative, and the other want stay where they are. Eventually the people from the first planet will be technologically as far away from the people on first planet, as we are from people on Sentinel island. And therefore will be completely reliant on goodwill first people.

3. The only way to preserve life on earth is to develop space technology, once we have sufficient industry in space, controlling whether on earth will be a simple task, trivially solving climate change issue.

Cure aging? We could relieve a lot of pain in the world by just curing cancer(s), or at least make them treatable like HIV.

Jake died yesterday. I don’t even think he was 40 years old.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201555

Susan was only 56.

Let’s at least give everyone a chance at a full life.

Yeah, but magnitude wise it doesn't seem like a huge difference of 56 vs 90. 56 to me now looks way early, but I assume when I get 70 then I start to think that 90 looks way too early. When I was 10 years old, 56 seemed miles away though. So there's always going to be this problem. Especially since supposedly the older you get the faster time seems to go. So the fact that I and we are all going to die at some point not too far away is still something that is constantly in the back of the mind and frequently on the front.

E.g. compared to being able to live more than 1,000 years or forever and with body in its prime condition recovery etc wise. E.g. having a 25 year old body for 1,000+ years.

Sure, I’m all for living to 1000. Curing cancer(s) likely needs to happen first. The war on cancer started in 1971.

We’d likely need trillions of dollars of investment, and a lot more people working on it, to increase our lifespan/healthspan.

But hey, we can hope together, for what that’s worth.

Living in poverty and Being broke is stressful too. Living in a shit family as well.

Yes the upside of being rich and stressed is that it’s all your choice. You could retire at any moment if you wished to

It's not about them opposing each other, it's about priorities.

As far as net worth figure goes your health is the first significant digit, everything else come after.

> first significant digit

Big endian

Your message is very powerful, for the good, and I think people nowadays are used to extremes instead of the balance when they read something like your comment.

That’s BS.

Yes, both rich and poor die of cancer.

But being rich or even just comfortable gives you a completely different experience during the end of life.

You can afford to quit your job and be with your friends and family.

You can afford to see that best doctors that will ensure you have as comfortable as possible end of life.

Your kids can afford to take a sabbatical to come spend time with you.

You can be sure that no matter what your kids will be financially secure.

You know that you got the absolute best care that you could.

The list goes on.

Cancer is horrible and everyone who loses someone hurts the same. But you absolutely cannot keep saying that being poor and rich doesn’t make a difference during the progress of this awful disease.

Only someone who has never been poor would ever say that.

If you're poor you won't even officially have cancer, because no one will diagnose you, since then you'd be entitled to services. Someone who's actually been poor would understand this.

Lots (if not all?) of hospitals offer free care options for patients in poverty. I grew up poor and had a family member who was able to be diagnosed, for free, a university clinic that offered free care, and then was able to receive free care through a program offered at one of top 5 ranked cancer systems in the US. Although the premium quality wasn't even that big of a deal. The overwhelming majority of care can be provided pretty much anywhere. It's not like a premium hospital offers super chemo or super radiation. The treatment is what it is, and all the money in the world isn't going to significantly change your odds of survival relative to basic treatment provided at any clinic anywhere.

The US healthcare system is broken beyond belief, and I do think there is some degree of managerial sociopathy around profit (particularly in the pharmaceutical and insurance wings), but by and large there still remain options for people even if they may be arduous, and I do think that hospitals and doctors are still significantly motivated just to provide good care.

The problem is that, for patients in poverty, the chance that cancer will be detected early enough for treatment is much, much lower. Cancer is often detected during check-ups for vague symptoms that most people can't afford to go visit a doctor for. By the time the symptoms become alarming or even debilitating it is often already too late.

Eh, I made 75k on my IRS forms last year and don't have health insurance. The poor people I know all have way better access to treatment through medicare/medicaid and various subsidies, and all use the medical system multiple times a year while I look up videos on YouTube (thanks susan!) to learn how to perform minor surgeries on myself

When my mother died of cancer (also in her 50s, still working as a public teacher in NYC so should have had great insurance for this) the hospital went after the estate with a million dollar bill. I couldn't even afford a lawyer to contest it at the time and ended up not inheriting anything except what I could take out of the house.

The only people with good outcomes are the rich who can afford it, and the poor who couldn't afford anything yet are still being treated because other tax payers are paying into this system.

it's not just access to healthcare, it's time, convenience, effort, whatever.

an impoverished single-parent 4 member family will not have time to exploit whatever medical care options are made available to them. this time deficit is one of the more common characteristics that impoverished families have in common.

in a way it's similar to the healthcare problems that startup people see early in the business; 'no time for the doctor, I have meetings -- i'll live with the ulcer' , just from a different angle.

lack of opportunity for time management.

Two things can be true.

Money does buy comfort and care. Also, it does not make one immortal.

We can choose what we take away from events. I could choose to feel unlucky that I haven't made as much money as someone else, and I would be justified in it, because being rich absolutely makes a difference. I just choose to feel lucky to be alive instead, and I'm just as justified. You are free to choose your own perspective.

“remember that only health and family matter”

Those were your exact words. But nice backpedal.

Edit: I don’t want to get into an argument but just beware that your original post rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I respect that’s the pain and sorrow of a loss are the same but please don’t dismiss the power and need of money. It makes a world of a difference in the process of dying. You don’t want to sound like someone living on an ivory tower.

Let me put it this way. I don't think you and I are fundamentally disagreeing: money matters, to the extent that it allows to buy statistically better health outcomes and quality time with family. I don't personally think it matters more than that.

In general if you want people to take you seriously, don't make statements like "Two things can be true." It reeks of reddit condescension where they can't make a simple statement without implying the other party is stupid enough to think that only one thing can ever be true at once.

For what it's worth, I thought his comment was fine whereas yours is insufferable.

It's not worth much!

I mean, considering that people harped on about one specific thing being more true than the other, it certainly seems like people think that only one thing (being rich) can ever be true at once.

Stupidity is entirely your implication, but people generally like to see things in binary. It’s far easier than acknowledging that most things live on a spectrum.

Susan didn’t start YouTube.

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