The Three Kinds of Laziness
sub.garrytan.com
sub.garrytan.com
I was in the hills (I had been training to prepare for a multi-month bike tour), so I was helicoptered to the hospital. If just a few things had gone worse, I could have been paralyzed or even dead. The driver had his eyes off the road to adjust his sun visor, so literally anything could have happened. I was aware of this myself but the paramedics and doctors all made sure to make me aware of my said luck. I've somehow gotten out with just a few broken ribs and abrasions throughout the left side of my body (probably will be permanent).
It's definitely brought a renewed sense of appreciation for the time I have left here on this little blue ball.
I wasn't going to write about this until all the insurance claims had been settled, but I felt compelled to spill the beans here on this occasion here. I guess it's a sign that I've grown pretty close to this community.
It's important to appreciate and enjoy the time we have. If we don't... what's the point?
a friend of mine told me about a famous emacs contributor who has a keyboard that is only the "left half" but has a toggle key which switches it to the right half keys with one button, and that he is lightning fast with it. do you think that's something he'd be interested in using? he could also probably hand make something like that, like the custom keyboards that keyboard.io is making.
That'd fit his tastes far better anyway. :)
It is hard to hear about that... it's worse to see it. I sold my motorcycle after he got in his second accident. I'm not excessively risk-averse, but some things just put too much on the line.
Perhaps it's a midwestern thing; we're in Minnesota and he's from Michigan. :)
I'm not seeing direct contact info for you from your profile or blog, but if you could drop me a line, my email address is in my profile. If not, no worries. :)
I remember getting back on the bike after the first one, and having worked myself up about it for a little while, the only thing I really remember was how amazing it felt to be 'free' again.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the anticipation of the thing was much much worse than the thing itself. Keep to a relatively safe environment, and let yourself remember why you loved biking in the first place.
NB. Purely anecdotal, I have no doubt that my experience of "getting back on the bike" is different to many others. Just don't convince yourself it's an impossibility.
PS. (I don't have a motorbike anymore, though I plan to buy one again at some point. I have had a little ride since the second - just no money to purchase a bike of my own)
The outcome was a broken left wrist. That's it. Literally nothing else happened to me.
There are things that happen to you that make it clear how close we all are to death at all times. I am glad to hear your injuries weren't too bad and hope you recover from them well.
Edit: I have to add, it's also times like these that you will oftentimes show you the best of people. The girl who was driving the car was very nice about everything and even offered me a ride into the city (more than 45 minutes) even though she lived in the opposite direction. The tow truck driver charged me only half the normal rate because "we gotta stick together" and he rode bikes too. Lots of people who were around near the accident helped immobilize my arm after the injury. The friendly folks down at Motoshop unloaded the bike and removed some of the ugly bits sticking out. Friend came to pick me up and take me to hospital. It was pretty inspiring. People are amazing.
I remember looking up towards the direction the car that hit me went and thinking, "please, please stop so you can call 911 for me," and the driver did stop and come back to me. He must have been in a state of panic, since he asked me, "Oh my god are you alright, can I do anything for you?" and I replied, gasping, "C-a-l-l 9-1-1".
In the ensuing minutes, a person with EMT training and a biker who was an off duty fireman stopped to check me out, make sure my hands and toes moved, made sure I didn't have pain in my neck, etc.
When a friend of mine crashed his bike descending Page Mill last summer (and fractured 3 spinal fins), a random car stopped for him and took him to Stanford hospital. Complete strangers!
You're absolutely right; give them an opportunity and people will show their wonderful side.
The car stopped roughly where the men are standing.
I am always very thankful for people with EMT training. When I climbed Mt. St. Helens last year a man had a medical complication and passed away on the mountain. There were about 20 of us who spent about 45 minutes helping him out until the helicopter arrived.
That experience really solidified for me the importance that we all get some basic medical training. Even something as simple as CPR certification can really save someone's life.
I get a little bit nervous for you cyclists. On the motorbike at least you have thick leather protecting you from road rash. I can imagine that that part can't have been fun.
Do or do not. There is no try.
If you want to do something (anything), you can break down actionable mechanisms all you want, but at some point it has to move from theoretical into action.
It's tougher with this stuff (lazyness) because it's all in your head - it's less physical - so it seems like you could hypothetically break something down into a million actionable steps - so people do and keep wondering why it never leads to action. That's the very trap you have to escape in order to DO something.
I can tell you all the mechanics in the world on how you're supposed to walk, but until you put one foot in front of the other, you'll never be able to learn. That's not condescending at all - it's just the process of learning. All the knowledge in the world won't help someone who's not willing to take that step.
The crux of the issue for me, is that intelligence research (to my rather limited knowledge) seems to be converging on the idea that people have different inherent [genetic?] constraints on learning ability. Not learning capacity mind you, just that it might be more challenging for certain subsets of people to understand quantum physics (for example) than others, and that that could be traced back to how much 'actionable' material they are exposed to -- if they're not exposed to enough, then they could easily be left behind and be blamed for not 'choosing' to get it. This is what bothers me. Especially since I know I often find myself struggling for ages with things that other people seem to grasp with significantly less information than I needed to 'get it'.
Thank you for this.
I'll keep this in mind next time I'm losing steam through a particularly tough CrossFit WOD.
"Today, I want to win." Amazing. Thank you. +1
In my case depression usually manifests as extreme fatigue coupled with disinterest in everything. Choosing to do anything is very difficult if nothing has meaning.
More recently I've been taking a nutrition based approach. I went off Zoloft in January, had an episode in late March/early April, then went to see a nutritional therapist. It seems to be working so far.
In my case, though, I was also diagnosed with adrenal fatigue a couple years ago and have been taking supplements to help with that.
Adrenal fatigue is a controversial diagnosis (some people think it's a made-up "disease") but a saliva test indicated I had low cortisol in the morning, which made it very difficult for me to get going before noon. The supplements helped with that even after I weened myself off caffeine.
IIRC, from the Diamond Sutra: a cloud, a flash of lightening, a dew drop, a star...view all created things like this.
If that doesn't divert one's attention from sex, beer, or a pint of Ben & Jerry's, nothing will ;-)
IMHO, the Buddhist recommendation to exercise this type of necessary skepticism is to try it out, to experience it. If your experience confirms what the received wisdom is said to be, you are probably on the right track. Of course, there are lots of other basics, including the most basic of all - get a good teacher. Needless to say, the meaning of "good" in this respect always requires a modicum of circumspection. :)
Yup, there's lots of stuff like those you mentioned to divert your attention. The idea is to give you a reason to get started. In this case I'd say something like Nike's Just Do It as mentioned in some of the other threads is a tad overconfident. The Buddhist way would more likely be Life is Short. Just Get Started.
Buddha: "No teacher have I"
Jesus: "Know thyself"
I'm not convinced there is a "Buddhist way", but rather ways. I mean, Vipasana is almost entirely technique oriented, apparently following the historical Buddha's extant teaching to the letter. Tibetans do a boatload of visualization, while Zen tends to emphasize open eyed sitting and posture without any focal point.
Same deal in Christianity, Islam, etc., many ways.
And yet, mystics like Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Eckhart Tolle, etc. all say, dispense with practice and teachers, these are extraneous to the fundamental matter. For Tolle it was rock bottom chronic depression; for Maharshi it was some kind of death experience, and for Krishnamurti it was talking a lot (heh, heh, kidding, he was apparently born without the sense of "I").
My view of Buddhism is heavily Mahayana and Vajrayana based, and I know little of Hinayana and the other 'vehicles'. In this context, emphasis is placed on one's teacher mainly because it is believed that it is very, very easy to understand things completely wrongly and to go off on a tangent that is harmful to oneself and others. The teacher is thus your guide, while the work of attaining enlightenment is still very much your own.
This of course is not to say that Buddhahood isn't possible without a teacher; it's just that it is rather more unlikely and difficult.
Add to that the fact that practice in the Buddhist world is almost always an ass kicker of the highest order (hello screwdriver in the knees), then one wonders why take it up in the first place? The whole process seems a bit like the Christian, "yours is not to reason why"; i.e. it will become clear(er) later.
Saying that, I did meet someone who awakened without a teacher. I suggested that he attend a couple of sitting groups that I used to go to. After the Dharma talk/discussion at each group, without having said a word, both teachers came up to him and basically said, how on earth did you do that?
Talking with him later he said he came into this life to awaken; i.e. it wasn't difficult and he was only just scratching the surface.
Pretty rare obviously, but then again, practicing for 5, 10, 20+ years and awakening is also not guaranteed.
That's an awesome story. I'm only scratching at the surface, and something tells me that it's going to take a lot longer than that, if ever, for me.
but then again, practicing for 5, 10, 20+ years and awakening is also not guaranteed.
For most of us, for sure. However, on the positive side, even many lifetimes of trying is but a mere tick on the clock of samsara. :)
Hang on a second, there is no you, how could you not be awakened?
Then why practice? Good question, it must be that delusions are endless; otherwise, we'd be lazy in the most wonderful sense of the word (see Ramana Maharshi for example).
These are all known mental health issues, with physiological markers, but ultimately they are aspects of human mentality that are present in everyone.
So, to ignore these, and ignore the myriad other mental and environmental issues, and suggest that 'just do it' is actionable advice goes against the grain of much that is valuable in Bhuddism: namely mindfulness and the purposes of meditation. Essentially, it is telling people to achieve presence through force of will, instead of using insight to accommodate their mental situation: only the unencumbered can succeed.
Is anyone saying "stop being such a crybaby" is the solution for all problems? No way. And certainly not the Buddhist way.
Returning to your points on PTSD, schizophrenia, BPD and ADDHD, I can state quite positively that I've read no Buddhist texts so far that discuss these disorders, let alone prescribe Buddhism as the cure. So again, we are more in agreement than not, unless of course you believe that all fear, discouragement and depression amount to PTSD, schizophrenia, BPD and ADDHD (in which case I would have to level the round trip fallacy charge at you!).
However, personally I believe modern medicine is far from understanding properly any of these disorders, and the treatment for them - mainly drugs - is an unhappy one even if that's all we have.
At the same time I also believe that there is a tendency to find the quick fix (what better than a drug) or a solution outside of ourselves (psychotherapy). Not every condition requires this sort of intervention, but there is a very strong trend and tendency to provide it and that's a pity.
What are loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity if not emotion?
As you have correctly stated, Buddhism is not about escaping from life but meeting it head on. I don't think I've said anything that would suggest I'm for escaping.
Yes going beyond the everyday meaning of the words we use, I agree with you fully. I'm just a beginner on the path, full of the fabrications and paradoxes we all live with, and I'm really looking forward to having them all blown away, or more likely - dissolved - as I dive deeper into it. Ah, aspiration!
I wrote a blogpost on this a while ago, I hope it helps you: http://zirconcode.blogspot.ch/2013/04/deciding-to-loose-free...
I do this often myself. I try to make educated decisions which means researching all my options. Eventually you end up with "analysis paralysis". Being overwhelmed with all the choices and variables and the "right choice" isn't always clear.
I blame this somewhat on tv and movies that always have the epiphanic moment where the right choice becomes clear and the protagonist knows what to do. We usually don't get those in real life.
Trivia: Rush were actually quoting Ayn Rand. It's entirely possible that the quote or at least the sentiment predates her too.
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
-- Franz Kafka, A Little Fable
Simply put, this is wrong. There are not three kinds of laziness. Better, it's wrong to assume that your laziness and inability to act is one of those three types mentioned.
As someone who was recently diagnosed with ADHD and OCD, I can assure you, reflecting doesn't solve anything. Nor are the three types mentioned accurate. Maybe the intent wasn't to classify ADHD and OCD as laziness, but until I was diagnosed, that's what I called it.
So no. This is dangerously wrong. If you have any thought that you might have ADHD or OCD, get it checked out. It can make a world of difference, not only in medication (which doesn't have to be addicting) but in therapy. The difference just over the last month has been staggering. It's a big difference, and hard to quantify.
If you have a problem, seek professional help in understanding it. Ignore meaningless platitudes "to reflect on death" and how there are "three kinds of laziness."
I agree with you -- if there is a medical condition that can be treated, then it makes sense to pursue that. I read a passage in a book earlier today that I liked, and I posted it on my personal blog. I would never encourage someone who had such problems to "just reflect on it."
I didn't mean to imply that you would suggest to someone with a condition to "just reflect on it." No reasonable person would, and apologies if it came off like that.
Rather, my hope is that more people realize that this condition does exist, it does carry a stigma, and you might not find out until you are well into adult-hood. Too many self-help and GTD-like books and articles focus on simple tricks. These all might help out, but if you find yourself constantly struggling, get checked.
And if you know people like this, people that are otherwise smart and do good work, but are somehow always behind, always playing catch-up, suggest they get tested.
A part of me was ashamed about having this condition. I felt as if it said to everyone around me that I'd really never been giving 100%. That I had lied to people around me. I thought that I can't complain. I had a great life already, and who was I to worry about not doing enough. OCD and ADHD, the premier first world problems.
None of that is true, of course.
The truth is, the best thing I can do is speak up about it. Make people aware. And share with them the fact that proper treatment and care can result in a dramatic difference in their lives. That the more we are aware of ourselves, the better off we can be.
This, especially, summarises my feelings about a vast number of HN submissions and articles on the internet in general of the form "The X kinds of Y" or "The 10 reasons Z" or "The Blahblahblah Principle". We all know this type of article. Many books too, especially in self-help and dieting, etc.
At best the writer has described a model which is useful for understanding some aspect of a larger picture, and at worst they are just doing reasonable-sounding pattern-recognition from a largely anecdotal pool, and then building what they believe is a bulletproof system from it all.
I remember when I was in university I wrote notebooks full of this kind of thing. I go through them from time to time and find interesting ideas wrapped up in way too much rigidity in search of a neat formalised system. There must be half a dozen "guru" bestsellers to be refined from those notebooks, if anyone had the time and lack of internal honesty to write them.
For a while now, variants of "Simply put, this is wrong" have been what my brain returns whenever I see such articles, yet I do still read them and I do still find nuggets.
> it's concrete advice
No, it's not. Your inability to defined whether it's good or bad advice, whether it's helpful or not, does not make it concrete.
It makes it a platitude. Oh shit, I reflected on death. Woohoo.
Now what?
Based on my understanding, this is crap.
First off: Buddhists aren't trying to perfect themselves. They seek stillness and reflection, and harmony. Perfection isn't part of that lifestyle because it's not even a concept they believe in.
Second: Essential? Essential IS sleeping and eating. What about programming or resolving any of the impermanent problems of the human race is any more important, in a necessary sense, than the very vital acts that result in one's continued existence?
Life is short, and if we want to develop our inner qualities it's never too soon to start getting down to it.
This post, in its entirely a quote (or pair of quotes, I can't quite tell), succeeds only in telling us that the things we think we ought to do don't matter at all and we should instead concentrate on... something, and that something isn't even hinted at, let alone defined in a meaningful way.
So yeah, I don't think there's really anything that doesn't qualify as "something", the point is just that the "somethings" that you want to do and the "somethings" you end up doing are often not quite aligned, and you kind of know it in the back of your mind but don't end up doing anything about it. "Yeah, I've always wanted to see the world, but it's not really a good time for it right now, so I'll just finish this project, and finish paying off my <X> loan, and then maybe I'll do it."
You kind of end up living in The Waiting Place from Oh The Places You'll Go. And no-one wants that.
> This post, in its entirely a quote (or pair of quotes, I can't quite tell), succeeds only in telling us that the things we think we ought to do don't matter at all and we should instead concentrate on... something, and that something isn't even hinted at, let alone defined in a meaningful way.
You don't think the context of the heavy overtone of buddhism helps answer that "something"? Perhaps the article is hinting for you to make a conscious effort to find that "something" rather than just defaulting to what life throws at you. Or perhaps it was a more explicit effort to get you to explore buddhism?
I'd reread the article with the idea that it is just giving you information to reflect on, rather than just information to respond to.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism#Schools_and_traditions
I like eating and sleeping. I pay a lot of attention to these things. If you're eating well and sleeping well, your life is probably going pretty good. Sure, I'm going to die, that's why food and sleep matter even more. This planet would be a pretty happy place if everyone was eating and sleeping as much as they needed.
Second, what the heck. Too lazy to work on perfecting myself? I thought spiritual enlightenment was about having a smaller ego, not a bigger one. I'm going to feel more motivated if I focus on how awesome I'll be if I do the inner work? You can't do this stuff for very long because you want to get something out of it, you only do it in the long term because circumstances push you into it and you have no choice.
Third, details vs. essentials. Details are bad now? You won't get far with only one or the other. Yes, essentials are important, but so are details. In startup terms, a great idea is essential, but you're dead without a great execution.
Anyway, "laziness" is such a crap word in a spiritual context. As if enlightenment was an achievement, when the point of just about every religion is being, not doing.
Eat. Sleep. Give yourself a break when you hit a wall; perhaps you ought to re-evaluate your priorities. Do a thorough and meticulous job on all of your little projects. Pay attention to what you're doing, and you'll come out of it all the wiser. Lack of progress in any one area is not laziness, it's a signal that you need to try a different course of action.
Firstly, everyone understands the difference between healthy sleeping/eating versus sloth and gluttony. Everything in moderation right?
Secondly, you confuse ego with self-importance. A poor ego doubts itself and may never attempt a daunting task because of the belief one is not 'good enough' to complete it. This becomes a convienient excuse to avoid doing difficult (but worthwhile) tasks. A healthy ego will undertake challenging tasks, because failure (in the traditional sense) is ok - failure will not define you as a person. The success comes from learning along the way.
Thirdly, we all have to do trivial things. This is a fact of life. However, how many times have you focussed on non-essential details in a project to avoid the meat of the thing? Its a common form of procrastination I catch myself doing. You also see it in overstuffed corporate environments - the term 'busy work' comes to mind.
It's not really about what you do, it's about what you see and how you do it; the essence is always there, even if you're fixing idiotic bugs in some obscure corner of your codebase.
One of the 'jokes' of Zen is that people will spend so much time attempting to reach enlightenment, only to realize there wasn't anything in particular to realize.
Case in point, Mu. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
Are those bad? It sounds like you might have learned a hard lesson, and I'd be curious to hear more.
Personal anecdote: I used to be the sort of programmer who would waste all my time surfing the net, and maybe banging out a script once in a blue moon, while congratulating myself on working 'smart'. The end result: a massive backlog of unfinished tasks, and a whole lot of wasted years.
Thing is, working hard and working smart - they aren't mutually exclusive. I found out all too late that when we say 'laziness is a virtue', we actually mean 'efficiency is a virtue'. It's the desire to be efficient at our job that leads to DRY and building productivity-multipliers. Laziness - that just leads to thumb-twiddling.
Work, work, work, work, work, more work, work more, must achieve success, must attain the "goal"
...ark, ack, nyug, gasp, Die.
We all meet the same end whether we attain something (achievement oriented successful person) or not (good for nothing enlightened lazy person).
If I have tasks to do involving programming, I would naturally gravitate towards doing them rather than screwing around.
Hmm. Perhaps you don't have enough passion for programming. I'm not trying to attack your skills or anything, but if I were you, I'd try to find something that involves coding, so you don't have to learn completely new skills, but that you actually have passion for. Then apply your skills towards that.
The thing about passion is that it makes most every other concern moot. You don't have to worry about procrastination, you don't need to concern yourself with whether you're wasting your life, because you already have something driving your actions every day.
Laziness is then defined as "The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure." You don't want to spend an hour writing 40 slightly different functions, so you spend 3 drilling into the problem domain and devise an abstraction that allows you to express the whole thing in 17 lines of code.
His project manager might call him lazy, after all, he technically pushed back project completion by two hours more than needed, by wasting time on an abstraction that was probably unnecessary, all just to scratch an itch. Is it, though? You could argue both ways.
Productive laziness leads to the improvement of tools from new programming languages to editor extensions to automating testing.
No, the antidote is boredom. Only eating and sleeping is boring.
I found it challenged many assumptions held by my younger self who was a self-admitted atheist and believed in the ability of Science (in my limited understanding thereof) to explain everything.
I'm not saying that all the arguments presented therein are correct, but I found them quite suitable to rock my world-view.
Then again, "when the student is ready, the Guru will present himself" (a quote from my master).
Also, just FYI, that's a fairly famous quote that gets tossed around a lot. Although usually with "teacher" or "master" in place of Guru. (Does anyone else have a negative connotation with that word?) I assume your master was referencing it.
- I tried thinking about death, but it turned out nothing was really essential without desire and thus it didn't serve to get me desire.
- I tried thinking about the benefits of something I didn't believe I could do, but since I didn't believe I could do it I just felt depressed.
- Just drop everything and get down to what gives life meaning - meh, unless you're prepared to sacrifice an awful lot it can be difficult to just drop everything.
Buddhist philosophy is about... well, it's more about exploring consciousness and letting the experience of that change the way you relate to the world. If you're looking for something to change what sort of person you are, this may be an awfully long road for something that, at best, seems to touch on what you're interested in as a side effect. May perhaps be better off looking at research into akrasia/depression.
As for spiritual enlightenment, my best bet right now is mind uploading, which should make introspection and subsequent ascension much easier. (I know it's still a long shot, since we may not have that possibility before my body fails me —if ever. But it is my best bet.)
But the interesting question is: why is it never going to happen? I can see several reasons:
(1) Dualism is true: we have a soul without which our bodies could not function, and souls cannot be uploaded with mere earthly artefacts. Such machine not only wouldn't be us, they would be nearly empty shells. Like zombies, only mechanical.
(2) Subjective identity does not transfer to the machine along with the information contained in our bodies. While the machine would be a perfect copy, behaving like us and all, it wouldn't be us. Only problem, the others can't make the difference, so your elaborate form of suicide goes undetected.
(3) Mind uploading requires an understanding of the human mind that is forbidden to us because of its deep self-referential nature. Gödel theorems and such. A superior being could do it, but we cannot.
(4) Our minds run on quantum stuff that we can't copy without screwing them (measurements of quantum system tend to have significant consequences on the system).
(5) We could never attain the necessary technological level. Moore's law may cease to apply, we could screw ourselves in a major catastrophic event (World War III, virus from the lab, environmental collapse, Gray Goo accident, Skynet turning the solar system into paper clips… or the banal asteroid).
I think AI people only have authority on (3). Anyway, to the best of my knowledge:
(1) is bunk. The world most likely runs on math, and probably relatively simple math. Sure, we haven't found the complete laws of physics yet, but I have hope.
I wouldn't bet my life on (2) just yet, but it does sound improbable. My confidence is grounded on the fact that current physics say that copy&paste transportation works. If you were disassembled and scanned into a hard drive, then reassembled elsewhere with local material, it would still be you, not just a copy. Mind uploading only have the additional problem of the change of substrate (from neurons to silicon). I'm not sure it's a real problem though, because we could still imagine downloading you back into your body, only with a few additional memories.
(3) Shouldn't be much of a problem, provided we only need a low-level understanding of our inner workings. Self-referential or not, computer viruses are capable of copying themselves, because they don't need to comprehend themselves to do the copying.
(4) Is highly improbable. I know of no evidence pointing that way, and our neurons tend to respond in much more obvious ways to stimuli (easily detectable electrical impulses, modification of the blood stream, sizeable chemical reactions…). Anyway, we should probably ask neuroscientists.
(5) is the most probable in my opinion. That would really suck, but there is a good chance we bamboozle ourselves too deeply to ever recover.
Conclusion: like I said, it's a long shot. Not too long a shot however to give up hope just yet.
This reminds me of another insightful quip from the Dalai Lama talking about Man -- "...he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
And it's a very good thing to bring up. I for one, am always working on something, attending to something, and it's all as a lead-up to the 'something big'. What my co-founder tends to do is realize when we're in this mode and declare it's time to 'step it up a notch'. We do things if we realize we're scared or nervous to do them, purely to get past that and move forward.
I realized exactly that a few years ago (when I got into a car accident) but I didn't relate it to laziness. It's so important to have the courage to stop beating around the bush, especially when it comes to getting what you want out of life.
Great post! Now I'm intrigued by buddhism.
Speaking of Seneca letters, the last one is especially thoughtful, in reminding us that physical pleasures should not be scorned either.
The parent article may insist too much in spirituality - but besides that minor drawback, it's a great read, with actionnable practical advice.
1. Deferring an unpleasant talk 2. Doing an unpleasant task quickly to get it out of the way 3. Writing a tool to do an unpleasant task so you never have to do it again
The part which conveys this idea beautifully is this:
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart"
Basically, If we deeply[1] accept/realise that we are transient beings (which requires significant reflection given that we all secretly act as though we are immortal, though we may intellectual comprehend that we are not), one may more clearly distinguish between what is important in life and what is superficial.
A definition of the Spiritual Path which appeals to me: "Nitya anitya viveka vichara" -- "the ability to discriminate between the eternal and the ephemeral" [2]
[1] As an inherent and basic measure from which all action emanates
[2] I would be willing to delve into that a bit deeper should anyone be interested.
Do most buddhist monks depend on other people to feed them? More so than the rest of us?