Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

I am so sorry to hear this and also so glad you posted it here, Ben. Thank you. We all get so busy in our daily details, it's nice to be reminded what's really important.

Just some quick, well intentioned feedback from someone who has lost almost every important loved one...

Please don't be angry. That may seem like a natural response, but it is wasted output, serving as input into no productive process. Life is not a problem to be solved; it is a gift to be savored, one day at a time.

Have fun doing what you love to do, but don't forget to knock off when it still makes sense today. Then go hug your love one(s). Today will be gone tomorrow and there is no algorithm to bring it back.

View on HN

Mostly through a long grieving process, I would give slightly different advice, or perhaps the same advice said differently: don't feed anger. Don't hold it.

In my youth, I thought emotions were things to be controlled, suppressed. That was terrible for me. Three years ago a lot of bad things happened more or less at once, and my hyperrationalist suppression of emotion failed me. It was sand castles against a tidal wave.

Now I try to treat emotions like weather. I don't get to pick them; I just get to pick how to respond when they happen. So if somebody is feeling angry, I think that's ok. I'd hate for them to justify it, to sustain it, to make it a habit. There's no sense in nursing a grudge against the world, and I certainly wouldn't want them to let the anger spill over onto those around them. That is definitely a waste. When they feel it, they should feel it. But when it passes, they should let it go.

Thanks so much for this.

For what it's worth, I'm not an angry person. I recognize how useless and distracting anger is. I owe that mostly to my ability to see solutions where other people see problems. However when there are no solutions to be found, and the problem is this large, I can't help but experience this sort of frustration.

That said, the experience of writing this up and witnessing how this story resonates within people has been helpful. When I posted it I had no idea if people would upvote, especially with the obvious/shameless call to action for a donation. Seeing donations come in as a result of this has brought me to tears.

Being faced with such a situation it's impossible not to feel cynical toward the the world. Thanks to everyone here for responding so positively.

And you're so correct that life isn't a problem to be solved. I lose sight of that far too often.

Death is a bad thing. Anger is appropriate. We can probably fix it. If not in time to save ourselves, we might be able to save our children. We need to start now and spend a fortune. People need to stop pretending that it's ok.

Death is neither good nor bad. All life is terminal. You can't fix it, even if you can prolong it.

The sooner you get this into your head and heart, the better you will live.

Every time I come across this sentiment—that death is natural, and we have to accept it, and so on—the Fable of Dragon-Tyrant[0] comes to mind.

[0] http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

I don't want my children to grow up in a world where you have to work at McDonald's for 100 years to afford buying a small house on the outskirts of a city. All because old wealthy people just keep accruing more wealth and never returning it to the cycle of the economy.

When I look at the power structures of the modern world and the control that corporations have over our governments, I don't extrapolate positive changes should the powerful also start living forever.

Death is part of life. People need to stop pretending it's bad. If you feel it is such a bad thing, will you also cure death for every spider, every frog, every crow, every ant, every tree? What do you think will happen then? Or is life only important when it's a human?

The economy doesn't work that way. You and your children are not poorer because Warren Buffett is rich.

Death is part of life.

So are Alzheimer's, cancer, polio, and people with bad vision being eaten by bears. Which of those should we not address?

While the economy isn't zero-sum, resources like land are. Warren Buffett isn't taking money away from people, but I still believe income & other inequality would rise if people lived forever.

I think all of those problems are worth addressing, but I don't think we should be in a mad rush to cure death itself. It is a vital part of returning resources to the cycle of life to be used anew. I think our world would be worse off if humans lived forever, it would be stale and stagnant. Finally, I think we should fix some other problems that our overpopulation and thirst for growth are causing before we try to cement that growth with eternal life.

But you do want them to die?

Yep. I don't have any yet, but should I have offspring, I would expect them to die eventually. Obviously I would hope for a full, rich life before their passing (as I do for myself) but I actually look forward to dying. Not that I want it to happen soon, but I am curious about the experience and I'm not scared of it.

Things come and go all the time. I try not to cling to them. "This too shall pass" can be a very comforting mantra. Value things while they're around and know they won't always be around.

Its entirely ok to feel anger, just as it is entirely to feel happiness or sadness. There are no right or wrong emotions. The grieving process is a multi-stage process- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance and you can go through any emotion at any period in time in whatever order it comes. The only real way to truly get over pain is to go through it- talk about it, feel it, and don't suppress it.

> Please don't be angry. That may seem like a natural response, but it is wasted output, serving as input into no productive process.

No - be angry if that's what you are right now. Be sad, or envious, or bitter. Just try and move past them - don't linger and wallow in them.

I don't care about your tacky, techie-ish analogies. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to feel those 'bad' feelings in order to move past them. And it has nothing to do with productivity.

I here declare, that I disagree.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

tldr?

I only skimmed the piece, but it has a self-contained TL;DR at the bottom ("morals").

If I were to make my own abridged TL;DR, it would be "aging is a human tragedy that we can and should fix"

I worry that a victory over aging would be opening a pandora's box on humanity's progress on social change.

It is my personal opinion that a person's opinions of social norms, cultures, and traditions are largely fixed throughout one's lifetimes, and it is death (and birth!) that allows a society to shift its morals.

Even if that were true, and progress on social matters slowed somewhat, might it not be worth it to save many tens of millions of lives every year?

I disagree. There is an obsession with preserving life in our culture, at any cost. But everywhere else in the world (ie. for other animals) there is abundant evidence that death is crucial to life. Without a tree dying, what would mushrooms feed on, where would insects make their homes, etc.? Didn't you watch the Lion King?

Would you rather have tens of billions living forever in socially stagnant, oppressive conditions, or a few billion living in gradually-improving conditions? Doesn't the quality of the life matter as much as the quantity?

To take the argument to an extreme, I would certainly rather live a hundred years of average contentment than a thousand years of being tortured by a sadist every day.

Would you rather have tens of billions living forever in socially stagnant, oppressive conditions, or a few billion living in gradually-improving conditions?

This is a huge false dilemma.

Doesn't the quality of the life matter as much as the quantity?

Certainly. And the effects of aging are heavily detrimental to quality of life.

Why is it a false dilemma? I like your thought experiment of a world that doesn't suffer from aging but does have the social problems described above. But that's not the world we're in. I'd rather fix the social problems first because I think they'll get harder to solve if we get rid of aging first.

Ask the next menial labourer you encounter (the person making your food, ringing up your groceries, or cleaning your hotel room) which of the following they'd prefer: A) A basic income* until they die around age 100 B) Eternal life in the same economic & social conditions they're in now

Do you really think the majority would choose B?

* I'm using basic income as a placeholder for an improved economic & social situation.

Imagine a world where people don't suffer from aging, but that does have the problems you envision of slow social change. Would an appropriate solution would be to release a pathogen that slowly cripples everyone's bodies and minds over several decades before killing them?

I fail to see the relevance of that link to this post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com