I really like this, but to to add an alternate perspective: I’m skeptical of deathbed regrets, and regrets in general. I don’t think your present self actually knows what your past self went through. We remember events but are bad at remembering emotions except in very broad, general ways. You might say “I wish I had spent more time with my kids and less time at work”. But you won’t remember the feeling of dissatisfaction you had with your home life and the pride you felt when you delivered on a difficult project. You could say “I wish I was more satisfied with my home life” but how much control do you have over that, really?
I don’t remember where I heard this: “every person you see is fighting a battle that you know nothing about, so be kind, always”. I think we can extend that same kindness to ourselves.
More like you might say “I wish I had spent more time with my kids and less time at work” but you won't remember the anxiety of planning for the future. In hindsight you managed to saved enough for retirement but it didn't always looked that way when you were laid off for the second time in 4 years in the middle of an economic crisis. Your kids grew without life changing injuries but you didn't know that and you didn't have to battle a cancer.
So at the twilight of your life you might say that you wish you hadn't worked overtime for that startup or spent your weekends on side projects but at the time you were worried about paying your rent or a dead-end career path and you had to try to work harder because you had no way of knowing things would turn out fine. And maybe they turned out fine because of your efforts.
Hindsight is 20/20 and this is just as true for your future self judging your current self.
I'd say you have about as much control over your career trajectory as you do your home life (arguably more control over how your home life turns out). And I agree that memory is fickle and weird but I think there is a reason you so rarely hear someone say, they wished they had spent more time on their career rather than family. They recognize what brought/brings them happiness.
I suspect that a lot of deathbed regrets about not spending enough time with your kids is for the benefit of the kids. Who would say “I’m glad I didn’t spent all that much time with you and your siblings. Frankly. I had better things to do.”
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t spend more time with your family. I’m saying that we should give our past selves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their decision making, whatever your present self decides to do. It’s just an argument against regret.
Not affirming or disproving anything you wrote, it just reminded me that my mother once told that in one of the last conversations she had with my grandmother, she told her she never really loved her as much as she loved my uncle (or maybe that she didn't really love her much at all, I don't remember exactly). She was eventually senile enough to be unable to talk towards the end of her life.
I also found it interesting that my grandmother was extremely loving and caring to me. And my grandfather (who was ever less kind to my mother than my grandmother was) was very affectionate to his great-grandchildren (but not his grandchildren). Maybe they both regretted it near the end of their lives and tried to handle things differently with the younger generations?
But yes, I agree- I would guess most people had more tact and empathy than my grandmother apparently had towards her daughter, and wouldn't say something like that even if it was true. And if they did many their kids wouldn't be too quick to recount the experience publicly?
I definitely don’t want to say that choosing family over work isn’t the optimal path to happiness. My point is that decisions are largely made on emotion, and we’re bad at remembering past emotion.
My daughter is turning 5 in a few weeks. I realized I only have 3 more of these until she’s (likely) moving out. 4x5=20, and she’ll likely be living her own life by 20. Most of the time you spend with your kids is spent by the time they’re 16.
I moved away from my hometown. I see my immediate relatives twice a year now, once at Christmas and once in the summer. Most of my family is getting old. I probably have 125 or so more visits with my parents, 20-50 with my grandparents, and less than 10 with my great grandpa. I keep these numbers in mind every time I go home.
Life isn’t short. Meaningful moments are. Don’t take them for granted.
This is inevitably going to sound facetious but you can always move back. Give up some things, gain others. Isn't that what this essay's about?
I'm 40. My parents are 75 and I recently moved back next door to them. I expect to be here until they die. Is it my favourite place to live? No. Best for my career? Couldn't be worse. But I see my folks every day. I see my childhood friends every week. I see as much of my family as I can stand - I bump into a random cousin on the daily.
Do you value closeness to family above other things and would you like your daughter to value closeness to you when she grows up? Choices are here to be made.
A large number of people I grew up with "wanted to see the world." My younger self modeled a lot of my desired outcomes on people's externally stated desires.
As I got older, I started realizing something: a lot of what people said they wanted was attainable for them and their socioeconomic status if they made different trade offs. So I started poking and offering advice on how they could "visit Paris."
What I came to learn is that they wanted to be the kind of people that wanted to visit Paris. But they never would go to Paris. It was the idea they liked.
I have well off family members who talk about wishing their son lived closer. They have the means to visit him. They're retired and live near an airport with direct flights, 3.5 hours door to door. But they never go. That's their Paris.
I don't want to live in my hometown. I don't kid myself - I value raising my family here where I live more than the extra time with family. But, at the same time, when I go back I spend that time in a way maximally meaningful to me.
I try not to have "going to Paris" wishes. I sacrifice protecting my ego from my own decisions but it makes me reconcile my decisions with my desires before reaching the state of irreversible regret.
It's clear you've put a lot of thought into the tradeoff between these mutually exclusive wishes but I'd still encourage you to look for ways to spend more time with your folks. It's not all roses but it's been precious for me, personally.
This is actually something that's been weighing on my mind heavily this holiday season, as I'm home in the first time for a year. It's...difficult for me. I love seeing my good friends and family, but there's also nothing in this town for me (apart from a job); it's in rural Kentucky, and there's nothing there to promote my interests (mainly academic) and good luck finding any long-term partners (I'm about as far from a Trump supporter as you can get). But, I truly miss seeing my family and friends regularly, more than I realised. It's a tough decision, and one I'll probably actually discuss with my friends on our annual New Years trip.
I'm in my late 20s. Still no kids but a long term partner.
Since finding a fully remote job, I've been going back and forth. I stay one month in my city where I am independent, go out with friends, basically where I live my life.
Then I stay 2-4 full weeks with my folks. I bought new office equipment to work as comfortably as in the city, and nice things to make my space really mine.
It's an interesting cycle that I've learned to accept and enjoy. When I'm with them, I work a bit more because I have less social distractions, I go to the gym every day, and I see them all day. When I go back to my place, I go out with everyone, eat less meat, go to events, and do my regular activities that make me feel myself.
It's a 6 hour cheap trip, which is not bad considering I stay in one place for weeks. It's not perfect, and maybe not permanent, but I can see my folks. Half the year at least, even if they never visit me. They're getting older. If they leave this world today, I will be devastated, but happy that my present self is doing the best it can to be with them.
> If they leave this world today, I will be devastated, but happy that my present self is doing the best it can to be with them.
Yeah, this is what's bothering me, just turning 30. Even moreso in that if something were to happen where they were to leave the world tomorrow, I don't know if I'd be able to make it because of the way flights work overseas. It's a lot to think about, honestly, though I feel it'll at least be 2024 before I come back as there's a masters programme I want to do I think I'll always regret if I don't. Then maybe a PhD. Maybe getting a remote job would be the best, or just returning to teaching here. Thanks for your input!
Here are options you could consider if your career supports remote work, all with their perks:
-Move to the nearest city that will support your interests and allow for weekly visits. Make Saturday or Sunday a family day.
-Work from your parents' town during the week and escape to a place in the city on the weekend.
-Spend different seasons in different places. I'm moving to Tokyo for 3 months next year as a breather.
There are no answers that don't require sacrifice but life design is ripe for parallel thinking. Don't settle for preconceived options without having a go at some different ways of being.
> -Spend different seasons in different places. I'm moving to Tokyo for 3 months next year as a breather.
As I was a teacher, this is what I did before I moved countries. I'd spend a month or two of the summer holiday in a different country doing language courses (I love languages and linguistics as well). It was a great way to have structure in a place as well as stuff to do, plus I've found they often arranged guided tours cheaply, so it always worked out well.
Might consider doing that again, but I'd likely need some extra income streams, which could be doable.
Life is ridiculously short once you move past the mid point - early 40s.
Even the luckiest ones among us get to do a tiny fraction of personally meaningful activities.
As I am piggybacking my youngest one up the stairs, I am enjoying the trek as much as she does. I have this illusion of immortality, surely nothing bad could happen to us this very moment.
Surely that is my elephant/lizard part of the brain. My rider part keeps telling me I could be doing other more egoistical hedonistic activities instead.
> "After the larva stage, female mayflies usually live less than five minutes, while males can live a whopping two days. But they don't waste a single minute, spending that short period of time mating and reproducing"
I'm able to shorten life by doing mindless "have to" tasks and consuming distracting media (music, books, movies, games, etc.)
I'm able to lengthen it by deliberately, reflectively doing anything (thinking, programming, breathing, etc.).
I spent almost three decades in school -- grading and getting graded. I made that time race by as much as I could so I could get to the part where I have kids and a job that I can actually enjoy.
Now I'm savoring every minute. I feel the natural compression of time that comes with age, of course, but I'm more than able to counter it by consciously enjoying life.
Well said. It’s worth adding that various mood altering substances can speed up our perception of the passage of life while impairing our ability to remember what happened.
Does that also make those moments more memorable? I don't have any experience in it, but seems like an interesting possibility that when things seem to slow down you remember them better. Or maybe you remember them even less?
Good question. My early 20s are a blur, partly because of recreational substances I ingested. At the time, the days felt long and full. The experience isn’t less fun or valuable but I wish I could access all of those memories.
It’s not that I worry about the accuracy of the memories I’ve retained. I am saddened by the gaps in what I remember.
For anyone wondering why it is "vb.html", it certainly comes from "vita brevis" (life is short), often used as "Ars longa, vita brevis", which references Hippocrates[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis
8 years with your kids is short, 8 years with cancer is long, 8 seconds with your hands on a hot stove is very long.
If you succeed in developing a good or at least occasionally enjoyable life, your perspective on life is different than others barely enduring it at all.
In general, it is short in the way of a bell curve. It is long when you are a child or at the end of a long life enduring hardships of old age.
> If you're a freelancer or a small company, you can do this at the level of individual customers. If you fire or avoid toxic customers, you can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more than you decrease your income.
The one I never forget is how PG describes his mother's death.
"I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was."
I read this the last time it was posted and this scared the living hell out of me. It has reminded me to never take people, especially my family, for granted. I used to be much more reluctant to go home, but as I've grown older I now appreciate the finiteness of life.
> After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her.
Sometimes I wonder this about my own parents. I haven't seen them in over a year. I have no desire to see them either, and am dreading the obligatory Christmas call.
I see a ton of advice floating around these days about "make sure to visit your parents a lot, because you'll regret it after they die if you don't". But there's another side to the "life is short" coin: maybe it's not worth spending time with people that make you intensely unhappy, even if those people are your parents.
It’s definitely context dependent. But I spent the last few years of my dad’s life not really speaking to him much, and when he died - suddenly at the age of 53 - I realized it had been for really petty reasons. The things I disagreed with him on blinded me to what really mattered: he was still my dad.
This year I sold my company, and as exciting as that has been, I wish I could have told him about it. :(
This is rather true indeed. I would always visit home often as it made my parents happy but sometimes would wonder if I should skip a visit once in a while.
My dad died this year and the result of all those visits is that I have zero regrets. I'm grateful I stuck with them because having regrets now, when it's too late, would be awful.
I'm glad you have good people in your life, but that isn't true for everyone.
My life would improve immensely if I didn't ever visit my family. I see them once a year and it is once a year to much. I love them, but ideally it would be from very far away for the rest of our lives.
"One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option."
This may be true, but this is not the majority of your life - unless you’re on some mission to repopulate the earth, you’ll have maybe 8-10 years when you have children who aren’t babies who want to play with you. Apparently people become magically wise during those years and then quickly forget these wisdom after. If that’s not true then you should be seeing a glut of extremely wise people who’ve been “corrected” by their child raising experience decades ago.
The reality is, kids trigger happiness centers in our lizard brains. Enjoy the short time with them, but let’s not fool ourselves that children fundamentally change your life view in any way. If anything the person you should be working to prioritize is your partner, who if you do it right will be with you fairly unchanged all your life. Given the divorce rates though, most people don’t seem to have gotten that memo however.
+1 based on (n=1) having two kids and being married 15 years. Being with your kids is a flash in the pan compared to decades with a partner. Don’t neglect your kids, but the evidence is strong they’re mostly on rails you don’t control and as long as you care, that’s most of where the effort needs to be. Finding good partners is hard. Keeping them is work. Losing them can be catastrophic (emotionally, logistically, financially) and leave you in a place it can be difficult to come back from. Operate accordingly.
Most of the time, the things that are screaming for our attention are not the truly important things, so it's easy to get distracted and waste time. When we have little kids, they happen to be both important and screaming for our attention, which makes it much easier for us to focus on what's important. That's the point he was making.
I actually observed this in my life a week ago. We just moved our toddler from the crib to a bed and he's been waking up in the middle of the night asking for attention. When this happened, my first instinct was like "ugh. I have to go lay down w him rather than doing advent of code". Then I realized that laying down w my 2 year old is so much cooler and meaningful than anything else I could be doing w that time.
I heard the phrase sometimes "you don't have to do this, you get to do this". That's what I think the quote is about.
I’d argue you misunderstood it. I’m hypothesizing that your lizard brain forces this “kids are important” attitude on you and is artificial and ephemeral. Not what truly makes you happy long term.
First, I was just explaining what I thought the author meant. I guess you are making a parallel point.
Second, I haven't met many people who are "happy long term" who don't have children front and center in their lives. Have you? What is the thing that is giving your life meaning that during your days and on your death bed you will feel great about?
There is also something powerful to have kids who want to spend time with you on holidays and so on, because they had a good relationship with you. Kids are not just the time you raise them, even if they are mostly active in 20 year span of your life. And if you care about your children, treat them and raise them well, in some ways they will be the most stable relationship you ever have.
A lot of relationships go sour, and IMO I think it's fairly difficult for even the married-forevers to say if their relationship stays good. There is also more conflicts of interest with your spousal partner than there are with children in many ways. Your partner is major, but so is your friends, your kids, your family and there isn't a silver bullet for any of them.
> Apparently people become magically wise during those years and then quickly forget these wisdom after.
Sample size of 1, but there is a noticeable difference in my friend and family group between people with kids and without kids. Particularly around “having it together.” Children are little logistical nightmares, more so the younger they are. From scheduling around the kids schedules (I.e when they wake up, have dinner, swimming lessons, when the bedtime routine starts, etc) to being prepared to leave the house for mundane things like grocery shopping (is the diaper bag packed, do we have milk, will we be gone long enough to need to pump, etc.). There is also much less agency as a parent, a good portion of every day is on the rails dictated by your kids schedule. You are also chronically sleep deprived for a window of 6-24 months around each pregnancy and the mother has a tonne of discomfort, weight, and a new balance of hormones for a large window around the pregnancy. You’re operating in this degraded state and have to juggle the logistics of parenthood on top of the family budget because you still have bills to pay. Your kids finally go to bed, but you can’t leave them at home alone (morally or legally) so unless you pay someone to sit on your couch for the night or find a relative who can pitch in, you are literally trapped in the house and can’t leave until they wake up.
People without kids say “thank god it’s Friday!” at the office, people with large families call the weekend two days without child care. People without kids mention going to the movies, people with kids haven’t been to the movies since their first kid was born unless they scheduled it a week in advance with their grandparents, and that movie had to be weighed against every other possible option for date night because you might not get to go out together again for months.
I don’t know how this _couldn’t_ impact a human’s behavior. To conflate it with “wisdom” might be incorrect but, at least from my personal observations, parents operate VERY differently in their day to day lives than their counterparts without children.
To your point of that having a lasting impact, it’s clear grandparents to these families have forgotten a lot of what it meant to be parents. Often suggesting unreasonable things in the face of the logistics of parenthood (like staying up late for a social gathering - as if they’ve forgotten what an over tired 20 month old is like).
It sounds like the parents, quite understandably, develop common traits specific to the circumstances they share (that is, "raising human offspring"). To conflate those role-specific adaptations with any innate or generalised "superiority" or "special class" in any wider sense would be a mistake, I think.
We're all relative experts in the specific roles of our individual lives, and the very complex journeys they take us on.
As a parent we can only truly compare ourselves to our own past self. That is not the same thing as comparing ourselves to other people, who are on quite different, but similarly complex journeys. It's important to recognise the difference.
You don’t sell a pretty picture of child rearing and it’s purported benefits. “But it’s all worth it!” Doesn’t keep staying persuasive at some point you know!
Reg. Your grandparents forgetting the problems you have, consider that maybe they never had your problems to begin with! It’s a known fact that parenting has become a self inflicting masochistic venture in the recent generations, compounded by the increasingly nuclear nature of family structures.
I would still like to have kids but sincerely hope to not screw up my life in that endeavor (saving up for a night nanny and hoping to have our parents around to help out).
Be careful about the rosy picture he's painting for himself and others here. When he wrote this he was probably already rich and into the pontification phase of his career. I'm going to go ahead and bet had plenty of ways to escape his kids when desired, plenty of help with childcare, etc. If you are really just looking at your phone while you're at home, great, but if you are (like many people here , I'd guess) interested in doing creative or focus-intensive, non-kid things while at home, those things are seriously going to suffer when you have kids.
You will miss these interactions as they outgrow you. No one looks back at their time when their kids were little, to miss that didn't tap more in their screen
That mostly happens when they feel they don't get enough attention from you. Sometimes you really are busy with something else, like trying to prepare food for them or answering messages from your pestering boss. But often it is because you are trying to be clever at HN instead of giving them your undivided attention.
Or when they're hungry. Or over-stimulated, under-stimulated, tired, anxious over something that happened at school, hyped for the holiday season.
Guilt-tripping someone who shares that they're not always having a good time as a parent is not cool. Your comment is over-generalizing, and IMO quite mean.
Yet there is a very large societal problem here worth pointing at. Parental time with children in this society is bizarrely low by anthropological standards. You can get a look at the stark difference by reading the book "The Old Way," about a nomadic society.
I suppose a typical nomadic society is not like "mother and father with kids, the nearest relative a few miles away".
Childcare is easier when you have a group of adults taking care of a group of kids. And of course, parents have the primary responsibility, but it is not a 24 hour duty.
That counts, but parents spend most of their time with their kids. Moms gather and the kids come along and help to an extent. If you can take your children to work and interact with them while you're working, that's huge.
The upshot is that we have to do everything we can to give our children more of our time; we aren't a desperately poor society, we can do more. We have wandered far from our "species essence" and now wonder why so much is going wrong.
'Tis true. Even sixty years ago, kids (7 or 8 and older) walked long distances in cities to school and then hung out in packs for hours 'till the streetlights came on. Not every day but a lot. This does seem to be a pretty good (substantial) substitute for parental supervision/contact; and may well be normal for nomads some of the time (in high visibility terrain only lone predators could hide.)
Nomadic societies are no where near standard of human society. They are more of an exception. Also, they are such due to lack of other choice. As in, they evolved when the option of staying long term was not there. The anthropological argument about our exceptionality should not start with outlier society where the world around is too dangerous and there is no way for adults to make it safer.
Sounds like you think I'm trying to argue that most people on earth in 2022 are still nomads? Really, this was about anthropological (and, unstated, evolutionary) averages. Nomad's evolutionary and genetic inheritance is our own, very largely. There hasn't been enough time since agriculture came, enough generations, for widespread genetic change.
Anthropology studies past societies as much as modern ones, although the evidence is thinner.
Evolution prepared us for nomadic life, not this life. Do take a look at "The Old Way." How children are in a nomadic tribe; and our experience of what children are like is way, way different. They're better company, more mature, more useful, and vastly "better behaved" because they're not struggling constantly to compensate for weird raising conditions.
While I somewhat regret the tone in my comment, the whole notion that pointing out that you sometimes at least are partially responsible for your circumstances is called "guilt tripping" is weird.
It's not that my kids never are unruly. But I can almost always track it down to some failure from my side. I was too busy with something, or simply distracted, so I forgot to give them their snack in time, or they got to bed too late the day before, or I didn't pay attention when they tried to tell me something they felt was important, etc.
And while I'm aware that my experiences aren't universal. The opposite notion that I often hear that tantrums are some kind of unavoidable natural disaster is even more absurd. Yeah, if I bring my kids to the store at 5pm to buy dinner without giving them any snack, while I'm hangry yourself, stressed, and trying to think of something not horribly unhealthy to eat, they might end up screaming on the floor in front of the candy shelves. But my thought then isn't "why am I cursed with such horrible kids". My thought is "ok, I screwed up today, because this was predictable and preventable, and by now I certainly know better than putting ourselves in situations like this."
I'm curious just how many hours of undivided attention per day you think you have to give? Because most small children will drain you entirely dry within a week, and you have half a decade or more of that to deal with.
Here’s my perspective on life: dying is probably the whole point of your life, or perhaps coming to terms with it, and conquering your fear of it. All other forms of “importance” derive from this root.
- It is is unlikely anything you do will “matter”. Out of ~117 billion people to have ever lived over countless millennia, the lives of note throughout history are what? 10k? 100k? Even if it’s 1b meaningful lives that weren’t just an aggregate in the wave of babies, you’ve got a worse than 1% chance of being meaningful. Or, perhaps all lives are significant on a level we are incapable of comprehending. If it defies comprehension, what is the use in crafting a meaningful life?
- you have only the present, and your unreliable recollection of the past to mark your existence. The present is ephemeral, the past is mutable, and neither carry any clear indication that the experience of either matters beyond themselves. Time is sending us all beyond the threshold of both, as best we can tell. With such imperfect information, what planning can you rationally do? To quote Stephen Covey, if it is out of your hands, why worry?
- some of the largest structural entities mankind has ever built are based on the “afterlife” (ie religion), and many possess a concept of heaven and hell. In addition, there are more modern attempts to inspect the qualia of death. The notion of going to heaven or hell intersects with the notion of having a good trip or a bad trip. And of course now I have my shining Joe Rogan moment where I cite the huge DMT trip awaiting most of us (assuming your death not by complete annihilation, such as nuclear explosion, or other).
Therefore, the only thing that you really need to plan for is getting to the end of your road, and not having your exit DMT trip be sponsored by the ninth circle of hell, if you can.
In conclusion it really doesn’t matter. Time eternally marches forward, there are no actual stakes because everybody is damned. Include the notion that we as a society do a pretty dog job of (1) not producing fucked up people (2) not fucking people up as it all goes and (3) pledging to change that, so it’s basically just a daydream that mankind will ever transcend to be anything of transcendent/indisputable value. Don’t know how to phrase the last part.
> It is is unlikely anything you do will “matter”. Out of ~117 billion people to have ever lived over countless millennia, the lives of note throughout history are what? 10k? 100k? Even if it’s 1b meaningful lives that weren’t just an aggregate in the wave of babies, you’ve got a worse than 1% chance of being meaningful. Or, perhaps all lives are significant on a level we are incapable of comprehending. If it defies comprehension, what is the use in crafting a meaningful life?
Forward few million years to the future. It turned nobody mattered, talented or not, recorded in history or not. High chances the whole civilization will disappear without any trace. So, essentially, nothing ever matters except now.
Your view of what matters is really narrow. Not everything has to have an impact in the style or singular magnitude how Aristotle, Charlemange or Muhammad did. You could edit a wiki article that inspires someone to contribute to a software that has a button that someone will push and change things. Human life has billions of nuances like this every minute. And even if most of that is ericadated by a catastrophe, some percent of this experience might continue, containing an essence of it all. We must drive life forward with such beliefs, thinking not just of ourselves.
Yeah, "doing for others" is the point of life. I would argue it is an avenue in life, a very good avenue, and I don't discredit its morality, or correctness. But it is not the point of life, per se.
You do for others for your own peace of mind, so that you can live, day to day, as you approach your death bed. Your doing for others is your avenue to a clear conscience. Play the "why" game on that one for long enough and it ends in "because bad is bad, and I don't want to feel bad infinitely". This is why I argue that your death is the point of life. It's your destination, it's why people freak out about leaving a legacy. Death is the great motivator.
You wouldn't "do for others" if it was established wisdom that "doing for others" meant some experiential equivalent of eternal damnation. It's not that doing for others is wrong or something, it's just that it has an ontological derivative.
If we did for others despite our deaths, I think that Adam Smith would have been lambasted as a heretic, and I think communism would actually work.
DMT trip sounds rather nice. The closest I ever was to death was a simple fall into darkness. No more fear. Peaceful. With a single regret: leaving the family around in pain.
Probably not what the parent meant, but I think the past is "mutable" in that we can change how we see it through time.
Example. A few years ago I was laid off right after my kid was born. Bad thing that happened to me, right?
In retrospect, if I didn't get laid off from there, I would end up living in a different state, and my kids wouldn't live next door to their cousins. And I am fine work wise as well.
So I retrospect, getting laid off from that job was the best thing that could have happened because it was a critical junction to my current life which I love.
At 51, I am trying to come to grips with wasting my life in my 20s, 30s and 40s. I don't remember doing anything memorable during that time. I spent too much time doing bullshit programming or doing the same old comfortable things with friends. I wish I dated more. Tried more things that young people can do. I was too scared to make mistakes. Now I can't go back. It's driving me nuts.
What can young people do now that you could not do ? Internet stuff?
The way I see it, young people now can do less than when I was young. For example lots of dangerous activities got prohibited (e.g. fireworks) or they added too much regulations (alcohol, cigarettes, mopeds). For good or worse, no more compulsory army at 18. We live in a very protective society where every threatening activity gets banned.
As a European, I studied in the UK and got a masters, tutions fees paid by the European Union. My children cannot do this anymore.
My young is 17 and spend his free time in the gym, and he is not alone. It is true I could not do this at his age, but I do not understand it.
I wish that I had hiked the Appalachians mountains. its a 7 month journey one of my friends did it in his 20's. I'm in my 40's and in good shape, but im not sure I could do that one anymore.
Nothing is stopping you except family/work obligation. But I believe you can take a month off or at least 2 weeks to do a part of the trail, no?
I'm also perusing of doing a pilgrimage, not because I'm religious, but because it has a lot of facilities along the way. The real thing stopping me is to take the time off to do it.
This is a grander version of what I do when I procrastinate: fret about the time I’ve wasted, beat myself up about what I wasted it on, and anxiously berate myself every minute that I don’t _just stop wasting time_. None of that ever works, and nothing feels better than forgiving myself for it, forgetting all of it, and just getting started. You don’t have any “then” left, but you do have “now” left.
For bad (and for good), what you did in the past does not matter that much. Good memories can help your current moment, but only a little if you can't do the same now.
For example, if you dated more and had more good relationships can do some good for your self esteem, but you'll still miss these things now if you don't have them.
And the end of the day only the current moment really matters.
Another stat I read recently: Parents spend ~75% of their child’s life with them before the age of 12. Puts into perspective the good and bad influences long before they fly from the nest.
I was explaining to my 12yo son when he wanted to play video games instead of hanging with the family that I only had 6 more Christmas eves while he lives at home.
Children live with their parents until their thirties nowadays. You mean he still has another 18 Christmas eves left.
That is why life is short. The barriers to young people are growing bigger and bigger. Their adult lives keep getting shorter faster than their lifespan increases.
80 years is not a short period of time by any stretch of the imagination.
The lifetime of a galaxy isn't that much different than 80 years, right? Right? As Lincoln said, everyone's legs are long enough to reach the ground; but even so, mine are short compared to his.
An antidote to bullshit (e.g., unproductive meetings that you still have to go to) is journaling. When you're writing to yourself, for no other audience but yourself, you can be 100% honest. So that helps serve to counteract it and give strength, sometimes you also see things from another person's perspective. e.g. the meeting may have some value to your boss, which has follow-on benefits to you that you hadn't considered.
I have recently started wondering about the nature of a very specific bullshit enabler these days, which is attention commoditization. It almost looks like in the pre-AI days, there was a surge of online marketers trying trying to learn about people and behavior, occasionally employing dark patterns to get you to click. Later, with the surge of social media use, AI models were used to recommend content incongruent with the user's best interest. And it worked as it becomes increasingly difficult to go out in the internet to get a particular job done, but the sheer amount of rabbit-holes ventured to must me astounding. And now the trend seems to be shorts/stories/tiktok, which only looks to me as means to groom human attention for even easier override with clickbaits and ads.
I wonder how many people daily fail to focus on what matters because of the attention problems induced by the modern tech and is there any research about it?
Having kids is hard, but yeah it is one of the best things.
My wife would get annoyed when we would pass someone walking and they would see our kids and say "enjoy your time with them while they are young!" Because she hadn't slept and was stressed out. She would think "you enjoy your freedom and your full night of sleep!"
"The days are long but the years are short" is a quote I think about a lot.
I think the key is the same whether you have kids or not: peace of mind in the present moment. If you are happy now you won't regret it later.
> If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
I find this argument strange, especially since he uses the word "seem". "Seem" does not mean "is".
If you really want to make life seem short, measure it in millennia. You only get a fraction of one.
Personally, I feel it's about your state of mind. If you're depressed, life feels unbelievably long. If things are going well, then you don't want the good times to ever end, and it seems short.
I don't really know how to conclude whether life is or isn't short. All I can conclude from the article is that PG is quite happy with his!
> I find this argument strange, especially since he uses the word "seem". "Seem" does not mean "is".
As he writes in the beginning, there is no objective truth to answer this question. Since it is subjective "seeming" is all that matters. If life seems short to you, it is (for you). If not, it isn't.
Beautiful post, which I had not seen. Many thanks for (re-)posting. I often use the "seems critical now" vs "will be important in the future" test and marvel at how crazy different these are. As I get older, I seem to be getting better at telling the difference. The consequence of this attitude is that you have to get used to taking a lot of immediate flack for ignoring transitory bullshit.
I love the reference to children and their helpfulness in bullshit-shedding. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes, from a somewhat sick bird who nonetheless really got the value of both time with children and avoiding bullshit:
"A man's maturity consists in his finding, once again, the seriousness that he had as a child at play" -Friedrich Nietzsche
> The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms.
This is a great sentence and I want to see it expanded on. I crave being in that flow state and enjoy what I do but it makes me very irritable to be interrupted and I realize needing this level of focus potentially takes me away from other aspects of life like spending time with my family. I’m wondering if others have dealt with these sorts of feelings. I love what I work on, sometimes to the detriment of other things and difficult for me to zoom out in the way described in the essay.
I enjoyed the piece and this is one part that I disagree with. As I understand it, being in a flow state simply means being totally absorbed by what you are doing during that time frame - it doesn't necessitate taking any more time away from other activities/priorities that you otherwise would if not in a flow state. I also enjoy working like this, and can relate to the feeling of frustration when being interrupted when the going's good. The most effective way I've found to avoid it is communicating that I'm "head down" and turn off all (non-emergency) notifications. Being able to shift away from work when you're not on the clock is a certain kind of discipline that is necessary to living a healthy and (IMO) worthwhile life - working in a flow state does not have to impede this.
After reading the word "bullshit" about 10 times in 5 paragraphs, a beautiful piece of advice emerged.
The "bullshit" avoided in life should be replaced with something meaningful to you! At the end of the day, a proud man has the realities of his past: meaningful work done, love loved, and suffering bravely suffered. Replace the nonsense avoided with things that matter in a 1 to 1 ratio.
Here's my question: why should you care what your future self thinks? Should avoiding future regret really be your primary goal now?
This whole article seems a bit self-centered, in that it suggests you should first and foremost care about how things will affect you in the future, rather than caring about others.
It seems to me like you should spend less time trying to prevent future regret, and more time trying to do right by other people.
If it was only a regret on the deathbed, I'd agree. But if these regrets are held for many decades, and thus the pain from them may well outweigh a sacrifice in the presence - if the regretfullness is high enough.
I try not to regret. It is a pain to do so. You can't go back in time and you can't change a thing but we torment ourselves with the wish to do so. Stop doing that. We live now and if we want to spend more time with our loved ones we have to do it. Now. Not later.
" I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did."
PG's writing style is excellent, conversational and clear expression of ideas.
Profoundly written.
Relentlessly pruning bullshit gets better with practice and age.
The only way to lengthen the shorten of life, to me, is to improve education system.
Education is the single most important reason we're born, lived, because it requires each of us to inherit human knowledge, and develop new knowledge for further generation.
What a pity, that, the education system is mostly broken in several places.
I think counting visits or counting in general isn’t as good as getting that one quality time you spend with that person that would remember for a life time. You could be visiting and just be around, while that is also good but you may wish you did way more
Holy god this is terrifying. It gives way to a mindset of desperate minmaxing, when conventionally we are supposed to maintain a view of abundance towards life. How can we think life is abundant when it is in fact scarce?
Somewhat related and somewhat tangential. Slavoj Zizek on the "tautological emptiness of the master's wisdom" -
"""
The tautological emptiness of a Master's Wisdom is exemplified in the inherent stupidity of proverbs. Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If ones says, "Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it's the only life you've got!" it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite ("Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air - think about eternity!"), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides ("Bring Eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!"), we get another profound thought. Needless to add, the same goes for it's inversion: "Do not try in vain to bring together Eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!" If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: "Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!" the result is, again, no less profound than its reversal: "Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple - it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!" Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: "The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life."
"""
An average-ish human lifespan of 80 years is approximately 1000 months, or 4000 weeks, or 10,000 days. It's frightening,but my memento mori is to remind myself of this periodically.
...but it doesn't need to be. There are people working on real, scientific, anti-aging technology, like the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, SENS Foundation (I prefer LEVF though), and the many individuals involved, but especially Aubrey de Grey.
One of the reasons I got into software development was to try to make enough money to contribute to these causes, or to work on the problems directly in bioinformatics. Unfortunately I haven't reached the point where I would make much of a difference, but who knows what will happen in the next 10-20 years.
What got you interested in life extension? And how long would you want to live for?
I’ve never understood the philosophy behind life extension research, because to me it seems like a case of spending a lot of resources in the hope of improving something that isn’t really broken. However I love people with passion and I value freedom, so I’m glad that people get to work on it even if I feel like it’s probably a bit of a waste.
Immediately when I first heard about it I thought, wow, this is fantastic, because death is a really bad thing. I believe it was mostly reading the book Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey, although I may have heard about some related ideas on various websites before that.
> And how long would you want to live for?
Certainly at least a couple hundred years, and by that point I'd have time to think about how much longer I'd want. I don't really see a reason why I'd want less than infinite time if it were possible.
> I’ve never understood the philosophy behind life extension research, because to me it seems like a case of spending a lot of resources in the hope of improving something that isn’t really broken.
I've spent several decades working really hard, or studying. Although I hope I'll have a great time in the next several decades, I sure do want more.
Also, I have many things I want to do that I know I won't have time to do in one currently normal lifetime. There are several projects like books I'd write that I will probably not get a chance to do, because there are so many other things I want to do also.
Basically the rough outline of my schedule for the next 40-50 years is pretty packed. Obviously I'm going to prioritize and so a bunch of things will be pushed off the list, but I'd really like to do all the things on the list, plus have plenty of time for general entertainment, social life, and so on.
It's simple really. I want to exist because I exist. I exist because I want to exist. This mutually recursive loop belies the bottom of everyone's motivations for everything. All wants and urges, from an evolutionary standpoint, stem from wanting to keep existing. Wanting to exist stems from already existing, as anything which exists without wanting to will readily lose out to those that do exist and want to. That's all "point" there is at the bottom of it all.
What's the point of extending our life? The same as the point of eating and breathing. I want to keep on existing.
I think your logic makes sense, but in some cases may be wrong. The underlying assumption is that living longer personally will lead to a longer existence for your descendants, which is probably true but not always.
E.g. life extension may accelerate resource extraction to the point that your descendants die out sooner than they would have if you had died normally. Although you are living longer, your lineage isn’t.
Also, I suspect that the cycle of life and death is like a computer reboot in that it is a reset of state. Leaving it too long without a reboot might cause existential level issues.
Don’t get me wrong, I support life extension research, but I’m just skeptical of how ‘good’ it would actually be for society and the life extender themselves. Hopeful, but cautious.
> it seems like a case of spending a lot of resources in the hope of improving something that isn’t really broken
This puzzles me. Ageing is extremely expensive to society. Healthcare and care for the elderly is often >10% of total expenditure. Surely that's pretty broken?
And of course there's all the pain they're in, the things they wish to enjoy but can't (like football) and things like covid lockdowns that have to be done because the elderly are at risk (a 20 year old has a risk of death from covid under 0.005%). Lockdowns severely damaged the mental health of many people I know and being housebound due to age related infirmity causes depression in the elderly.
I meant the human life cycle wasn’t broken, because I was only thinking of this in terms of preventing death. Framing it as a reduction in suffering helped me understand, thanks!
I still have concerns that it would be used in such a way that people would live long despite intense suffering, thus increasing suffering overall. But hopefully that isn’t the case.
The leading organizer of research in the field thinks it has a 50% chance of being achieved in 15 years.
Specifically, longevity escape velocity being achieved, meaning for each year you live the technology improves fast enough that you get another year.
Whatever can be done to raise the odds is obviously preferable, because there’s also a chance it won’t happen in our lifetime and that would be really bad.
If anything, human life got remarkably longer in the last century. Any feeling that it is "too short" is not an objective reality (compared to what?) but indicates the failure of collective societal mechanisms to put the individual at emotional ease with reality and their existence and role in it.
Eliminating all existential angst of the human animal is likely impossible as various absurd religious constructs (after life, reincarnation etc) testify. But modern society performs significantly below par by failing in more basic ways.
Excessive individualism, disconnecting and disregarding those living next to us, before us and those living in our future hence not living also through them is the main cause.
I feel it's destructive for people to hold this incorrect belief. People living into their 60s and 70s was very common for all of recorded history. By ignoring this, modern people are less incentivized to criticize and challenge their modern lives and the societies we live within.
Average person lives longer new. Literally deadly diseases are non-issues now. Whole classes of malnutrition related disabilities that used to be frequent basically don't exist anymore, to the point where many people don't even know it existed.
Nobody says no people lived to their 70s. Just like the fact that people live to their 100s now doesn't mean that it doesn't matter if most people live to their 100s.
Then again, I'd rather be young for 50 years than old for 70.
The only thing what has changed is childhood mortality. If you take statistical lifetime of most animals (say frogs) and count in all offspring with hope to describe their average life duration then it would be low number of seconds. Human as such seems to have always same lifespan programmed in, just natural early mortality has been taken away. Basic statistical bias.
Does almost removed early mortality really make our species stronger/better is another question. Removal of one natural survival test may have its own consequences.
There are other factors too, sure. But I’d like to remind here that wars killing people too soon are still a thing, now even in the Global North. If you have any means to help to bring end closer to these current issues, please do so.
We have tech community (some of them YC alumni) delivering essential equipment (trucks, generators) to the chrisis zone for example. Today west seems to be already tired of the news and this is exactly what the conflict starter counts on.
In the other hand they were not dying from technology induced accidents, like traffic :) Sure it is simplification, but the point is that statistical average life duration and total lifespan of adult person have quite weak correlations.
Actually even now these early years are most risky ones, just the scale is different. Now I have witnesses bias here also - in my 40ies I can expect to live 50 years more, very different from a newborn with immediate terminal condition. So lifespan does have different meaning for us.
It does not cancels out. It is not just simplification, you have to grossly overestimate traffic deaths now and underestimate accidental deaths in the past. (Basically regardless of when and where you place "the past".)
> Actually even now these early years are most risky ones, just the scale is different.
Babies mortality used to be huge too. And maternal mortality used to be huge by our standards too.
People used to die from transportation, drowning when crossing rivers, accidents around horses, etc... were very frequent. Safety codes are fairly modern.
Everytime someone posts the correct fact that average lifespan has drastically increased in the past century someone will wrongly claim that it is only because we got better at lowering child morbidity. They might even link to the garbage BBC article that only looks at data for rich privileged people who did indeed live long lives centuries ago. However the rich and privileged of old times were not representative of the general population.
Why do people so aggressively deny that things have been getting better in the past 100 years?
Please do enlighten me as to how and where I aggressively stated anything here.
In the meantime, I will gladly point out that anyone who actually read said garbage article couldn’t have helped but notice how the author, very quickly establishes the difference between life expectancy and lifespan, before also pointing out how the data presents multiple huge biases.
"Life is short" isn't meant to be a philosophically rigorous, consistent logical statement.
It's just a common saying that's meant to remind us that we have a tendency to spend huge amounts of time and emergy on things that ultimately don't matter, and hopefully sometimes short-circuit the thought process that causes us to do this.
PG seems to be putting it in very concrete terms. For example, he mentions spending only 8 Christmas with a young kid who feels it's "magical". 8, he argues, is an objectively small number for lots of human experiences, like "8 books" or "8 times I dined my favorite meal".
I don’t understand how anyone can call “various religious constructs” absurd. It’s a very “Reddit moment” thing to do. Religion has existed since the dawn of man. The internal feeling that there is something more out there - something that created us, is something almost all of us have.
As for the feeling that life is too short; I’ll offer a comparison to the early biblical figures: Adam and his sons lived almost a thousand years. Noah the same. Isaac lived almost 200 years. Compared to biblical figures, we live very short lifespans.
Biblical lifespans seem nice, but only if you wholly believe the stories. Given how often the same stories come up across different civilisations, I'm sceptical they're accurate. For instance, Eve picking an apple is not too dissimilar to Pandora's box. The flood in Noah's lifetime is also part of Babylonian myth where the protagonist was Gilgamesh. I recall even the concept of hell was taken from Greek mythology - notice how we call this mythology today instead of religion.
Answering questions like "where did we come from" and "where are we going" have always existed. Passing knowledge down through generations has always existed. Treating these stories as gospel makes little sense to me.
> Biblical lifespans seem nice, but only if you wholly believe the stories. Given how often the same stories come up across different civilisations, I'm sceptical they're accurate.
WTF? "Skeptical", probably not "accurate"?
You have to be absolutely nuts to think that they're even remotely true.
I'd call it understatement. Rather than write it all off as fabrication, I'm open to believing there's elements of truth mixed in.
I don't believe Noah lived for 1000 years and had 2 of every animal on a boat. But I could believe there was a tsunami that killed thousands. I could also believe it was rationalised as a an act of god and eventually became the great flood that appears in the Bible.
That’s why he said “religious constructs” and not “religions”. I believe religious systems are useful, but I agree with the parent that concepts like the afterlife are absurd concepts used to alleviate existential dread. Maybe this utility means it isn’t absurd, but I would say that many religions don’t have the concept of an afterlife, so other less-absurd concepts may provide the same functionality without the same cognitive distortions.
As you're portraying believing in the hereafter as a cope for existential dread, you could say the opposite.
The disbeliever tries to ridicule the concept of an afterlife as to allievate the dread of being held accountable for their deeds on the day of judgement which would likely lead them to an eternal and painful hell.
In Islam, it's very clearly mentioned that each individual will be judged according to their deeds. There are two destinations possible paradise or hellfire.
Other religions that came before have often tried to tone down this reality by either removing accountability like Chrisitanity with the concept of Jesus (peace be upon him) having died for our sins or by simply removing the concept of an afterlife all together.
The Quran clearly tells us that many prophets were sent in the past with revelation but as time passed on they were falsified by people. In light of this, one could easily see how polytheistic religions came about.
In the end Islam is the last religion and it was intended to be preserved which makes it unlike any other religion in the world today. It has one book there a no multiple different versions. It is perfectly constructed and there are 0 inconsistencies and errors. No arab linguist can deny that.
Allah sent the previous prophets specifically for their nations however the last prophet Muhammad peace be upon him was sent for all mankind until the end of times.
Give the quran a read. https://quran.com
Do some research on the topic. YouTube is a great ressource for this.
Make your own opinion.
In light of this, I still want to invite you to become muslim. Islam answers all the questions Chrisitanity and other religions couldn't. Most importantly it will save you in the hereafter. I'd suggest putting your hand on a hot stove (not too hot) and ponder. Do you really want something like this for yourself and for eternity?
I respect your passion and faith but I think you are very mistaken.
I tried to read some of the Quran but couldn’t find anything that spoke to me. Can you recommend any good sections or translations? Maybe the parts that make you so certain of the afterlife?
When you say different versions of Quran, what you are talking about is very different from something like different Bible versions and edits and translations etc.
The Quran is multi form. Oral texts tradition and from the Hadith we know that the Quran was recited in different modes by the Prophet Muhammad pbuh. But these are all valid revelation. Actually one of the “miracles” linguistically about the Quran is how the authentic Qiraa’aat (the reading-out of the Quran) can be traced back to a chain of reciters authentically. And each Qiraa’aat adds eloquence to the Quran and it also speaks to the people of a certain dialect. Think about British English and American English and how the same word can be pronounced differently, and you begin to approach an understanding of Qiraa’aat.
Actually, different Qiraa’aat are essential to the revelation of the Quran and giving evidence about how it has been revealed as an “Arabic Quran” in which many examples of mankind and prophets are related.
These qiraa’aat add enhancement to the meaning of the Quran. For example, if you look up tafsir Al-Qurtubi [not sure if there is an English translation but you can find the Arabic text on Quran.com] (tafsir is an explanation of the Quran), of (verse 87 from chapter 20)[https://quran.com/20/87 ] you will find that the word ملكنا has three different readings مِلكنا ، مُلكنا، مَلكنا which when we transliterate to English we get: mulkinaa, milkinaa, malkinaa. Malkinaa and milkinaa translate to “our will”. Mulkinaa translates to “our power”.
And all together in the verse it enhances the meaning that shows that the Children of Israel were made to carry the burdens of weight of the jewelwery/ornaments from the Pharoah’s people.
Also in this verse, we have two readings for حملنا which are: حُمِّلنا and حَمَلنا which is hummilnaa, and hamalnaa, respectively. Hummilnaa is the passive voice and means “we were forced to carry”. While “Hamalnaa” translates to “we carried”.
Both of these convey a similar meaning of carrying, they enhance aspects of what is happening in the verse. Passive voice focuses on how people were forced to Carry while the active voice focuses on how people indeed did carry.
This is just one example of how important and helpful knowing Qiraa’aat are and Arabic.
If you take a step back, it is a great and profoundly absurd mystery that there is existence at all.
So given this background absurdity, how do you even delineate what's absurd and what's not, when it comes to concepts relating to the nature of existence itself? It's certainly fashionable to attempt putting everything in terms such as "cognitive distortions", but it's not clear it's sound reasoning when it comes to things like this.
And I say this as a rather staunch irreligious person.
I like the Zen approach to mystery, which is to accept it and resist the temptation to rationalize the mystery away. Thus no absurd concepts are needed, since concepts are not needed. (I’m relatively new to Zen so I may be off the mark a bit here, but I think I got the essence correct)
Some might view something as a mystery that another views as an absurdity. I think a mystery is more interesting and less ... (Edits: hmm I don't know what the word is.)
In this case I think that the mystery of life requires something to avoid existential angst, and some people use the afterlife as that something. Other religions (like Buddhism) might view the entire question of “what is this?” as absurd, and so use methods like meditation to help alleviate the angst, thus avoiding absurd beliefs.
TLDR: the mystery isn’t the absurdity but our reaction to it might be absurd.
It's still a social construct. As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases and it's really on us to accept there are some questions we cannot answer.
As the unit cost of destruction constantly decreases, logarithmically; we might guess instead that keeping the mental attitudes of individual actors in line is more important as tech surges forward. If you have a better method than religion to do this (and I don't discount the possibility) do drop a description of that.
"Humanism" highly correlates with lock sales worldwide as far as I can tell. It's not defense at all vs drug addiction. Humans feel great when drugged up.
>As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases
Citation needed, massively!
If anything, the powerful technology and knowledge we now wield (weapons of mass destruction, mass surveillance, modern logistics and coordination, global communications) only makes it more important that we don't forget the hard-earned scoial and moral lessons of our pre-scientific ancestors - lessons that were often encoded in evolving cultural systems like religion.
Taking Christianity specifically as that's the only religion I know at least a little.
A lot of the more specific day-to-day life advice in those texts are outdated because they're based on societal circumstances of the time, which have changed by now. Or they are explanations of phenomena that we have a much better grasp on now. Or they make claims that are implausible given today's understanding.
Religions teach us some valuable high-level concepts, like love and compassion. Those values are extremely important, but also not terribly interesting. You can totally arrive at them through other means.
I don't see how those high-level values help at solving modern crises of global scale. Believers searching for specific advise on modern day problems need to work hard and read though a lot of "code" to find a few nuggets - ultimately failing to get specific enough answers.
If I do a web search on what the bible says to homosexuality, for instance, I get walls of text discussing precious few bible verses. In effect the bible, being what it is, allows those in charge to impose their individual preferences and opinions on their believers by means of laying out suitable interpretations of the code.
I am tempted to conclude that there is less collected wisdom in the bible than you might think, and more potential for harm than you like to admit.
You deciding what belongs or does not belong here, what is allowed to be said or what is interesting or enlightening is the terror tactic almost all religions used to suppres people and ideas they do not like
On the contrary, I think comments that push religion as some kind of romantic enlightenment of the past as opposed to science are the ones that don't belong on this site.
In the West is it even debatable that christianity is on a decline?
As for the muslim world its more mixed but I do think the younger genereation is less religious than the older ones. It has a long way to go though till we can say its a secularized society.
“Religious-ness” has two contexts. One is for philosophical purposes, where a person agrees with a set of assumptions (aka beliefs).
The other context is as a tribal marker, for practical purposes. In this context, the “religiousness” is not about agreeing with the set of assumptions, but pretending to agree and/or going through the motions of various customs as a signal of how committed they are to the tribe.
In societies where individuals need to rely less on the tribe, it might be posited that there is less reason for people to put on a show for the latter reason, so they can afford to be less “religious”. So if, on average, children of Christians are more likely to be economically independent, then they may tend to being less religious, and children of Muslims, who are more likely to be economically dependent on each other, tend to be more religious.
There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism.
Of course it's not everything, but I don't think humanism on its own would work without an older religion as its "bootstrap".
I wouldn’t say it necessarily correlates with validity - Darwinism is about one thing: fitness of survival.
I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion.
A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.
> There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism.
Absolutely not, because the fitness, in an evolutionary sense, of those memes does not correlate with their truthfulness but with how easy they are to believe because they appeal to our fears, hopes and dreams.
Take that "life after death" trope. The hard truth is that there isn't any, when you die, everything that made up "you" will be gone for good. But no religion based on that truth would ever thrive because the thought is just too scary and bleak.
I don't consider myself a humanist, but I accept that my views are similar to them. I think humanism only exists because the way Christianity has been promoted recently forced the alternative to have a graspable answer rather than "I'm a good person for my own preference".
If "Sky Daddy" is the literal creator of the Earth who gave direct commands to mankind, then that alone is a pretty valid reason.
If he isn't, then he's a powerful (yet imaginary) social construct that has evolved over the past 4,000 years to encode the wisdom of many past generations through a set of rules and stories that happen to match up with the stories and rules of many other cultures. It's also an incredibly fast and low-cost way to reach a solution.
Either way, there's definitely some validity to the claims of any major religion.
I'm not sure these views are as consistent as you say they are.
The Atlantic slave trade started in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s. Even then, it was controversial and faces opposition from certain Church groups (while getting support from others).
Vilification of gays based on Christian religious grounds apparently goes back to the 11th century (based on a quick read of Wikipedia, TBF), and is only starting to come undone now. I don't really have an answer for this, it was unfortunate.
Ah yes. Adam. Noah. Isaac. And yet, literally no historical record shows that anyone ever lived that long. And if you believe that the Bible is the only historical record we have of those times, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
I wouldn’t want to die tomorrow. Is that desire “objective reality” or not? If it is, how is that different from not wanting to die a century from now?
The other comment was about disregarding reality, not about wanting to die.
Most people don’t want to die tomorrow, at the same time we need to come to terms with the fact that we age and that our time is ultimately limited.
Which is an objective reality.
As I grow older, I am discovering that life has different chapters. Each with their benefits and challenges. The other comment is talking about us as a society failing to integrate and value each chapter and instead focusing on youth and youth alone. There is nothing desirable in age for western societies (probably others too, I just don’t know enough).
This makes you think that Paul would be interested in fighting for a world where people don't waste most of their short lives in bullshit corporate jobs because the market demands it, and instead can focus on important things like their families.
Funny enough, I know some engineers who go to work, non-remote, to escape from their wife and kids for a bit and work becomes an avenue to relax! And having to take care of an aging parent who lives with me, I can understand.
I was interviewing for a job in the middle and towards the end of 2020, and regardless of my chances of success or interest, I asked the interviewers how work from home had gone for them so far.
I encountered this sentiment most of all - 40 year old dads who were suddenly stuck at home with the wife and kids, working from an improvised home office.
When I asked about returning to the office, most of them were clearly looking forward to it, with a sentiment of "Of course working from home is less efficient and comfortable, what do you mean?".
It was quite a surprise for me, who had finally gotten away from the noisy open-plan offices and meetings where everyone shouted at each other until the loudest person "won".
I'm 40+ year old dad as well. I don't feel stuck at home with wife and kids. I don't want to ever return to the office. I'm in managerial position and know that WFH is not any less efficient or less comfortable. I find office to have more distractions. Sentiment is shared across the team as well.
I found that most such people didn't originally plan for work from home, so their experience was predictably horrible. Also during the pandemic daycare/schools were closed, adding to the problem.
Meanwhile me and other young dads who did plan for remote work have now a designated room for an office and children at daycare/kindergarten for most of the day.
Until my child was old enough to attend daycare it was indeed chaos, but with just one you can get used to this. It's much like having a co-worker who likes to chat a little bit too much.
I planned for this as well, 2 months before Covid happend, so a bit lucky. Anyway it works great and I don't want to go back. The thing I don't subscribe to is the "co-worker" part. you see if my child cannot attend daycare because she is sick, I cannot work full. we have an agreement at my work that in such cases we go into "50% or best effort"mode. I guess it depends on the child and maybe the job, but I cannot code/think/debug while a 4 year old wants to be entertained, also I don't want to sit her in front of a tv/mobile just to calm her down, so 50% it is
I would guess that if we further split 40 year old dads into introverts and extroverts, the sentiment would also split into loving wfh and being happier working away at the office.
The first years are brutally hard (the sleep deprivation in particular) and in my experience work is much easier than raising children, so there's definitely truth to that. The best is when you can do both at the same time. During COVID, for instance, I wrote code in one room while my 1yo played in the next (since everything was locked down). As she got older, she started asking questions and would even provide me advice "stop thinking daddy!" (just do, I assume she was implying). I think this is closer to how it was in the old days—where the kids worked alongside the parents in the farms or shops. You get to spend time with your children while teaching them your crafts and showing them the joy and passion of work. That is the good life, in my opinion.
A personal take on this. I found myself allowing too much screen time for the kids while working at home and having the kids around me. I couldnt give enough attention to either work and kids. Its good for everyone that everything is back to (normal)
Oh I would agree. Luckily we had dual income and hired a nanny 5 days a week from 8-4. Otherwise would have been impossible (at the time we lived far from family).
When my kids were small, I used to work away 3 days a week. It was my resting days as I could sleep normally and recharge myself.
I did not realize it until I spent 7 days a week at home.
Certainly. When I’m at home I sometimes cannot wait to run off to the office. The feeling is often temporary though, and by 3-4 I’m basically waiting until I can get home :)
Hybrid is the way to go! I do not like full remote because you get out of touch with the teams and office politics. When I'm full on site I cannot get my work done properly. Hybrid mode allows me to manage my schedule better, get shit done while remote, and keep up with office's politics while on site.
That definitely exists.
But I think there's more people who'd prefer to work less hours (and keep their current salary) than people who simply want to stay in the office more.
Try not to judge, you don't know their circumstances. Some may have medical, family, or cultural challenges ("Homeschool is only way! Daycare is the devil!") that make time at home stressful.
If they have either of those "cultural challenges", then they are literally dropping even more work and isolation on their wifes. That is why it is egoism.
Because when they do this, their partner has no choice but to do it all. And the partner is getting no break.
I do knows guys like that. They walk around happy. Their wife's walk around stressed, tired, loosing themselves while talking about how much their husbands need to work. While I know they slack around in work padding time cause chatting with friends is fun.
> If they have either of those "cultural challenges", then they are literally dropping even more work and isolation on their wifes. That is why it is egoism.
No, I mean the breadwinner may be stressed because their SO has such an attitude. Therefore the kids are basically always home, and no one ever gets a break. Some folks also decide to have kids and agree to parenting strategies, only later to realize they're not working. If the stay-home partner insists on "the one true way" then even counseling may not be enough.
Again, the broader point is you may not have the whole picture. Try to assume good intentions, and if circumstances are undeniably out of balance look for constructive ways to help.
If everyone behaved like that, our society wouldn't have the wealth needed to make anyone's lives comfortable and secure, except for the lives of the rich.
A job that provides an income to a worker, and generates wealth for society, is not bullshit -- even if all it involves is making crappy consumer products, or working on an assembly line, or doing paperwork all day. In fact, such jobs are the reason the majority of people no longer live in 19th-century conditions -- and the lack of such jobs in regions that used to have a lot of them is a primary driver of populist politics.
Universal Basic income would solve those problems. Eventually AI and automation should perform all the mundane jobs which is a good thing but we need to provide basic sustenance for everyone.
France has UBI in the form of “RSA” since 1981. It is proportional to the number of children, so you can live with children on it, and use the state-provided accomodations.
For now it rather seems that it has created two sorts of populations: Those who live off it, and those who work, the two forever opposing each other, the latter literally enslaved by the masses of the former. The enslavement in a society which is ever-more reliant on the remaining workers meets another phenomenon: Shunning the workers who protest, because looks at all this poverty, why would you not accept to fund them.
France’s RSA does not meet UBI standards that we’re considering in the US / California because the amount paid is so small. If you live alone with 2 kids, RSA would be 899€/month in 2022, far below minimum wage.
RSA is not only the monthly amount paid, the recipients also live in social housings paying next to nothing in rent, heating, healthcare and transportation.
A similar thing exists in other country like UK or Germany
A lot of things are cheaper when you have the RSA, but granted, it’s mostly leisure and optional things (museums, cinema, holidays at ucpa.com, etc). (ucpa.com is an excellent sports camp address for 18-40, by the way).
Not only optional thing. Metro/bus/tramway are nearly free for them. They also have reduced rate for utilities.
Granted it is not easy to live with 500€ a month, but you can get by.
I understand the justification for UBI from a labor perspective if all “mundane jobs” are automated, but where I haven’t heard convincing justification is on the more abstract “life purpose” side of things. What happens, regardless of UBI, if we move towards a system that provides little to no purpose in working towards anything, or at a basic level, working for a living at all? I know many friends and relatives who reached retirement and faced anxiety and depression due to lack of “a reason to get up in the morning” - it feels like UBI would introduce this problem at a larger scale, and I’m not convinced by the general “we’ll all just be artists” concept either…
We don't have a fix for this problem now, we barely paper these social cracks by requiring people to work extended hours in jobs they don't value at all. Most people don't even have the time to think about how unfulfilled they are.
My opinion is that UBI would actually free people up to do the low-paying mundane job that they can't afford to do today. It would provide the option of a normal work life that allows one to feel like they were productive, even if it is mundane work, and provide the human interaction by means of socializing at work.
If I don't have to work, I will probably enjoy my work more.
We could have 75% of the population stop working now and the taxes on 25% could provide basic sustenance for everyone.. at 1910 levels.
Same thing would happen with automation, some people would keep working, get 2-3x the wealth and everything that comes with and we’re in the same spot we’re in today.
Entrepreneurs I know are reluctant to hire because it does not scale. Yet they do hire, slowly and surely. They need these jobs, as they cannot grow without it.
Similarly they complain about the lack of talent. Most of the people they value do not want the regular job that they offer. They need the people who want the regular jobs.
I am sure this will change. Yet today it is the reality.
> Similarly they complain about the lack of talent.
...of people I want to have around me...
It's been my experience that "cultural fit" has been a much more important coefficient, than "talent."
In my case, it's a bit of sour grapes, and I'll be the first to admit it. I have the talent and experience to pretty much singlehandedly "make" a smallish startup (I'm doing exactly that, right now, but for a nonprofit, for free), but found that my gray hair terrified prospective employers so much, that they ran screaming.
There's plenty of talent out there, but it may come with things like self-assurance, confidence, and an unwillingness to put up with childish BS, or be a galley slave.
I can't understand how educated people can still gobble ubi propaganda up when it's proven that such model is completely unsustainable economically and socially
> when it's proven that such model is completely unsustainable economically and socially
How exactly has it been proven? That's a very strong word to use for something that has never been tried on anything but very small scale limited pilots.
It hasnt been proven but those who live in Europe see families that get:
-free housing
-free money
-money for children (that they use for themselves)
-various other help (clothes, coal, christmas packages)
This had an unfortunate effect of creating a group of people who never worked and all they did was raise 3-5 children. Despite the parents not working (so having time to take care of their children) those children did not really get any education, often did not even finish high school. And guess what those children often got their own set of children early - who also will never work, live of social benefits and small time theft.
You dont exactly have to be a right winger to notice that the model is not sustainable. Especially as this group of people only demands more and they think that they "deserve" it.
Also if you would try to teach the children that everyone should contribute to society by working, their parents/grandparents/even grand grandparents will protest. Since they lived this "parasite" lives forever and dont know better. How can someone demand that they work? They deserve higher social benefits and they deserve better housing. (While you are supposed to get a mortgage and slave to get a house).
Also at some point the group will become so big that they can vote for politicians that will give them more (at the expense of those who work).
Of course perhaps maybe UBI can work and it will be all rosy, but it is just wishful thinking. Communism was also supposed to work.
Different problem with UBI is that middle class becomes nobodies - you are supposed to shut up because you get your dole. While I bet the rich people will still be rich.
Interesting opinion, nothing that meshes with the actual largely indeterminate results of the Finish experiment [1] [2] [3] nor with the bulk of the other small scale examples [4].
Countries such as Australia with robust (compared to the US) welfare safety nets (not perfect by any means, but not to shabby overall) have proven to have strong long term GDP growth and to be resilient in the face of various global crisis events.
Good safety nets provide a place to regroup and do better - without being reduced to homeless and struggling to meet basic food and clothing needs.
> This had an unfortunate effect of creating a group of people who never worked and all they did was raise 3-5 children.
You dont seem to be aware that such programs are designed to have people raise such 5-6 children while doing nothing else in order to bump up the declining population. And if you think raising 6 children is not work... boy...
The problem is that (1) those programs seem to "produce" (as awful as it sounds) undesirable people who dont work nor contribute to society. There are entire families (grandparents, parents, children) who lived their whole lives on benefits. So for the society they are a net loss. And on top of that they often do petty theft.
(2) if you are in middle class, or low class (but still working) you are contributing for others and dont get anything in return from them. I would argue that if you didnt have to contribute so much then those middle/low class families would have 2 children instead of 1. Children of parents that work and will raise them right.
You seem to think that those low life people work hard raising their children? Lol, they dont care about their children.. those kids are raised by the streets.
It is the same in UK where some families mass manufacture inbred children (seriously read about it) and same in Slovakia where alcoholics get more kids since they dont use contraception and having a kid allows more money for vodka.
You assume that everyone wants the best for their kids, nope those people just have a strategy to pump few kids, who maybe will pump more kids. At thr expense of taxpayers.
> The problem is that (1) those programs seem to "produce" (as awful as it sounds) undesirable people who dont work nor contribute to society
The problem is that (1) that is patently false.
Take the case of Germany. So many Turkish immigrants. So many used those programs and had many children. So many complained. Yet, Germany's most famous footballer, the makers of Crysis, the inventor of the Biontech vaccine (the one that you know as Pfizer) are all such kids born to such families.
Since your initial propositon is flat out false, I dont see the need to address the others.
Don't invent false realities. Nobody proved nothing as such. The Finnish experiment and others showed that there is no relation in between ubi and unemployment.
Because The educated is synonymous for woke politics bullshit these days. They got knowledge but they lack wisdom. They got their privilege living in safe 1st world environments but they forgot true human nature that 3rd worlders see daily.
> If everyone behaved like that, our society wouldn't have the wealth needed to make anyone's lives comfortable and secure, except for the lives of the rich
The society today already has the means to make only 1% of the population work, and still keep the comfort level for everyone as it is.
We are making people waste their lives away creating imaginary wealth to bump up the stored imaginary wealth in financial institutions only to keep the existing economic system going.
I'm very sceptical about this claim. Would like to see a source.
Sure, we may have enough "money" to redistribute it. But if 99% of the population stops working, who is going to make everything we use, produce food, run power stations, and transport everything to us. Automation is great, but it doesn't cover anywhere near 99% of necessary jobs yet.
Corporations typically provide actual value. Think machinery, chemicals, food production, etc.
It’s the bullshit software startup jobs that typically serve no purpose besides shuffling investor money from one place to another. Yes dear reader, that’s probably you.
Fighting for a better version of this world does not imply having a utopia in mind. You can simply help people avoid bullshit as much as you can. In fact, this is what this essay does.
I don’t remember where I heard this: “every person you see is fighting a battle that you know nothing about, so be kind, always”. I think we can extend that same kindness to ourselves.