As someone who has a terminal cancer diagnosis (and I'm mid-way through the range of time I was told I had left, months, FTR), I don't agree with a lot of this. And I'm essentially on my deathbed (mentally), even though I'm currently not bed-bound.
Yes, my state now is not a representative state of the one I was in a year ago before my health started failing. But I'm still the same person. I forgot that briefly after my terminal diagnosis, and starting doing things I thought were the right things (making sure things would be OK for my wife, tidying up a litany of messes that would be hard for her to deal with without just giving up and selling things for pennies or giving them away), but after a few weeks and speaking to the right people, I started living more normally again.
Yes, my priorities have changed massively - things that I thought were important 4 months ago are truly meaningless to me now - but many things that are important to me now were so before. And they will be until I cease to exist. I'm making the most of the time I have left because it's important that my experience at this point is as good as it can be, and because I want my wife to have good memories of our last months together.
I've never suffered from 'reason 2'. I've always felt I made the right decision at the time with the information I had and the person that I was at the time. So I don't have many regrets - none of significance to speak of, certainly. I know I am lucky in this respect.
Reason 3 is meaningless, IMO - both generally and certainly to me. I'm 53.
And I don't think many people really do think about this seriously until it's actually on the table for them. I certiainly know I didn't - even last year when I had an operation which hopefully would have removed the cancer and given me years of life, I hadn't really thought about the finality of death and what it means (or doesn't) to me. FTR I'm an Atheist, and I think that 2026 will have as much meaning/experience for me as 1969 (i.e. before I was born).
I’m not deeply thoughtful about this stuff, but my personal philosophy could be called “positive existentialism.”
I am here. It is amazing that I exist, and have an opportunity to be alive and aware. I don’t want to waste it, and so I try to say “yes” to life. And life comes to us moment by moment, day by day. I don’t want to regret things I’ve done, but I also don’t want to regret things I didn’t do.
I’m not in the position that either of you are in (sorry about that btw) but in a sense we all are, and just don’t realize it yet.
Thank you for sharing. You don't have to share any more, but if you would, I'd like to know what things have become truly meaningless to you. Did any of those things surprise you, or were they what one would expect in this situation (career, retirement, and similar)?
There were a whole load of things that I thought were important - mostly objects I owned and projects that I was going to do (some with them, some without). I have done a lot of clearing out so that my wife doesn't have to 'next year' (our euphemism for after I die) - partly because I want to decrease the load on her as much as possible and partly because I know the things in question and their value.
I still have a large workshop full of stuff (tools, building materials, etc), and none of it means anything to me now, whereas it did before - I was worried about all of these objects, which sounds a bit strange, but I've mostly been a 'caring about objects' person most of my life.
There are things that need to be done that I know I won't get done now, and they don't bother me at all - now that I've ensured my wife will be OK financially and the house (which I've been extending so we could live comfortably) is mostly complete and I've finished the small jobs needed to get it to that state with some help from friends. Also, I've had a few other things I've needed to get rid of that I didn't want to (one was my van, main form of transport, which had a mechanical fault that in 'normal' times I would have fixed myself, but would have taken 3-4 days work plus machining time and costs). Just sold it and let it go, and I've not thought about it since. Same for the motorbike I owned and loved for 14 years - once it had gone, that was that. There has been something freeing in letting go of these things.
The biggest thing, though, is playing music. I've played guitar since I was 13, and made most of my income from playing and teaching music (and music technology). Aside from a project I have completed for my funeral (a song my wife wrote and played), I've not touched anything musical - not picked up a guitar or anything like that. There's been no desire to do so whatsoever, it's just 'gone'. I stopped listening to music for a month or two, but that's back now, fortunately.
I didn't really have a 'career' - I've been self employed since 2000 and fallen into things which have worked for me (and I have loved doing, which is good). If I had the energy, I don't think I'd still be doing work, but I still care about it and its quality, so that is still there.
Effectively, I have 'retired' with my wife, who is long-term off work (because of the work she does, she can't work while going through this). So at least I have that and we've spent all day every day together since January. This has been meaningful.
My wife is in your situation and she wouldn’t agree with the article either. Travel is the only thing she dreams about doing. Everything else she wants to keep as normal as possible for as long as possible.
I was wondering, are you looking into religion at all? Does your inner self sometimes suggest to you that there is a God, and do you feel an urge to pray to Him?
Not that you asked my advice but as a believer I would ofc gently nudge you to do so. I believe with conviction that the doors to God are wide open until the very moment we breath our last.
I'm not the person you responded to, but In my experience most people who choose the label of "atheist" have spent time looking into religion. The nonreligious people who haven't are much more likely to just describe themselves as non-religious.
As an atheist, the only time or two I've felt an urge to pray has been when I've felt very alone, and missed the comfort that came from praying and believing that someone with real power was listening. If that's what you believe, of course that's going to feel comforting (plus it provides opportunity for mindfulness and reflection).
Both fortunately and unfortunately, Christianity (which you did not mention, but your language is consistent with) did not hold up to scrutiny for me, so that full level of comfort isn't there, but thankfully many of the benefits can be found in meditation.
If you’re looking for comfort in Christianity, I agree that you aren’t going to find it. Jesus explicitly says that we will suffer in this life. There are comforts in the Christian life but on the whole, it’s not a tool for finding “benefits” or feeling fulfilled.
I'd certainly have agreed with that! But it's only the occasional comfort it brought me that I miss, obviously I don't miss making sacrifices in exchange for an afterlife I don't believe in.
The comfort that religion such as Christianity gives is in the belief that any suffering is temporary and meaningful, while the state of non-suffering that shall follow will be permanent.
As an atheist who still holds up some religion mostly because of fear, I genuinely fear very small outcomes and sometimes I genuinely feel like luck is on my side when statistically it shouldn't have been and then I praise the "lord"
I wasn't born into christianity but rather hinduism.
My critique of your statement is that I personally don't see any difference b/w suffering and non suffering in an infinite scale, our bodies will adjust to it.... suffering has its meaning because its finite.
You could very vaguely quantify suffering at a neurological level,I think.
But the meaning of the suffering is derived from its temporal nature. If suffering is permanent, my point is, is that there would be no difference b/w suffering or euphoria.
There are other critiques as well.
I just don't understand, I know why I follow religion, its mostly fear and some really lucky moments.
I don't wish to pray to god, I wish to pray to universe in some sense. Thanking the universe, I just have named it god because I find him more approachable..., more personal I guess, but I know its fiction.
To be clear, I wasn't referring to Hell or anything like that, especially since the notion is rather fuzzy in Christianity and is completely absent in e.g. Judaism, so it's not a universal monotheistic thing, but rather to day-to-day pain and suffering As to your point that suffering or non-suffering is made irrelevant by permanence, I think not everyone would agree, but more importantly, humans in general aren't particularly good at dealing with infinities, even imaginary ones. So the selling point there isn't so much so the abstract philosophical notion of eternal bliss, but rather the very concrete one of not having to ever again deal with some painful events that you regularly face IRL, like starvation or your small children dying.
Regarding your take, it reminds me of how in David Brin's Uplift series, humans are mostly non-religious but often invoke a deity called "Ifny", short for "Infinity", which is basically a personification of luck as you describe it. It's not an uncommon thing, either - indeed, I would argue that most pre-monotheistic religions are largely that, just with specialized gods responsible for different manifestations of luck, so to speak (so e.g. you'd pray / sacrifice to the god of harvest to ensure that no unlucky events would happen this year that'd ruin it).
Monotheism is rather different, though, and I think it can be distilled down to the archetype of a perfect government - which would also explain why it only arose sometime after the first large centralized states, and was largely spread by them. But this also takes care of the "unlucky" angle in a sense that there's simply no such thing as luck in a perfectly ordered universe.
You do realize that that's also likely true for all the thousands of Gods that've ever been imagined by humans? So I am gently nudging you to consider praying to them as well, just to be on the safe side. ;)
>I am gently nudging you to consider praying to them as well, just to be on the safe side. ;)
Lol do you guys remember Benny, from the mummy? There was a scene where he was going through necklaces of various religions, praying, and that's the image I can't get out of my head right now.
I think I disagree, I may be wrong, I usually am but here's what I think:-
I have looked into christianity from an atheist's critique and I read that in christianity, if you did even a minor sin (which I guess everybody does, because nobody's perfect), then all you have to do is, is say that Jesus didn't die in vain and you can go to heaven because all sins are forgettable.
This idea of all sins are forgettable is also in hinduism, with bathing in river ganga as well.
To me, I wonder, if Jesus exists, And some guy just worshipped him but he was a really bad guy, would he go into heaven? and Because the only sin unforgettable in if so, why should I really obey the christianity is being a skeptic of the religion/ blasphemy which is really ironic I guess, better make people worried about hell and if they question it, they automatically fall into it.
To be honest, there have been some really lucky instances in my life when If I ask god for something, he truly gives me that thing, I mostly ask for study related marks, like going to an exam hall without studying and still getting really decent marks imo compared to others simply because the exam was way tougher than expected and I am sitting like wow, I didn't realize the exam was tough because of my own issue of time issue... great....
I know it seems really petty that I believe in god / reject god because of fear/reward, but I genuinely don't know. All rational thinking really leads me to an idea that we haven't found God yet...,
If I have to believe in anything, if anything spiritual, it might be the idea of karma. I want to die knowing that if somebody bullies me sometimes and I don't speak back because I can say some really vile things but then there won't be any difference b/w me and them. So I just sit, I know that it hurts listening to them and probably try my best to ignore them but they still know that it hurts, so they try to chip me away..., I try to think of the best things I can speak that can make them realize I am not OKAY with their shit. I want to probably die knowing that me not shit talking back/ being pacifist has its value. IDK.... , maybe I am too weak and skinny. I legit never thought I am gonna get bullied but I guess some people are messed up
I sometimes really wish religious people would engage in the reflection they expect from others and start to realize how offensive this is, especially to someone on their deathbed.
I think the author fixates too much on this one construction of the idea of deathbed regrets and misses that this is just a single modern incarnation of the positively ancient and cross-cultural idea that you should plan your life around the knowledge that you will die.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. [1]
And the Tao Te Ching: The Master gives himself up
to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. [2]
A relevant Buddhist concept is called Maranasati [3].
And in the Quran: And donate from what We have provided for you before death comes to one of you, and you cry, “My Lord! If only You delayed me for a short while, I would give in charity and be one of the righteous.” But Allah never delays a soul when its appointed time comes. [4]
And the Bible: The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘... I will store my surplus grain. ... “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ [5]
There's something fundamentally human about contemplating one's own impending death and making changes to one's life accordingly, and nitpicking the exact wording of a single manifestation of that human impulse misses the forest for the trees.
“small things like short commute times make you happier. ... Going to work most days and dropping a few friends you don’t have time for may actually be sensible right now if you are in the middle of your career, doing something meaningful.”
You’re correct that the author is not representing the other side of the argument sufficiently, but this is because the author is focused on rationalizing why it’s ok for people to overwork, and then suggesting a few “tips” to make it easier.
Personally, I overwork because I’m slow, mistake prone, insufficiently skilled, overly-idealistic, self-sabotaging, and only know how to say yes, while I live for a business that will only try so hard to work with a universal source of randomness before it must be let go, leaving it and its dependencies to the wolves, as it comforts itself that it was the right thing to do.
I often think of myself like one of the workers that built the pyramids, perhaps dropping stones and being whipped. I believe this isn’t the way, but this is where I am now.
> Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”
> But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
The answer is presumably "some guys who found the barns." I'm not seeing the issue here. Except I suppose he doesn't even have time to build the barns. So the lesson is, never build anything? Just party like Prince, because we could all die any day?
But mortality makes people crazy, it's true. Planning around your expected death is desperate and twisted planning. You left out such ideas as "I don't care, I'll be dead by then", and "YOLO".
I think it's a little more like... Feed your neighbours, understanding the blessing of grain came only from God, and seeking to share and extend that blessing, rather than hoarding it away for self-preservation.
When reading the Bible you should first put it through chat gpt to summarize and fix the distracting artifacts of translation. I believe the idea is that the grain would be sequestered in a place hidden from knowledge and would spoil before anyone could get use of it.
The Bible is notoriously difficult to interpret, and depends on massive amounts of ancient cultural context. Trusting that to ChatGPT or even asserting that you absolutely have found the one correct interpretation is wild (even as someone who does not believe the Bible is special beyond its cultural influence).
this is the perfect response to this post and here we see the big difference between the pure engineering /logic mindset vs. the liberal arts mindset. When I see these posts on hacker news that are all about some deep philosophical issue, but the writer seems to be approaching the issue as though it were a Google interview question to be solved in isolation of anyone else's experience or knowledge, it emphasizes what a profound blind spot exists throughout much of the tech community, and how the ever more apparent disdain for liberal arts that exists in tech is truly pernicious. Reading up on what humans around the world, across history, across disciplines, and even shudder across cultural backgrounds and gender, have to say on questions that are not actually very novel is essential if you're actually going to open up your text editor and write a blog post about it.
I think this blind spot exists because the pure engineering/logic mindset is such a massive superpower in so many elements of life, people fail to consider that it might not always be the right way to think about the world.
One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work
> Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work.
It does, there just needs to be a proper model of how humans work to back it up. The usual mistake is using logic to prove why a person is right instead of to work out why the relationship is going wrong.
People who don't use logic to guide their interpersonal interactions cap out in some fairly shallow waters. They are more easily suckered by emotions primed to respond to looks and the present instead of properly aligning the relationship for the long haul. The easiest path to push back against those inbuilt biases is logic - there needs to be some set of principles beyond emotions to use as a guide.
There's also the added issue that binary logic (what most people use when they say "logic") is only slightly less constrained than unary logic and is insufficient for modeling reality. Without uncertainty logic, the wisdom available is highly limited. This allows for every emotional story to be engaged and worked through without declaring it immediately and absolutely false, allowing emotions to inform while not letting them drive the decision-making process.
And that is where nerds do massive missteps including horribly ridiculous jumps in the logic. Because nerds and technical people are emotions driven as anyone else. They react to own feelings of anger, fear, frustration etc.
But, since they think emotions dont matter and cant be talked about, they rationalize all above into arguments that sound logical to them and no one else.
All people in the relationship have to be willing to use logic (and understand logic) for it to ever work when dealing with the relationship. That’s rarely the case.
Logic is a technique for detecting inconsistent beliefs. Only one person using it is still helpful, one side being logically alert in a disagreement is going to open up more paths toward controlled deescalation and resolution than two people both fighting while being logically inconsistent.
Even when it is the case you can logically come to a resolution but if you don't emotional feel it, the problem/conflict is not solved and will come up again. In my experience this manifests in non obvious ways that are far removed from the original problem
I think the reasonable explanation is that logic works great for simple systems, but once there are more than, say, seven variables involved, nobody can properly reason in real-time anymore. Personal relations, politics, raising a child, finding out what to do with life, selecting a web framework, all involve millions of variables.
Even if some abstract concepts (love, power, friendship) allow a scientifically minded person to consider complex systems as simpler ones, the underlying complexity is still there, and is relevant. Human ecosystems do not adhere to Maxwell's laws.
> One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work
This is awfully glib for something that rings so wrong for me - logic not useful in emotional conflict?? Emotional conflict itself stems from emotion! How could taking a step back and trying to look at things logically not be productive?
In my experience, one of the only things that can safely navigate conflict, whether emotional or otherwise, is logic - your challenge is to actually be disciplined enough to apply it in stressful situations - and/or to be willing to leave the matter unsettled until you’ve had time to cool down and can afford the luxury of looking at things more practically.
I suspect we’re using the same words to mean different things because I can’t imagine not being able to logic your way out of emotional conflict, I can’t imagine any other route being viable apart from logic - I think the root cause of emotional conflict is getting overwhelmed by feelings and neglecting to think.
Using logic with people who think logic fails laughably short anytime they get emotional does indeed not work.
These people view everything through the lens of power - they are amusingly simple creatures who only use logic to acquire power or for an occasional hoot.
When people like that get into positions of power over others - disaster follows.
It's really only on HN that I find that people reject the liberal arts so ardently.
Liberal arts was a fairly decent chunk of my engineering courses, and maybe I was annoyed while in school since I was trying to not flunk out, but after some time I came to appreciate them as some of the best education I've ever had.
Old-School scientists were called natural philosophers for a reason.
Liberal Arts is simply a subset of engineering, specifically information theory. Shakespeare, Monet, Banksy, etc. are all humans who produced algorithms expressed with primitive technology. But now we have enough computing power to essentially run an emulation layer on them. And shocker, in a world with ASI it's not unthinkable computers will produce high quality works of Shakespeare in the coming years.
When that happens this field is going to have an existential problem on its hands.
I'm not saying Liberal Arts will go extinct, but if they cannot keep up with the technology they will fall behind. Realistically at some point the field will be rolled under information theory as computers prove that most of it can be broken down into numbers, algorithms, etc.
Liberal arts mindset has been that Marcus Aurelius is a fascist. Stoicism is right-coded and tech-coded and has been for the last decade. I think you're right in terms of what liberal arts SHOULD be, but it's been diverted badly from that path.
I'm not sure what your comment is trying to convey. From my experience Meditations is basic and doesn't offer any substance. Popular Stoicism has a lot of legitimate criticism and is very often misused and glamorized in right-wing spaces. So the label "right-coded" seems appropriate.
All in all your comment caused some confusion. I know a handful of "extreme" left-wing, liberal arts people who are enamoured by "Fanged Noumena" whose author is the infamous nrx, 'hyper-racist' father of accelerationism Nick Land. So the politics don't seem to be the problem.
My gut instinct was that you have fallen for the meme/propaganda, as I have seen similar talking points being repeated on other sites. Maybe you can give me a more detailed explanations of what you're trying to get at.
The opposite of nitpickingly missing the point is making grand generalizations and extrapolations.
No the What About Your Deathbed is annoying and has holes in it. You shouldn’t necessarily plan according to what your deathbed-self thinks.
Then you say no, you’re missing the point. It’s about having a finite life. For some reason I am perfectly capable of appreciating wisdom about life being finite when it is delivered in better ways. That is: the ways that I have the capacity to recognize as such.
If this Deathbed narrative is really about having a finite life then it should perhaps be better formulated. Wisdom is also about communication.
(Someone else has already mentioned memento mori... can it get more evocative than an emperor in a parade being reminded by a slave repeatedly that he is mortal like everyone else? The Deathbed formulation is far worse.)
I appreciate wisdom. At worst I can be accused of missing the forest for the trees sometime.
The problem I’ve always had with over-weighting deathbed advice is that dying people rarely think through the counterfactuals involved. What would actually be the consequence of not working so hard and relentlessly prioritizing personal relationships (as all such advice seems to recommend)? How much worse of a future would result from financial insecurity and lack of career fulfillment? Has the advice giver actually thought through the tradeoffs that lead you to work hard in the first place? Further, dying people’s worlds usually contract to personal relationships only so it makes sense this is the only aspect of life they emphasize.
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" captured this so well with the "Tapestry" episode. It showed that if you do life differently, you will indeed get a different life - but maybe not the life you thought you wanted!
This is a good point. You have to strike a balance between immediate and delayed gratification.
I try and conduct myself in a way that future me could look back on present me and say "past me took advantage of life experiences that were only available at the time" (think: youthful adventures, travel, friendships, etc.) but also "past me did a good job of setting present me up for happiness and fulfillment" (think working reasonably hard, being conscientious, financial responsibility, etc.)
Part of this bias is the kind of people dying on a deathbed tend to make less risky choices. You’re underrepresenting motorcycle riders let alone BASE jumpers etc. Long hours seem like the safe option, you’ll rarely get fired for working late. However, it’s easy to be pissed how much extra time you put in when you get laid off etc.
Thus, people looking back have more information to work with and where risk adverse so they likely worked more than they should.
Working outside of normal hours is now a cause for suspicion. Especially in today's WFH environment. It's a prime time to convene with the handler who does the actual work. Or to exfiltrate proprietary information to your superiors in North Korea. Etc.
Whatever it is you need to do, get it done during normal business hours. If you can't manage that, find another job.
It's so bizarre for me to see this perspective in a tech space when my tech-adjacent academic R&D career exposed me to so many people who naturally wanted to pull periodic all-nighter efforts or just live in strange shift patterns that ranged anywhere from night owl to vampire...
I've been asked unpleasant questions about working into the night, and I've seen working outside regular hours listed as a red flag on "how to detect employee fraud" guides. So however bizarre you may think it is, it's real, and companies are well within their rights to behave this way. Remember, in the USA your employer has the right to fire you for any reason except the ones specifically enumerated in the Civil Rights Act, or if it violates your employment contract.
Most people working in "tech" are implementing business functions and processes, and are answerable to people on the business side of things. Academic R&D is a whole different animal.
It's also that you might have a better idea of events that couldn't have been foreseen at the time. Maybe working hard didn't pay off because you lost much of the savings in a bad investment or a bad divorce anyways. Maybe you could have done with fewer savings because of a larger than expected instance or stock reward. Or maybe the fruits of some efforts never materialized anyways. With the information available at the time the decisions might still have been the correct ones.
How do you know whether dying people think through the counterfactuals?
Of all the people I can think of, my future self would absolutely be on the short list for who I would like advice from.
My older self can definitely advice my younger self to not work so much and so hard, without meaning that I should "relentlessly prioritize relationships". (Edit: I already prioritize relationships, but not relentlessly)
In my eyes, this is nothing controversial at all. In this thread I am surprised that the concept of "deathbed advice" provokes so many people.
My father, like me, was an economist. He was not a star, but if you work in asset pricing you probably know of his work. This past weekend, he passed away.
As the end approached, he became very philosophical. At one point, I asked him if he had any regrets. He replied:
"Do you remember that summer when we rented a cottage in Maine?"
He was talking about a memorable family vacation. One where we spent three carefree weeks together on a lake. My kid sister took her first steps there and I learned to swim there.
I told him that I did. Then, he said the following:
"That summer, I had an idea for an extension of the CAPM model. But being on vacation, someone beat me to it. I regret ever taking that trip. If we stayed home, it could have been me publishing in Economica."
The article is accurate but I think it also misses one other important perspective - getting advice from people who have major regrets of the form "I wish I’d" is sampling for the sort of people who made major mistakes. Just because they are dying doesn't suddenly mean they have their life sorted out. Metaphorically. Arguing with a dying person is a major faux pas but they're ultimately still just people and as fallible as ever.
The people to learn from are the ones who, on their deathbed, say "that life went really well, I did X, Y and Z and it was very rewarding". Which is basically where the article was heading, although going straight to happiness research is probably better again.
I think my experiences with the 4 people I’ve seen die so far all four were sad they were leaving the world (already), but also satisfied with their lives (though they definitely had regrets too).
Well, yeah. Regrets are cheap and plentiful. Which raises the salient point of why deathbed regrets would suddenly become a source of wisdom. But they are often a sample of things that the person thinks they were consistently miscalibrated on over their entire life so it isn't clear why they'd suddenly gain clarity into what they should have done instead.
The top 5 list in the article is some really basic stuff. And a lot of people do get that wrong (most people, really) but (1) if they get told they will persist in making the same mistakes and (2) there are a
lot of people in absolute sense who actually get those things about right if you look for them and practice a bit. You don't need to be dying to regret those things and the dying still probably don't actually understand what they got wrong. If they actually understood the mistakes they were making they wouldn't make them and most people keep making stupid mistakes like not expressing their feelings or working too hard instead of talking to people for entire lives of 50+ years. Expressing feelings and not working too hard are actually pretty easy things to do if you keep chipping away at it; these people probably don't really understand what they did wrong.
Having regrets mean you actually made decisions with consequences, and paid attention to their impact. They are unavoidable if you want to live with purpose and thoughtfulness.
The problem is that you are mainly restricted in the present by self-limiting beliefs and comfort zones that accomplish nothing but diminishing your experience.
That's why you didn't walk up and talk to her. That's why you didn't strike up more conversations. That's why you didn't buy the one-way plane ticket. That's why you didn't launch the idea. That's why you took the easy and safe and less fulfilling path. ...Or you just wandered down it in a zombie like haze.
It's trivial to see through this with hindsight, hence the deathbed meme. Hopefully you don't wait until your deathbed to figure it out, though.
I have a lot of respect for past me and what he got us through. Some of my past experiences gave me a profound distrust of others. Even today, while I can intellectually admit that most folks are good and decent people, and I am perfectly safe with them, there are all sorts of unconscious temperaments and behaviors that would work wonders to keep me safe in a dangerous world, but limit my ability to connect to others.
Likewise, my frugal asceticism might have helped me survive when I was living below the poverty line, but it's very much not helpful when I purposely make a 'fun money' budget today, and it either goes unspent or I feel guilty about spending it because my 'inner frugal bastard' sees money as safety.
I'm seeing someone to work through these issues, but it's slow going. I can intellectually see these behaviors aren't helpful, but stopping them from being my default script is hard.
The list is cherry picked, unless they have cameras and record everything people say close to death and then they make an statistics. So someone collected a list of items that considered interesting, but memory is flimsy so people most of the time don't have an accurate memory of the frequency of the items in the lists and the items not in the list.
I think the author misunderstands the argument. He argues that it is irrelevant what other people believed they should have done when they were close to death.
But the argument should rather be, that you should look ahead of your life right now and consider whether what you will be doing will be something you regret in the future. It is not a fallacy at all, it is introspection about your future. That you might change your views later is essentially irrelevant to the point. The point is to take a completely different perspective on your life, one where your life is behind you.
This is something I try to do every day. "What would future me like me to have gotten done right now?"
Future me doesn't really care if I spent 3 hours playing Minecraft, but they would be pleased if that shelf I've been meaning to build for months were finally done.
But also, my brother died recently and left behind a house that was kind of a mess, and that has added "dying me would like my friends/family to be able to easily find the important stuff among all this clutter."
> What I want you to take away is this: Don’t bother with the Deathbed Fallacy. Look at happiness research...
Right, don't make the mistake of overindexing on what people say as they're dying, instead base your life on something accurate, reliable, and unchanging, like happiness research.
I don't really think everyone goes around optimizing for their deathbed thoughts, but uses the framing to try and understand what to optimize for with their time on this earth. The framing becomes more prominent when their current situation is lacking in some way and their subconscious is telling them so.
Planning for how you'll feel on your deathbed is like planning for how you'll live in retirement (not speaking of the financial aspects): it's wonderful to know you planned well if you end up in that situation, and there are certainly benefits, but don't forget that you may never get there.
When my mother-in-law was on her death bed, with tears in her eyes, she told my wife and I that she killed herself because she refused to stop smoking, even though she knew the potential consequences. It was heart breaking since neither of us were smokers.
This happened just a couple of hours before she passed. Before then, everyone present did their best to comfort her with kindness and family stories. At no time did she have any timely advice, including don't smoke. I will say though, she was using the morphine candy on a stick provided by the hospice nurse.
The deathbed argument is simply a rhetorical one - examine your life, determine what you really want out of it, and ask yourself the hard question if you’re doing it.
It’s also a useful exercise to do repeatedly throughout your life. Would I want to look back at my life and realize that I spent all of my time working on building legs for Zuck’s avatars in the metaverse or would I rather have spent more time with my son?
The whole point of the post is that building legs for Zuck's avatars might be the thing that allows you to spend what time with your son that you can. Many people work very hard for miserable salaries and they couldn't spend more time with their children if they wanted to.
This is true, but elephant in the room: many people also work long hours because they want to, because it is comforting for them.
Humans have a tendency to do whatever it is they know best, whatever is in their comfort zone. There's some people who purposefully work more than is necessary because they're "scared", so to say, of going home. Maybe they are lonely at home, or maybe they're not and their family is a source of stress.
Either way, it's a form of self-destructive behavior. If you're lonely, then delving deeper into your work is only going to make it worse. Because, ultimately, solving problems is uncomfortable. If you're always comfortable, we might interpret that as you being stagnant.
Yes, solving marital problems is uncomfortable. So is spending time with your rebellious teen. And so is going to the bar and cold-approaching people you don't know. But choosing not to dedicate time to these things doesn't make them go away, it just makes them grow behind your back. And that's how people get blindsided with divorces, for example.
Anyway, long rant, point is: lots of people willingly do the easy thing, working, to avoid the harder stuff. And they may not even realize that's why they're doing it.
These types of examples IMO show how good we have it now. The worst thing we can say about the job is that it feels meaningless. A subsistence farmer wouldn't have made the same argument about working the field. A 1900 miner wouldn't have made the same argument about getting dust lung in a mine.
We've reached a point that we can complain that our WORK doesn't provide meaning. It's an incredible luxury and we aren't when seeing that we have it.
Years ago I had a consulting gig where we ported a f2p game from iOS to Android. It was a rather tedious engagement and it was clear kids would spend their parents money on in-game crap to their parents surprise. We all felt bad about it. Meanwhile the office was kinda annoying because there was frequent fuseball and nerf battle noises. One day I looked around and realized that I was sitting in an ergonomic chair at an height-adjustable desk, drinking free water that was flown over the ocean from Italy so that I could consume it. At a similar age my grandpa fought in Stalingrad, spent time in a gulag and then became a poor subsistence farmer who worked odd jobs on the side. I was in heaven and didn't know it
Yeah I think about things like that too. My grandfather was born in the Great Depression, fought in the pacific during ww2 is some of the worst battles. Came home and went to work driving an oil truck in west Texas. He raised a happy, healthy family and never hurt any of them. Despite the hardships and horrors he endured he was a man full of love. If, on my death bed, I can say I’ve earned the right to stand in the shadow of his grave then I’ve done pretty well.
Good point. I get a sense of conflict from the author, and his reaction to 'ignore' may be due to difficulty with this hard question. He has some good points, but they don't warrant his conclusion.
It's always great to see someone post about something I think about a lot. Most people want to lead a happy life but that doesn't really help you navigate these time trade offs. Assuming your job makes you unhappy and you work super hard for 40 years and then retire and are having a great retirement and are loving life for 10 years you may say the hard work was worth it because current you is now only experiencing the benefits. But was it really worth it? Conversely, if you pursued a life of hedonism and in your later years are unhealthy and feeling a lack of meaning does that invalidate the happiness you felt earlier? I am not sure there is ever a clear answer to these questions. Most people accept some degree of short term sacrifice for longer term happiness but there is always some limit to what you are willing to go through today for a better life tomorrow.
Maybe you should look at Epicureanism. If you only had a glance at it and reduced it to "YOLO!", then take a closer look, as it is not about ignoring the consequences of your actions, in fact, it is the opposite of that. But the one thing Epicureans don't want to consider is death.
Death is just an insignificant transition between existence and non-existence, and what happens after you cease to exist is irrelevant to you because, well, there is no "you" there. The deathbed at least represents some period of time, but do you really want to live your life for a short moment you won't remember?
It doesn't mean you shouldn't think about future generations, and be a good person in general. Just don't do it for the deathbed, do it for the present, doing good feels good.
Also the fact that the ended up on a deathbed given the path of live they've chosen. What about those who did follow the advice, perhaps they because of such advice they couldn't live a sustainable life that would end with them being on a death bed. A form of survivor bias if you will
I don't think like this person at all. Two major differences.
First, people often prioritize what’s immediate over what’s truly important. But people who are near death don’t have the excuse of postponing what matters, because for them, the important has also become immediate. That’s why I listen to their words, which tend to be consistent across cultures and surveys.
Second, the idea that someone must be high on Maslow’s hierarchy to reflect deeply or be truly happy goes against my experience. In remote villages where people weren’t stripped of their resources or caught up in consumerism, I met individuals who lived with very basic safety yet were happier by Aristotelian standards. Many successful businesspeople and political leaders I’ve met didn’t have a consistent sense of happiness. Often relying on medication, especially when their goals of artificial happiness like amusement or luxury stopped producing dopamine. When that stopped working, they tried to escalate, but eventually that too became unsustainable.
I'm so very impressed by your capacity for rationalization the way you surgically dismantle this world view that no one actually proposed is very good and the way that you swipe at the poor is very. good. The way that you don't actually argue for anything is good too. The way you ramble on about imagined conversations between you and your young self, while it did nothing to clarify your point... actually it did, it let everyone know that this was just a trite exercise in performative rationalism so masquerading as philosophy so you can signal and maybe gain some social points in whatever less-wrong adjacent tribe you find yourself in. Be honest you don't want to help anybody with this you just want to string words together until you get undeserved respect. Gross and stinky.
Seriously why is lesswrong dogshit so popular here? Are they all they sons of VC investors or do they just all have Theil as a surrogate father? Total crap.
Bravo! Planning your life in order to minimize deathbed regrets has always bothered me, because the nature of humanity is to want what it hasn't got. If you assume that, on average, people make correct decisions to work hard and pursue what matters to them at the opportunity cost of not enjoying quite enough free time, then their final wishes will naturally include the time they gave up to live the life they had. If, however, they had fully indulged the desire to enjoy and maximize free time, their wishes might instead have revolved around the unfulfilled potential thereby relinquished.
The problem, of course, is that the feeling of regret considers what may have been gained without reflecting on what would have been lost.
Now the right way to deal with this is some sort of self-consistent closure, where present you and past you with the same values and access to the same information (which could be anything from zero to complete knowledge of then-future outcomes and downstream effects) would make the same choices including both upside and downside. But that would be too complex for motivational advice, which is primarily about creating an inspirational mood, somewhat about positive first-order consequences, and not even a little bit about recursive self-consistency.
I doubt that the reflex to want what we don't have is in our nature. It wouldn't be selected for. That's how you kill off the herd in the spring and starve the following winter.
We work to ensure that others want what they don't have because we've built systems that rely on them continuing to do so. It creates a sort of logic that defines for us what counts as rational behavior. But when that logic meets another one and they each evaluate the other as irrational, there's no reason to expect that the want-what-you-dont-have logic is somehow more valid. If it seems so, it's just that more of us are under its spell than the other.
Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise and founder of the School of Orphan Wisdom speaks a lot about this. The “wretched anxiety” he observed as head of palliative care in Canada he claims stems from fear of being forgotten. Which is tied to a particular Western failure: not honoring our elders who have died, and the amnesia of cultural memory. His book is a good read, and I think provides an alternative account to the points made in this article.
I largely agree with the post, but less because people near death don’t know what’s important, but rather because reports of these are self-help, currated to appeal to audience and get clicks. When I’ve had meaningful conversations with e friends and family memebers near death, I’ve found they have a real capacity to help you moderate your perspective and make better life decisions. Of course the specific individual personality plays a big role in this.
Per the article suggestion, follow the happiness reasearch.
The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.
“If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.
What is a representative state, exactly, and why should that be treated as categorically normative? My consciousness has changed over time as I've matured. I would never wish to regress to the ignorance and stupidity of youth. I see the world differently and more accurately than I did before, and I am more rational and measured. The illusions that youth so easily absorbs lay less of a claim on me (some people persist in this juvenile state for life, it seems).
I understand the concern that in a state of distress, people can make decisions that aren't rational, but people also make irrational decisions when not in distress. Comfortable people are often attached to comfort, preventing them from pursuing what is good until some proportionate threat or discomfort dislodged them from that state. Procrastination is a way of avoiding distress or discomfort, but deadlines can work marvelously to focus an undisciplined person that would otherwise drift and dawdle. Most of us have experienced this effect.
In similar fashion, the awareness of imminent death can focus the mind. Those on death row, perhaps knowing more or less the day of their deaths, are put in a position that make wishful thinking, distraction, and postponement less easy. This is why it is said that if the death penalty doesn't move someone toward remorse, then it is unlikely anything will. These are either the mentally ill or people hardened in their evil.
So I would say: you cannot speak absolutely about the death bed. People enter death in different states of mind, different states of knowledge, that can vary their responses to death. It cannot categorically be said that what is said on one's death bed is true or untrue, or sound or unsound. It depends. But it is also true that death is the ultimate threat, and that remembering that it can strike at any time and without warning can remind us of the preciousness of the little time we have in this life, and in doing so keep us from dissolving into myriad aimless and senseless distractions and diversions that so tragically squander this unrecoverable, perishable privilege.
I’m in the middle age slump. There is more talk around me about death. Some of our parents died in their 50s and this perspective of ’this might be the last decade’ is creeping in. Yet the same person talking might have still one of their grandparent alive!
I am not so interested in the short life. I am happy today so don’t know how else to prepare for that. I keep worrying about living to a 100. Not very likely, but likely enough to be a risk worth consodering. If I am still to live for 50+ years I can’t start hating everything new that is happening. I probably need to do more learning. Need new friends and cant’t solely live the family life. More sports and active life than before. Retirement is not even on the horizon in this scenario.
I'm not on my deathbed, but I also say all those things to myself "I should keep in touch with friends". But don't, even though I'm not dying, and tell myself too. Maybe I'm an ass? Everything takes time and energy.
As I get older, I know that I have less time. I don't do things that have a payoff time that is past my expected passing.
For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn't make much sense at my age, because there's not much time left for the payoff.
Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either.
When you're a kid, the returns on investing and education have much bigger payoffs over the many more decades to make use of them.
> For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn’t make much sense at my age, because there’s not much time left for the payoff.
That is tragic! Learning more about things is fulfilling in and of itself. If your only concern is about growing the number, and you limit your choice to those which are within a time horizon that you can reap the result, then getting older becomes even more bleak than it is.
But the point remains, doing things that won't pay off in your expected remaining life are not worth doing.
For another example, I was looking at when to start receiving social security benefits. If I start them earlier, the payments are lower. But, if I invest those lower payments, then the built up portfolio will be generating investment returns.
Where is the crossover point, where you're better off taking the earlier, lower payment vs the later, higher payment? For me, that point was at age 83. So I decided to take the earlier payments.
The weird thing is nobody ever mentions this when discussing the option of when to start taking the payments. Except my accountant, who figured this out for himself, too.
People just don't understand the time value of money.
If I make it to that age, if Social Security is still paying out, if I'm still a US citizen, I'll tell people that the creator of D gave me the idea. It'll be funny
> I don't do things that have a payoff time that is past my expected passing.
> Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either.
I continue saving money because I want my kids to have opportunities that I didn't have, and avoid stresses that I did have. I will not live to see the consequences of my actions today, but they matter a whole lot to me.
Same with other decisions that will affect future generations beyond my family. I want, in some way, to leave this Earth in better shape than when I was born.
Not if the process of trying to become one is itself enjoyable. I am a habitual setter of improbable goals. I decided I would become a world class acrobat (if you knew me, you would laugh at that idea). Did I do it, of course not. But did I learn to cartwheel, handstand etc. Yes.
No matter what you do you’re going to die with regrets. Some might even feel it wasn’t a good life. I’d say try to focus on the things you did right. You’re just passing through for a moment in a universe currently teeming with activity. You’ll probably regret you didn’t get to see more. Right about when you’re about to die something new and exciting that will revolutionize the future of humanity will be invented and you’ll only know about it for a few days or so.
Yeah I get this, always catch myself thinking about how much life is left versus how much I want to actually do. Makes me wonder what even counts as a good use of time.
I don’t agree with this. Too many of us rush around without stopping to think what makes us happy. At least it’s true for me. Being with friends _does_ make you happy. But for some reason it’s hard to find the time for it. In the end it seems we realize that we down prioritized things we shouldn’t have.
My sister in law has a poster of a man walking uphill on a rugged mountain trail in Tibet. It says "there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way".
You won’t be happy on your death bed no matter what, if you are not regretting then you are just gonna be sad about something else. Ain’t stopping the bad vibes when you are there
we need a universal rule: deathbed doesn't count. Your life's work and philosophy should not depend on a single time point. It is how you live that matters.
For me I think it all revolves around the value we attribute to the past. To me, the past has little to no value. Since I can't change the past, the only thing I can do is learn from it what I haven't already learned, which is usually little. Dwelling on the past is useful as far as it provides me actionable advice for the present and the future. In reality, I often find myself thinking so little about the past that I have essentially forgotten large portions of my life.
Since I don't believe there is anything after death, this makes thinking about the life I lived useless, because in a short time, I will be dead. There's is no actions I can do anymore, so there's no point in trying learning from the past at that point. Perhaps thinking about the good things I have done will be worthwhile and ease my death. But I see no point in seeking regrets.
Of course I could also give advice to others on my deathbed. But it's something I try to avoid doing. On one hand, because I mostly reject the advice others give me, and thus I expect others to do the same, so I won't waste my time trying to give them advice. On the other hand, I generally find this advice either doesn't match my experience and world view, or it tends to be absolutist about the "one good way of living life", which I don't believe in. People all have different aims in life, and who I am to say which one is correct. Live your life as you see fit, I'm not advising you about what to do and what not to do, because I don't know you better than you do.
Something that annoys me a lot is when people say things like "do it now, or you'll regret it later". Even worse: "do it now, anything could happen in the future, you could get sick or even die". So what if that happens? If I die, there's absolutely no judgement I will be able to make of it, since I will be dead. If I get sick and become unable to do it... so what? I will be unable to do it, but since the past has no value to me, it doesn't make it different from anything else I was already unable to do.
"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And thus, our lives slip away moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
I think the origin of life-changes-on-the-deathbed has its origin in the Christian practice of medieval kings, dukes, etc.
My understanding is that the ruling class would often remain unbaptized throughout their rule so they could do the things such people tend to do, and then partake of a deathbed baptism so they could still meet the requirements for going to heaven...
TL;DR - author is doing a mediocre rhethorical (not even a philosophical one) exercise in a weak attempt to show how smart he is. Early GPT level writing and reasoning.
This fallacy also assumes that free will exists (it does not) and you could have made different choices (you couldn't have). Accepting that your choices are not free and are influenced by multiple factors (such as your current state, your knowledge at the time, your emotions, your past, upbringing, genetics even, the people you interact with) makes you realize that regret is meaningless.
As someone who has a terminal cancer diagnosis (and I'm mid-way through the range of time I was told I had left, months, FTR), I don't agree with a lot of this. And I'm essentially on my deathbed (mentally), even though I'm currently not bed-bound.
Yes, my state now is not a representative state of the one I was in a year ago before my health started failing. But I'm still the same person. I forgot that briefly after my terminal diagnosis, and starting doing things I thought were the right things (making sure things would be OK for my wife, tidying up a litany of messes that would be hard for her to deal with without just giving up and selling things for pennies or giving them away), but after a few weeks and speaking to the right people, I started living more normally again.
Yes, my priorities have changed massively - things that I thought were important 4 months ago are truly meaningless to me now - but many things that are important to me now were so before. And they will be until I cease to exist. I'm making the most of the time I have left because it's important that my experience at this point is as good as it can be, and because I want my wife to have good memories of our last months together.
I've never suffered from 'reason 2'. I've always felt I made the right decision at the time with the information I had and the person that I was at the time. So I don't have many regrets - none of significance to speak of, certainly. I know I am lucky in this respect.
Reason 3 is meaningless, IMO - both generally and certainly to me. I'm 53.
And I don't think many people really do think about this seriously until it's actually on the table for them. I certiainly know I didn't - even last year when I had an operation which hopefully would have removed the cancer and given me years of life, I hadn't really thought about the finality of death and what it means (or doesn't) to me. FTR I'm an Atheist, and I think that 2026 will have as much meaning/experience for me as 1969 (i.e. before I was born).
Thank you for sharing.
I’m in the exact same boat as you and what you wrote matches my experience and thoughts almost to the word.
These days my motto is “Make today a good day” and every day I do my best to live up to that.
I’m not deeply thoughtful about this stuff, but my personal philosophy could be called “positive existentialism.”
I am here. It is amazing that I exist, and have an opportunity to be alive and aware. I don’t want to waste it, and so I try to say “yes” to life. And life comes to us moment by moment, day by day. I don’t want to regret things I’ve done, but I also don’t want to regret things I didn’t do.
I’m not in the position that either of you are in (sorry about that btw) but in a sense we all are, and just don’t realize it yet.
> in a sense we all are, and just don’t realize it yet.
one of the luckiest breaks you can catch in life is to live through something that forces you to realize this.
Thank you for sharing. You don't have to share any more, but if you would, I'd like to know what things have become truly meaningless to you. Did any of those things surprise you, or were they what one would expect in this situation (career, retirement, and similar)?
There were a whole load of things that I thought were important - mostly objects I owned and projects that I was going to do (some with them, some without). I have done a lot of clearing out so that my wife doesn't have to 'next year' (our euphemism for after I die) - partly because I want to decrease the load on her as much as possible and partly because I know the things in question and their value.
I still have a large workshop full of stuff (tools, building materials, etc), and none of it means anything to me now, whereas it did before - I was worried about all of these objects, which sounds a bit strange, but I've mostly been a 'caring about objects' person most of my life.
There are things that need to be done that I know I won't get done now, and they don't bother me at all - now that I've ensured my wife will be OK financially and the house (which I've been extending so we could live comfortably) is mostly complete and I've finished the small jobs needed to get it to that state with some help from friends. Also, I've had a few other things I've needed to get rid of that I didn't want to (one was my van, main form of transport, which had a mechanical fault that in 'normal' times I would have fixed myself, but would have taken 3-4 days work plus machining time and costs). Just sold it and let it go, and I've not thought about it since. Same for the motorbike I owned and loved for 14 years - once it had gone, that was that. There has been something freeing in letting go of these things.
The biggest thing, though, is playing music. I've played guitar since I was 13, and made most of my income from playing and teaching music (and music technology). Aside from a project I have completed for my funeral (a song my wife wrote and played), I've not touched anything musical - not picked up a guitar or anything like that. There's been no desire to do so whatsoever, it's just 'gone'. I stopped listening to music for a month or two, but that's back now, fortunately.
I didn't really have a 'career' - I've been self employed since 2000 and fallen into things which have worked for me (and I have loved doing, which is good). If I had the energy, I don't think I'd still be doing work, but I still care about it and its quality, so that is still there.
Effectively, I have 'retired' with my wife, who is long-term off work (because of the work she does, she can't work while going through this). So at least I have that and we've spent all day every day together since January. This has been meaningful.
Much to think about. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing
My wife is in your situation and she wouldn’t agree with the article either. Travel is the only thing she dreams about doing. Everything else she wants to keep as normal as possible for as long as possible.
Thank you for sharing, much respect to you.
I was wondering, are you looking into religion at all? Does your inner self sometimes suggest to you that there is a God, and do you feel an urge to pray to Him?
Not that you asked my advice but as a believer I would ofc gently nudge you to do so. I believe with conviction that the doors to God are wide open until the very moment we breath our last.
I'm not the person you responded to, but In my experience most people who choose the label of "atheist" have spent time looking into religion. The nonreligious people who haven't are much more likely to just describe themselves as non-religious.
As an atheist, the only time or two I've felt an urge to pray has been when I've felt very alone, and missed the comfort that came from praying and believing that someone with real power was listening. If that's what you believe, of course that's going to feel comforting (plus it provides opportunity for mindfulness and reflection).
Both fortunately and unfortunately, Christianity (which you did not mention, but your language is consistent with) did not hold up to scrutiny for me, so that full level of comfort isn't there, but thankfully many of the benefits can be found in meditation.
If you’re looking for comfort in Christianity, I agree that you aren’t going to find it. Jesus explicitly says that we will suffer in this life. There are comforts in the Christian life but on the whole, it’s not a tool for finding “benefits” or feeling fulfilled.
I'd certainly have agreed with that! But it's only the occasional comfort it brought me that I miss, obviously I don't miss making sacrifices in exchange for an afterlife I don't believe in.
The comfort that religion such as Christianity gives is in the belief that any suffering is temporary and meaningful, while the state of non-suffering that shall follow will be permanent.
As an atheist who still holds up some religion mostly because of fear, I genuinely fear very small outcomes and sometimes I genuinely feel like luck is on my side when statistically it shouldn't have been and then I praise the "lord"
I wasn't born into christianity but rather hinduism.
My critique of your statement is that I personally don't see any difference b/w suffering and non suffering in an infinite scale, our bodies will adjust to it.... suffering has its meaning because its finite.
You could very vaguely quantify suffering at a neurological level,I think.
But the meaning of the suffering is derived from its temporal nature. If suffering is permanent, my point is, is that there would be no difference b/w suffering or euphoria.
There are other critiques as well.
I just don't understand, I know why I follow religion, its mostly fear and some really lucky moments.
I don't wish to pray to god, I wish to pray to universe in some sense. Thanking the universe, I just have named it god because I find him more approachable..., more personal I guess, but I know its fiction.
To be clear, I wasn't referring to Hell or anything like that, especially since the notion is rather fuzzy in Christianity and is completely absent in e.g. Judaism, so it's not a universal monotheistic thing, but rather to day-to-day pain and suffering As to your point that suffering or non-suffering is made irrelevant by permanence, I think not everyone would agree, but more importantly, humans in general aren't particularly good at dealing with infinities, even imaginary ones. So the selling point there isn't so much so the abstract philosophical notion of eternal bliss, but rather the very concrete one of not having to ever again deal with some painful events that you regularly face IRL, like starvation or your small children dying.
Regarding your take, it reminds me of how in David Brin's Uplift series, humans are mostly non-religious but often invoke a deity called "Ifny", short for "Infinity", which is basically a personification of luck as you describe it. It's not an uncommon thing, either - indeed, I would argue that most pre-monotheistic religions are largely that, just with specialized gods responsible for different manifestations of luck, so to speak (so e.g. you'd pray / sacrifice to the god of harvest to ensure that no unlucky events would happen this year that'd ruin it).
Monotheism is rather different, though, and I think it can be distilled down to the archetype of a perfect government - which would also explain why it only arose sometime after the first large centralized states, and was largely spread by them. But this also takes care of the "unlucky" angle in a sense that there's simply no such thing as luck in a perfectly ordered universe.
No. I know being religious would be a great comfort at this time, but I just don't feel that way.
Thank you, I appreciate your honest answer and genuinely wish you all the best.
You do realize that that's also likely true for all the thousands of Gods that've ever been imagined by humans? So I am gently nudging you to consider praying to them as well, just to be on the safe side. ;)
>I am gently nudging you to consider praying to them as well, just to be on the safe side. ;)
Lol do you guys remember Benny, from the mummy? There was a scene where he was going through necklaces of various religions, praying, and that's the image I can't get out of my head right now.
How could I forget? One of the funniest scenes in movies for me, ever, to this day, and I am 45.
I don't pray to God "just to be on the safe side".
I pray to God because I have come to know Him from within my deepest inner self.
I haven't come to know any other God besides the Almighty and Most Merciful, Who created the cosmos and everything in it.
I think I disagree, I may be wrong, I usually am but here's what I think:-
I have looked into christianity from an atheist's critique and I read that in christianity, if you did even a minor sin (which I guess everybody does, because nobody's perfect), then all you have to do is, is say that Jesus didn't die in vain and you can go to heaven because all sins are forgettable.
This idea of all sins are forgettable is also in hinduism, with bathing in river ganga as well.
To me, I wonder, if Jesus exists, And some guy just worshipped him but he was a really bad guy, would he go into heaven? and Because the only sin unforgettable in if so, why should I really obey the christianity is being a skeptic of the religion/ blasphemy which is really ironic I guess, better make people worried about hell and if they question it, they automatically fall into it.
To be honest, there have been some really lucky instances in my life when If I ask god for something, he truly gives me that thing, I mostly ask for study related marks, like going to an exam hall without studying and still getting really decent marks imo compared to others simply because the exam was way tougher than expected and I am sitting like wow, I didn't realize the exam was tough because of my own issue of time issue... great....
I know it seems really petty that I believe in god / reject god because of fear/reward, but I genuinely don't know. All rational thinking really leads me to an idea that we haven't found God yet...,
If I have to believe in anything, if anything spiritual, it might be the idea of karma. I want to die knowing that if somebody bullies me sometimes and I don't speak back because I can say some really vile things but then there won't be any difference b/w me and them. So I just sit, I know that it hurts listening to them and probably try my best to ignore them but they still know that it hurts, so they try to chip me away..., I try to think of the best things I can speak that can make them realize I am not OKAY with their shit. I want to probably die knowing that me not shit talking back/ being pacifist has its value. IDK.... , maybe I am too weak and skinny. I legit never thought I am gonna get bullied but I guess some people are messed up
I sometimes really wish religious people would engage in the reflection they expect from others and start to realize how offensive this is, especially to someone on their deathbed.
It's not offensive. See OP's response to me. U need to get out of your bubble.
Proof by example?
I believe a merciful god does not damn people
Nobody has the right to call anyone damned on behalf of God, I agree. His Mercy is beyond our comprehension.
However people damn themselves sometimes, do you agree?
Im' starting to believe you are trolling now
Your god gave him cancer
What makes you know the reason behind that wasn't so he can enter into God's mercy much sooner?
Maybe he could have chosen some more peaceful way for him to die
I think the author fixates too much on this one construction of the idea of deathbed regrets and misses that this is just a single modern incarnation of the positively ancient and cross-cultural idea that you should plan your life around the knowledge that you will die.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. [1]
And the Tao Te Ching: The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. [2]
A relevant Buddhist concept is called Maranasati [3].
And in the Quran: And donate from what We have provided for you before death comes to one of you, and you cry, “My Lord! If only You delayed me for a short while, I would give in charity and be one of the righteous.” But Allah never delays a soul when its appointed time comes. [4]
And the Bible: The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘... I will store my surplus grain. ... “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ [5]
There's something fundamentally human about contemplating one's own impending death and making changes to one's life accordingly, and nitpicking the exact wording of a single manifestation of that human impulse misses the forest for the trees.
[1] Meditations 2.11 https://vreeman.com/meditations/#book2
[2] 50 https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati
[4] https://quran.com/en/al-munafiqun/10-11
[5] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A16-21...
From the author’s summary:
“small things like short commute times make you happier. ... Going to work most days and dropping a few friends you don’t have time for may actually be sensible right now if you are in the middle of your career, doing something meaningful.”
You’re correct that the author is not representing the other side of the argument sufficiently, but this is because the author is focused on rationalizing why it’s ok for people to overwork, and then suggesting a few “tips” to make it easier.
Personally, I overwork because I’m slow, mistake prone, insufficiently skilled, overly-idealistic, self-sabotaging, and only know how to say yes, while I live for a business that will only try so hard to work with a universal source of randomness before it must be let go, leaving it and its dependencies to the wolves, as it comforts itself that it was the right thing to do.
I often think of myself like one of the workers that built the pyramids, perhaps dropping stones and being whipped. I believe this isn’t the way, but this is where I am now.
> Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”
> But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
The answer is presumably "some guys who found the barns." I'm not seeing the issue here. Except I suppose he doesn't even have time to build the barns. So the lesson is, never build anything? Just party like Prince, because we could all die any day?
But mortality makes people crazy, it's true. Planning around your expected death is desperate and twisted planning. You left out such ideas as "I don't care, I'll be dead by then", and "YOLO".
I think it's a little more like... Feed your neighbours, understanding the blessing of grain came only from God, and seeking to share and extend that blessing, rather than hoarding it away for self-preservation.
That may be what it means but I don't believe that's what it says?
> But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
My only interpretation of that text is "you have planned for the future and understood delayed gratification, you fool!".
This is all about context though, the context is “a wealthy man”. This is a parable speaking against greed.
There’s a difference between having enough for yourself, which includes a healthy buffer, and excess beyond what you can ever need.
There are many biblical teachings about investing and looking after your future, this is a warning against excess.
When reading the Bible you should first put it through chat gpt to summarize and fix the distracting artifacts of translation. I believe the idea is that the grain would be sequestered in a place hidden from knowledge and would spoil before anyone could get use of it.
As in the barn being secret somehow? I doubt that's the intent of the story.
The Bible is very esoteric and strange but I promise you I am interpreting it correctly.
The Bible is notoriously difficult to interpret, and depends on massive amounts of ancient cultural context. Trusting that to ChatGPT or even asserting that you absolutely have found the one correct interpretation is wild (even as someone who does not believe the Bible is special beyond its cultural influence).
I agree. That was me being subversively sarcastic for my own pleasure. Please accept my apology for the solipsism.
Lol your comment is hilarious, and I'm a little impressed at how dense I was being
this is the perfect response to this post and here we see the big difference between the pure engineering /logic mindset vs. the liberal arts mindset. When I see these posts on hacker news that are all about some deep philosophical issue, but the writer seems to be approaching the issue as though it were a Google interview question to be solved in isolation of anyone else's experience or knowledge, it emphasizes what a profound blind spot exists throughout much of the tech community, and how the ever more apparent disdain for liberal arts that exists in tech is truly pernicious. Reading up on what humans around the world, across history, across disciplines, and even shudder across cultural backgrounds and gender, have to say on questions that are not actually very novel is essential if you're actually going to open up your text editor and write a blog post about it.
I think this blind spot exists because the pure engineering/logic mindset is such a massive superpower in so many elements of life, people fail to consider that it might not always be the right way to think about the world.
One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work
> Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work.
It does, there just needs to be a proper model of how humans work to back it up. The usual mistake is using logic to prove why a person is right instead of to work out why the relationship is going wrong.
People who don't use logic to guide their interpersonal interactions cap out in some fairly shallow waters. They are more easily suckered by emotions primed to respond to looks and the present instead of properly aligning the relationship for the long haul. The easiest path to push back against those inbuilt biases is logic - there needs to be some set of principles beyond emotions to use as a guide.
There's also the added issue that binary logic (what most people use when they say "logic") is only slightly less constrained than unary logic and is insufficient for modeling reality. Without uncertainty logic, the wisdom available is highly limited. This allows for every emotional story to be engaged and worked through without declaring it immediately and absolutely false, allowing emotions to inform while not letting them drive the decision-making process.
Love this thread.
“Two seemingly contradictory things can both be true”
“Your feelings and fantasies matter, but are not ‘real’”
Yes, I wonder if the two commentors in the thread above you appreciate the irony of their posts.
And that is where nerds do massive missteps including horribly ridiculous jumps in the logic. Because nerds and technical people are emotions driven as anyone else. They react to own feelings of anger, fear, frustration etc.
But, since they think emotions dont matter and cant be talked about, they rationalize all above into arguments that sound logical to them and no one else.
All people in the relationship have to be willing to use logic (and understand logic) for it to ever work when dealing with the relationship. That’s rarely the case.
Logic is a technique for detecting inconsistent beliefs. Only one person using it is still helpful, one side being logically alert in a disagreement is going to open up more paths toward controlled deescalation and resolution than two people both fighting while being logically inconsistent.
Even when it is the case you can logically come to a resolution but if you don't emotional feel it, the problem/conflict is not solved and will come up again. In my experience this manifests in non obvious ways that are far removed from the original problem
Good luck with that :)
I think the reasonable explanation is that logic works great for simple systems, but once there are more than, say, seven variables involved, nobody can properly reason in real-time anymore. Personal relations, politics, raising a child, finding out what to do with life, selecting a web framework, all involve millions of variables.
Even if some abstract concepts (love, power, friendship) allow a scientifically minded person to consider complex systems as simpler ones, the underlying complexity is still there, and is relevant. Human ecosystems do not adhere to Maxwell's laws.
> One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work
This is awfully glib for something that rings so wrong for me - logic not useful in emotional conflict?? Emotional conflict itself stems from emotion! How could taking a step back and trying to look at things logically not be productive?
In my experience, one of the only things that can safely navigate conflict, whether emotional or otherwise, is logic - your challenge is to actually be disciplined enough to apply it in stressful situations - and/or to be willing to leave the matter unsettled until you’ve had time to cool down and can afford the luxury of looking at things more practically.
I suspect we’re using the same words to mean different things because I can’t imagine not being able to logic your way out of emotional conflict, I can’t imagine any other route being viable apart from logic - I think the root cause of emotional conflict is getting overwhelmed by feelings and neglecting to think.
Using logic with people who think logic fails laughably short anytime they get emotional does indeed not work.
These people view everything through the lens of power - they are amusingly simple creatures who only use logic to acquire power or for an occasional hoot.
When people like that get into positions of power over others - disaster follows.
> people fail to consider that it might not always be the right way to think about the world.
Sadly, lack of education and worldly experience will do that
It's really only on HN that I find that people reject the liberal arts so ardently.
Liberal arts was a fairly decent chunk of my engineering courses, and maybe I was annoyed while in school since I was trying to not flunk out, but after some time I came to appreciate them as some of the best education I've ever had.
Old-School scientists were called natural philosophers for a reason.
The liberal arts provide empathy and guideposts for those dealing with the kind of people HN attracts.
Liberal Arts is simply a subset of engineering, specifically information theory. Shakespeare, Monet, Banksy, etc. are all humans who produced algorithms expressed with primitive technology. But now we have enough computing power to essentially run an emulation layer on them. And shocker, in a world with ASI it's not unthinkable computers will produce high quality works of Shakespeare in the coming years.
When that happens this field is going to have an existential problem on its hands.
I'm not saying Liberal Arts will go extinct, but if they cannot keep up with the technology they will fall behind. Realistically at some point the field will be rolled under information theory as computers prove that most of it can be broken down into numbers, algorithms, etc.
hubris is more than just a word, evidently. here's a word for you to learn, friend: techne. it's Greek for "hand".
clothed talking apes shouldn't presume to reduce the world to their own limited understanding of it.
it's like thinking you are actually squeezing the sunset when you pinch it in a photo.
ah yes, bonkers subsumed everything he didn't understand and called it macaroni.
Liberal arts mindset has been that Marcus Aurelius is a fascist. Stoicism is right-coded and tech-coded and has been for the last decade. I think you're right in terms of what liberal arts SHOULD be, but it's been diverted badly from that path.
I'm not sure what your comment is trying to convey. From my experience Meditations is basic and doesn't offer any substance. Popular Stoicism has a lot of legitimate criticism and is very often misused and glamorized in right-wing spaces. So the label "right-coded" seems appropriate.
All in all your comment caused some confusion. I know a handful of "extreme" left-wing, liberal arts people who are enamoured by "Fanged Noumena" whose author is the infamous nrx, 'hyper-racist' father of accelerationism Nick Land. So the politics don't seem to be the problem.
My gut instinct was that you have fallen for the meme/propaganda, as I have seen similar talking points being repeated on other sites. Maybe you can give me a more detailed explanations of what you're trying to get at.
The opposite of nitpickingly missing the point is making grand generalizations and extrapolations.
No the What About Your Deathbed is annoying and has holes in it. You shouldn’t necessarily plan according to what your deathbed-self thinks.
Then you say no, you’re missing the point. It’s about having a finite life. For some reason I am perfectly capable of appreciating wisdom about life being finite when it is delivered in better ways. That is: the ways that I have the capacity to recognize as such.
If this Deathbed narrative is really about having a finite life then it should perhaps be better formulated. Wisdom is also about communication.
(Someone else has already mentioned memento mori... can it get more evocative than an emperor in a parade being reminded by a slave repeatedly that he is mortal like everyone else? The Deathbed formulation is far worse.)
I appreciate wisdom. At worst I can be accused of missing the forest for the trees sometime.
see also memento mori [0]
Edit: spelling correction!
Memento - momento would be something like the moment of death ;)
Ha thanks, good catch!
The problem I’ve always had with over-weighting deathbed advice is that dying people rarely think through the counterfactuals involved. What would actually be the consequence of not working so hard and relentlessly prioritizing personal relationships (as all such advice seems to recommend)? How much worse of a future would result from financial insecurity and lack of career fulfillment? Has the advice giver actually thought through the tradeoffs that lead you to work hard in the first place? Further, dying people’s worlds usually contract to personal relationships only so it makes sense this is the only aspect of life they emphasize.
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" captured this so well with the "Tapestry" episode. It showed that if you do life differently, you will indeed get a different life - but maybe not the life you thought you wanted!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
Great ep.
This is a good point. You have to strike a balance between immediate and delayed gratification.
I try and conduct myself in a way that future me could look back on present me and say "past me took advantage of life experiences that were only available at the time" (think: youthful adventures, travel, friendships, etc.) but also "past me did a good job of setting present me up for happiness and fulfillment" (think working reasonably hard, being conscientious, financial responsibility, etc.)
Part of this bias is the kind of people dying on a deathbed tend to make less risky choices. You’re underrepresenting motorcycle riders let alone BASE jumpers etc. Long hours seem like the safe option, you’ll rarely get fired for working late. However, it’s easy to be pissed how much extra time you put in when you get laid off etc.
Thus, people looking back have more information to work with and where risk adverse so they likely worked more than they should.
Working outside of normal hours is now a cause for suspicion. Especially in today's WFH environment. It's a prime time to convene with the handler who does the actual work. Or to exfiltrate proprietary information to your superiors in North Korea. Etc.
Whatever it is you need to do, get it done during normal business hours. If you can't manage that, find another job.
It's so bizarre for me to see this perspective in a tech space when my tech-adjacent academic R&D career exposed me to so many people who naturally wanted to pull periodic all-nighter efforts or just live in strange shift patterns that ranged anywhere from night owl to vampire...
I've been asked unpleasant questions about working into the night, and I've seen working outside regular hours listed as a red flag on "how to detect employee fraud" guides. So however bizarre you may think it is, it's real, and companies are well within their rights to behave this way. Remember, in the USA your employer has the right to fire you for any reason except the ones specifically enumerated in the Civil Rights Act, or if it violates your employment contract.
Most people working in "tech" are implementing business functions and processes, and are answerable to people on the business side of things. Academic R&D is a whole different animal.
It's also that you might have a better idea of events that couldn't have been foreseen at the time. Maybe working hard didn't pay off because you lost much of the savings in a bad investment or a bad divorce anyways. Maybe you could have done with fewer savings because of a larger than expected instance or stock reward. Or maybe the fruits of some efforts never materialized anyways. With the information available at the time the decisions might still have been the correct ones.
How do you know whether dying people think through the counterfactuals?
Of all the people I can think of, my future self would absolutely be on the short list for who I would like advice from.
My older self can definitely advice my younger self to not work so much and so hard, without meaning that I should "relentlessly prioritize relationships". (Edit: I already prioritize relationships, but not relentlessly)
In my eyes, this is nothing controversial at all. In this thread I am surprised that the concept of "deathbed advice" provokes so many people.
Famous economist story https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/regrets-of-a-dying-econo...
Goes like this:
My father, like me, was an economist. He was not a star, but if you work in asset pricing you probably know of his work. This past weekend, he passed away.
As the end approached, he became very philosophical. At one point, I asked him if he had any regrets. He replied:
"Do you remember that summer when we rented a cottage in Maine?"
He was talking about a memorable family vacation. One where we spent three carefree weeks together on a lake. My kid sister took her first steps there and I learned to swim there.
I told him that I did. Then, he said the following:
"That summer, I had an idea for an extension of the CAPM model. But being on vacation, someone beat me to it. I regret ever taking that trip. If we stayed home, it could have been me publishing in Economica."
A few hours later, he died.
The article is accurate but I think it also misses one other important perspective - getting advice from people who have major regrets of the form "I wish I’d" is sampling for the sort of people who made major mistakes. Just because they are dying doesn't suddenly mean they have their life sorted out. Metaphorically. Arguing with a dying person is a major faux pas but they're ultimately still just people and as fallible as ever.
The people to learn from are the ones who, on their deathbed, say "that life went really well, I did X, Y and Z and it was very rewarding". Which is basically where the article was heading, although going straight to happiness research is probably better again.
I think my experiences with the 4 people I’ve seen die so far all four were sad they were leaving the world (already), but also satisfied with their lives (though they definitely had regrets too).
Everyone has regrets.
Well, yeah. Regrets are cheap and plentiful. Which raises the salient point of why deathbed regrets would suddenly become a source of wisdom. But they are often a sample of things that the person thinks they were consistently miscalibrated on over their entire life so it isn't clear why they'd suddenly gain clarity into what they should have done instead.
The top 5 list in the article is some really basic stuff. And a lot of people do get that wrong (most people, really) but (1) if they get told they will persist in making the same mistakes and (2) there are a lot of people in absolute sense who actually get those things about right if you look for them and practice a bit. You don't need to be dying to regret those things and the dying still probably don't actually understand what they got wrong. If they actually understood the mistakes they were making they wouldn't make them and most people keep making stupid mistakes like not expressing their feelings or working too hard instead of talking to people for entire lives of 50+ years. Expressing feelings and not working too hard are actually pretty easy things to do if you keep chipping away at it; these people probably don't really understand what they did wrong.
Having regrets mean you actually made decisions with consequences, and paid attention to their impact. They are unavoidable if you want to live with purpose and thoughtfulness.
That's not true. Maybe you simply avoided making any decisions and went with the flow. That is something you could come to regret.
Shouldn't the major mistakes be randomly distributed, though?
"I wish I had focussed on my career." "I wish I fit in better in society and impressed my neighbours more with my car."
The problem is that you are mainly restricted in the present by self-limiting beliefs and comfort zones that accomplish nothing but diminishing your experience.
That's why you didn't walk up and talk to her. That's why you didn't strike up more conversations. That's why you didn't buy the one-way plane ticket. That's why you didn't launch the idea. That's why you took the easy and safe and less fulfilling path. ...Or you just wandered down it in a zombie like haze.
It's trivial to see through this with hindsight, hence the deathbed meme. Hopefully you don't wait until your deathbed to figure it out, though.
I have a lot of respect for past me and what he got us through. Some of my past experiences gave me a profound distrust of others. Even today, while I can intellectually admit that most folks are good and decent people, and I am perfectly safe with them, there are all sorts of unconscious temperaments and behaviors that would work wonders to keep me safe in a dangerous world, but limit my ability to connect to others.
Likewise, my frugal asceticism might have helped me survive when I was living below the poverty line, but it's very much not helpful when I purposely make a 'fun money' budget today, and it either goes unspent or I feel guilty about spending it because my 'inner frugal bastard' sees money as safety.
I'm seeing someone to work through these issues, but it's slow going. I can intellectually see these behaviors aren't helpful, but stopping them from being my default script is hard.
Discussed a bit at the time:
The Deathbed Fallacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112241 - May 2018 (3 comments)
The background to this has been discussed here over the years:
Regrets of the Dying (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593302 - March 2022 (142 comments)
The Top of My Todo List (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 - Aug 2021 (18 comments)
The Top Of My Todo List - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613 - April 2012 (185 comments)
Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379 - Feb 2012 (4 comments)
Top Five Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535 - Dec 2011 (1 comment)
Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886 - June 2011 (51 comments)
Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239 - Aug 2010 (90 comments)
If anyone finds links to other related discussions, please let me know and I'll add them!
Is this so common you have the list ready??
Reason 4:
The list is cherry picked, unless they have cameras and record everything people say close to death and then they make an statistics. So someone collected a list of items that considered interesting, but memory is flimsy so people most of the time don't have an accurate memory of the frequency of the items in the lists and the items not in the list.
I think the author misunderstands the argument. He argues that it is irrelevant what other people believed they should have done when they were close to death.
But the argument should rather be, that you should look ahead of your life right now and consider whether what you will be doing will be something you regret in the future. It is not a fallacy at all, it is introspection about your future. That you might change your views later is essentially irrelevant to the point. The point is to take a completely different perspective on your life, one where your life is behind you.
This is something I try to do every day. "What would future me like me to have gotten done right now?"
Future me doesn't really care if I spent 3 hours playing Minecraft, but they would be pleased if that shelf I've been meaning to build for months were finally done.
But also, my brother died recently and left behind a house that was kind of a mess, and that has added "dying me would like my friends/family to be able to easily find the important stuff among all this clutter."
> What I want you to take away is this: Don’t bother with the Deathbed Fallacy. Look at happiness research...
Right, don't make the mistake of overindexing on what people say as they're dying, instead base your life on something accurate, reliable, and unchanging, like happiness research.
I don't really think everyone goes around optimizing for their deathbed thoughts, but uses the framing to try and understand what to optimize for with their time on this earth. The framing becomes more prominent when their current situation is lacking in some way and their subconscious is telling them so.
Planning for how you'll feel on your deathbed is like planning for how you'll live in retirement (not speaking of the financial aspects): it's wonderful to know you planned well if you end up in that situation, and there are certainly benefits, but don't forget that you may never get there.
"but don't forget that you may never get there."
Isn't that the whole genre of "I wish I had reconciled with person X?" That "you may never get there" thought is top of mind for many.
And, a lot of people are really bad at predicting how they'll react in situations.
Re retirement: ironically (in this context) it is apparently a reason why some people are soon on their deathbed
When my mother-in-law was on her death bed, with tears in her eyes, she told my wife and I that she killed herself because she refused to stop smoking, even though she knew the potential consequences. It was heart breaking since neither of us were smokers.
This happened just a couple of hours before she passed. Before then, everyone present did their best to comfort her with kindness and family stories. At no time did she have any timely advice, including don't smoke. I will say though, she was using the morphine candy on a stick provided by the hospice nurse.
The deathbed argument is simply a rhetorical one - examine your life, determine what you really want out of it, and ask yourself the hard question if you’re doing it.
It’s also a useful exercise to do repeatedly throughout your life. Would I want to look back at my life and realize that I spent all of my time working on building legs for Zuck’s avatars in the metaverse or would I rather have spent more time with my son?
The whole point of the post is that building legs for Zuck's avatars might be the thing that allows you to spend what time with your son that you can. Many people work very hard for miserable salaries and they couldn't spend more time with their children if they wanted to.
This is true, but elephant in the room: many people also work long hours because they want to, because it is comforting for them.
Humans have a tendency to do whatever it is they know best, whatever is in their comfort zone. There's some people who purposefully work more than is necessary because they're "scared", so to say, of going home. Maybe they are lonely at home, or maybe they're not and their family is a source of stress.
Either way, it's a form of self-destructive behavior. If you're lonely, then delving deeper into your work is only going to make it worse. Because, ultimately, solving problems is uncomfortable. If you're always comfortable, we might interpret that as you being stagnant.
Yes, solving marital problems is uncomfortable. So is spending time with your rebellious teen. And so is going to the bar and cold-approaching people you don't know. But choosing not to dedicate time to these things doesn't make them go away, it just makes them grow behind your back. And that's how people get blindsided with divorces, for example.
Anyway, long rant, point is: lots of people willingly do the easy thing, working, to avoid the harder stuff. And they may not even realize that's why they're doing it.
These types of examples IMO show how good we have it now. The worst thing we can say about the job is that it feels meaningless. A subsistence farmer wouldn't have made the same argument about working the field. A 1900 miner wouldn't have made the same argument about getting dust lung in a mine.
We've reached a point that we can complain that our WORK doesn't provide meaning. It's an incredible luxury and we aren't when seeing that we have it.
Years ago I had a consulting gig where we ported a f2p game from iOS to Android. It was a rather tedious engagement and it was clear kids would spend their parents money on in-game crap to their parents surprise. We all felt bad about it. Meanwhile the office was kinda annoying because there was frequent fuseball and nerf battle noises. One day I looked around and realized that I was sitting in an ergonomic chair at an height-adjustable desk, drinking free water that was flown over the ocean from Italy so that I could consume it. At a similar age my grandpa fought in Stalingrad, spent time in a gulag and then became a poor subsistence farmer who worked odd jobs on the side. I was in heaven and didn't know it
Yeah I think about things like that too. My grandfather was born in the Great Depression, fought in the pacific during ww2 is some of the worst battles. Came home and went to work driving an oil truck in west Texas. He raised a happy, healthy family and never hurt any of them. Despite the hardships and horrors he endured he was a man full of love. If, on my death bed, I can say I’ve earned the right to stand in the shadow of his grave then I’ve done pretty well.
Yes I am aware that trade offs exist.
Good point. I get a sense of conflict from the author, and his reaction to 'ignore' may be due to difficulty with this hard question. He has some good points, but they don't warrant his conclusion.
It's always great to see someone post about something I think about a lot. Most people want to lead a happy life but that doesn't really help you navigate these time trade offs. Assuming your job makes you unhappy and you work super hard for 40 years and then retire and are having a great retirement and are loving life for 10 years you may say the hard work was worth it because current you is now only experiencing the benefits. But was it really worth it? Conversely, if you pursued a life of hedonism and in your later years are unhealthy and feeling a lack of meaning does that invalidate the happiness you felt earlier? I am not sure there is ever a clear answer to these questions. Most people accept some degree of short term sacrifice for longer term happiness but there is always some limit to what you are willing to go through today for a better life tomorrow.
Maybe you should look at Epicureanism. If you only had a glance at it and reduced it to "YOLO!", then take a closer look, as it is not about ignoring the consequences of your actions, in fact, it is the opposite of that. But the one thing Epicureans don't want to consider is death.
Death is just an insignificant transition between existence and non-existence, and what happens after you cease to exist is irrelevant to you because, well, there is no "you" there. The deathbed at least represents some period of time, but do you really want to live your life for a short moment you won't remember?
It doesn't mean you shouldn't think about future generations, and be a good person in general. Just don't do it for the deathbed, do it for the present, doing good feels good.
Also the fact that the ended up on a deathbed given the path of live they've chosen. What about those who did follow the advice, perhaps they because of such advice they couldn't live a sustainable life that would end with them being on a death bed. A form of survivor bias if you will
I don't think like this person at all. Two major differences.
First, people often prioritize what’s immediate over what’s truly important. But people who are near death don’t have the excuse of postponing what matters, because for them, the important has also become immediate. That’s why I listen to their words, which tend to be consistent across cultures and surveys.
Second, the idea that someone must be high on Maslow’s hierarchy to reflect deeply or be truly happy goes against my experience. In remote villages where people weren’t stripped of their resources or caught up in consumerism, I met individuals who lived with very basic safety yet were happier by Aristotelian standards. Many successful businesspeople and political leaders I’ve met didn’t have a consistent sense of happiness. Often relying on medication, especially when their goals of artificial happiness like amusement or luxury stopped producing dopamine. When that stopped working, they tried to escalate, but eventually that too became unsustainable.
I'm so very impressed by your capacity for rationalization the way you surgically dismantle this world view that no one actually proposed is very good and the way that you swipe at the poor is very. good. The way that you don't actually argue for anything is good too. The way you ramble on about imagined conversations between you and your young self, while it did nothing to clarify your point... actually it did, it let everyone know that this was just a trite exercise in performative rationalism so masquerading as philosophy so you can signal and maybe gain some social points in whatever less-wrong adjacent tribe you find yourself in. Be honest you don't want to help anybody with this you just want to string words together until you get undeserved respect. Gross and stinky.
Seriously why is lesswrong dogshit so popular here? Are they all they sons of VC investors or do they just all have Theil as a surrogate father? Total crap.
Bravo! Planning your life in order to minimize deathbed regrets has always bothered me, because the nature of humanity is to want what it hasn't got. If you assume that, on average, people make correct decisions to work hard and pursue what matters to them at the opportunity cost of not enjoying quite enough free time, then their final wishes will naturally include the time they gave up to live the life they had. If, however, they had fully indulged the desire to enjoy and maximize free time, their wishes might instead have revolved around the unfulfilled potential thereby relinquished.
The problem, of course, is that the feeling of regret considers what may have been gained without reflecting on what would have been lost.
Now the right way to deal with this is some sort of self-consistent closure, where present you and past you with the same values and access to the same information (which could be anything from zero to complete knowledge of then-future outcomes and downstream effects) would make the same choices including both upside and downside. But that would be too complex for motivational advice, which is primarily about creating an inspirational mood, somewhat about positive first-order consequences, and not even a little bit about recursive self-consistency.
I doubt that the reflex to want what we don't have is in our nature. It wouldn't be selected for. That's how you kill off the herd in the spring and starve the following winter.
We work to ensure that others want what they don't have because we've built systems that rely on them continuing to do so. It creates a sort of logic that defines for us what counts as rational behavior. But when that logic meets another one and they each evaluate the other as irrational, there's no reason to expect that the want-what-you-dont-have logic is somehow more valid. If it seems so, it's just that more of us are under its spell than the other.
Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise and founder of the School of Orphan Wisdom speaks a lot about this. The “wretched anxiety” he observed as head of palliative care in Canada he claims stems from fear of being forgotten. Which is tied to a particular Western failure: not honoring our elders who have died, and the amnesia of cultural memory. His book is a good read, and I think provides an alternative account to the points made in this article.
I largely agree with the post, but less because people near death don’t know what’s important, but rather because reports of these are self-help, currated to appeal to audience and get clicks. When I’ve had meaningful conversations with e friends and family memebers near death, I’ve found they have a real capacity to help you moderate your perspective and make better life decisions. Of course the specific individual personality plays a big role in this.
Per the article suggestion, follow the happiness reasearch.
The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia. “If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.
Reminds me of that wordy speech, attributed to Steve Jobs (spoiler: his last words were actually “Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.”).
Morphine?
"Reason 1: It is not a representative state"
What is a representative state, exactly, and why should that be treated as categorically normative? My consciousness has changed over time as I've matured. I would never wish to regress to the ignorance and stupidity of youth. I see the world differently and more accurately than I did before, and I am more rational and measured. The illusions that youth so easily absorbs lay less of a claim on me (some people persist in this juvenile state for life, it seems).
I understand the concern that in a state of distress, people can make decisions that aren't rational, but people also make irrational decisions when not in distress. Comfortable people are often attached to comfort, preventing them from pursuing what is good until some proportionate threat or discomfort dislodged them from that state. Procrastination is a way of avoiding distress or discomfort, but deadlines can work marvelously to focus an undisciplined person that would otherwise drift and dawdle. Most of us have experienced this effect.
In similar fashion, the awareness of imminent death can focus the mind. Those on death row, perhaps knowing more or less the day of their deaths, are put in a position that make wishful thinking, distraction, and postponement less easy. This is why it is said that if the death penalty doesn't move someone toward remorse, then it is unlikely anything will. These are either the mentally ill or people hardened in their evil.
So I would say: you cannot speak absolutely about the death bed. People enter death in different states of mind, different states of knowledge, that can vary their responses to death. It cannot categorically be said that what is said on one's death bed is true or untrue, or sound or unsound. It depends. But it is also true that death is the ultimate threat, and that remembering that it can strike at any time and without warning can remind us of the preciousness of the little time we have in this life, and in doing so keep us from dissolving into myriad aimless and senseless distractions and diversions that so tragically squander this unrecoverable, perishable privilege.
I’m in the middle age slump. There is more talk around me about death. Some of our parents died in their 50s and this perspective of ’this might be the last decade’ is creeping in. Yet the same person talking might have still one of their grandparent alive!
I am not so interested in the short life. I am happy today so don’t know how else to prepare for that. I keep worrying about living to a 100. Not very likely, but likely enough to be a risk worth consodering. If I am still to live for 50+ years I can’t start hating everything new that is happening. I probably need to do more learning. Need new friends and cant’t solely live the family life. More sports and active life than before. Retirement is not even on the horizon in this scenario.
Exactly.
I'm not on my deathbed, but I also say all those things to myself "I should keep in touch with friends". But don't, even though I'm not dying, and tell myself too. Maybe I'm an ass? Everything takes time and energy.
I often wonder what I get out of friendships. It's not just intangible, it's very hard to quantify.
Last year I had a phase of sleeping around a lot. That was fun and I'd like to get back to it before I'm old
As I get older, I know that I have less time. I don't do things that have a payoff time that is past my expected passing.
For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn't make much sense at my age, because there's not much time left for the payoff.
Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either.
When you're a kid, the returns on investing and education have much bigger payoffs over the many more decades to make use of them.
> For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn’t make much sense at my age, because there’s not much time left for the payoff.
That is tragic! Learning more about things is fulfilling in and of itself. If your only concern is about growing the number, and you limit your choice to those which are within a time horizon that you can reap the result, then getting older becomes even more bleak than it is.
You're right that learning can be its own reward.
But the point remains, doing things that won't pay off in your expected remaining life are not worth doing.
For another example, I was looking at when to start receiving social security benefits. If I start them earlier, the payments are lower. But, if I invest those lower payments, then the built up portfolio will be generating investment returns.
Where is the crossover point, where you're better off taking the earlier, lower payment vs the later, higher payment? For me, that point was at age 83. So I decided to take the earlier payments.
The weird thing is nobody ever mentions this when discussing the option of when to start taking the payments. Except my accountant, who figured this out for himself, too.
People just don't understand the time value of money.
If I make it to that age, if Social Security is still paying out, if I'm still a US citizen, I'll tell people that the creator of D gave me the idea. It'll be funny
I use D to write little programs to do calculations for me. I never did figure out how to use a spreadsheet.
> I don't do things that have a payoff time that is past my expected passing.
> Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either.
I continue saving money because I want my kids to have opportunities that I didn't have, and avoid stresses that I did have. I will not live to see the consequences of my actions today, but they matter a whole lot to me.
Same with other decisions that will affect future generations beyond my family. I want, in some way, to leave this Earth in better shape than when I was born.
I'm not the only thing that matters.
Investing with the goal of passing it along to your children is perfectly reasonable.
If at age 70 you decide to become a concert-level pianist, you're wasting your time.
Not if the process of trying to become one is itself enjoyable. I am a habitual setter of improbable goals. I decided I would become a world class acrobat (if you knew me, you would laugh at that idea). Did I do it, of course not. But did I learn to cartwheel, handstand etc. Yes.
Good for you! My mom is in her seventies, and she is about to graduate in Fine Arts.
No matter what you do you’re going to die with regrets. Some might even feel it wasn’t a good life. I’d say try to focus on the things you did right. You’re just passing through for a moment in a universe currently teeming with activity. You’ll probably regret you didn’t get to see more. Right about when you’re about to die something new and exciting that will revolutionize the future of humanity will be invented and you’ll only know about it for a few days or so.
Yeah I get this, always catch myself thinking about how much life is left versus how much I want to actually do. Makes me wonder what even counts as a good use of time.
I don’t agree with this. Too many of us rush around without stopping to think what makes us happy. At least it’s true for me. Being with friends _does_ make you happy. But for some reason it’s hard to find the time for it. In the end it seems we realize that we down prioritized things we shouldn’t have.
Maybe the dismissal of the Deathbed Fallacy should be mitigated by the "What I'm doing right now can't possibly be wrong" fallacy?
As usual, people who haven't yet reached the situation of others, fail to learn from those ahead of them...
My sister in law has a poster of a man walking uphill on a rugged mountain trail in Tibet. It says "there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way".
You won’t be happy on your death bed no matter what, if you are not regretting then you are just gonna be sad about something else. Ain’t stopping the bad vibes when you are there
we need a universal rule: deathbed doesn't count. Your life's work and philosophy should not depend on a single time point. It is how you live that matters.
I don't know if this is so much a fallacy as it is a questionable assumption which disregards prudential reasoning.
I totally agree and it really bothers me that people put so much weight into last regrets
For me I think it all revolves around the value we attribute to the past. To me, the past has little to no value. Since I can't change the past, the only thing I can do is learn from it what I haven't already learned, which is usually little. Dwelling on the past is useful as far as it provides me actionable advice for the present and the future. In reality, I often find myself thinking so little about the past that I have essentially forgotten large portions of my life.
Since I don't believe there is anything after death, this makes thinking about the life I lived useless, because in a short time, I will be dead. There's is no actions I can do anymore, so there's no point in trying learning from the past at that point. Perhaps thinking about the good things I have done will be worthwhile and ease my death. But I see no point in seeking regrets.
Of course I could also give advice to others on my deathbed. But it's something I try to avoid doing. On one hand, because I mostly reject the advice others give me, and thus I expect others to do the same, so I won't waste my time trying to give them advice. On the other hand, I generally find this advice either doesn't match my experience and world view, or it tends to be absolutist about the "one good way of living life", which I don't believe in. People all have different aims in life, and who I am to say which one is correct. Live your life as you see fit, I'm not advising you about what to do and what not to do, because I don't know you better than you do.
Something that annoys me a lot is when people say things like "do it now, or you'll regret it later". Even worse: "do it now, anything could happen in the future, you could get sick or even die". So what if that happens? If I die, there's absolutely no judgement I will be able to make of it, since I will be dead. If I get sick and become unable to do it... so what? I will be unable to do it, but since the past has no value to me, it doesn't make it different from anything else I was already unable to do.
"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And thus, our lives slip away moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
I think the origin of life-changes-on-the-deathbed has its origin in the Christian practice of medieval kings, dukes, etc.
My understanding is that the ruling class would often remain unbaptized throughout their rule so they could do the things such people tend to do, and then partake of a deathbed baptism so they could still meet the requirements for going to heaven...
...power is having your cake and eating it too.
It seems like another part of the fallacy might be that we only hear from people who have regrets.
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TL;DR - author is doing a mediocre rhethorical (not even a philosophical one) exercise in a weak attempt to show how smart he is. Early GPT level writing and reasoning.
There isn’t even a real fallacy to begin with.
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This fallacy also assumes that free will exists (it does not) and you could have made different choices (you couldn't have). Accepting that your choices are not free and are influenced by multiple factors (such as your current state, your knowledge at the time, your emotions, your past, upbringing, genetics even, the people you interact with) makes you realize that regret is meaningless.