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).
najuloj · 2m ago
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.
lolinder · 2h ago
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.
card_zero · 1h ago
> 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".
_fzslm · 1h ago
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.
zzzeek · 2h ago
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.
jvans · 2h ago
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
roenxi · 1h ago
> 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.
crawfordcomeaux · 1h ago
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.
bckr · 1h ago
Love this thread.
“Two seemingly contradictory things can both be true”
“Your feelings and fantasies matter, but are not ‘real’”
closewith · 9m ago
Yes, I wonder if the two commentors in the thread above you appreciate the irony of their posts.
jvans · 1h ago
Good luck with that :)
alexashka · 5m ago
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.
mock-possum · 32m ago
> 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.
tekla · 1h ago
> 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
tekla · 1h ago
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.
keybored · 16m ago
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.
turnsout · 2h ago
see also memento mori [0]
Edit: spelling correction!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
bombcar · 2h ago
Memento - momento would be something like the moment of death ;)
turnsout · 2h ago
Ha thanks, good catch!
hombre_fatal · 54m ago
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.
wing-_-nuts · 44m ago
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.
superposeur · 1h ago
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.
massysett · 43m ago
"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!
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 jumper’s 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.
ajmurmann · 30m ago
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.
morsecodist · 21m ago
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.
gus_massa · 1h ago
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.
WalterBright · 27m ago
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.
kurikuri · 21m ago
> 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.
meany · 52m ago
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.
bombcar · 1h ago
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.
aaronbrethorst · 53m ago
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?
massysett · 35m ago
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.
ajmurmann · 21m ago
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
njdas · 1h ago
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.
roenxi · 3h ago
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.
Aeolun · 2h ago
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.
roenxi · 2h ago
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.
fullshark · 2h ago
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.
esafak · 1h ago
That's not true. Maybe you simply avoided making any decisions and went with the flow. That is something you could come to regret.
fullshark · 2h ago
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.
xianshou · 3h ago
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.
mathgeek · 3h ago
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.
readthenotes1 · 1h ago
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
plastic3169 · 3h ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY · 2h ago
Reminds me of that wordy speech, attributed to Steve Jobs (spoiler: his last words were actually “Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.”).
coolThingsFirst · 55m ago
Morphine?
gitroom · 2h ago
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.
gopherloafers · 1h ago
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.
g4zj · 2h ago
I don't know if this is so much a fallacy as it is a questionable assumption which disregards prudential reasoning.
constantcrying · 3h ago
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.
TOGoS · 2h ago
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."
deadbabe · 38m ago
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.
ojbyrne · 1h ago
It seems like another part of the fallacy might be that we only hear from people who have regrets.
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
"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.
eulgro · 10m ago
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.
bowsamic · 3h ago
I totally agree and it really bothers me that people put so much weight into last regrets
nurettin · 1h ago
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.
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 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.
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...
“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.
> 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".
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
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.
“Two seemingly contradictory things can both be true”
“Your feelings and fantasies matter, but are not ‘real’”
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.
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.
Sadly, lack of education and worldly experience will do that
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.
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.
Edit: spelling correction!
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
Thus, people looking back have more information to work with and where risk adverse so they likely worked more than they should.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Everyone has regrets.
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.
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.
Re retirement: ironically (in this context) it is apparently a reason why some people are soon on their deathbed
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.
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.
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 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.
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.