Life is Short
41–50 of 452 posts
Re: Life is Short
#42I'm (only) 23 and I've felt this for a while. I've been trying to leave my small no-name company for a higher calibre job in NYC for a few months now. I guess I'm lucky because I know what I want - but I need to wade through extreme amounts of bullshit to get there. I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary.
Re: Life is Short
#43Somewhat unbelievably, I still have that 1960's jeans jacket with the patch on it that says, "Do it today, tomorrow it may be illegal." And, all hail the Internet, that thing can still be bought online:
http://www.holidays.net/mlk/store/Old-60-s-70-s-Protest-type...
Re: Life is Short
#44Good timing on the topic, I mean "how short is it?" when it comes to life duration. I'm at a stage of slowing down, cutting back after working for decades "at the front line". Like everyone says, it all zoomed by so fast.
Or did it? I think it reflects the point of view, when we're involved in work, all the details to take care of, we feel overwhelmed, busy, time isn't rushing by at all. But once it's history, the past, all of that is suddenly doesn't exist, it has no reality and it is packaged up in memory as though it was just a brief moment. Kind of like closing a menu what's there is hidden, except we're not reopening it, at least not the same way ever again.
Time is relative, as Einstein said, it goes quickly sitting next to a pretty girl, but a boring lecture drags on forever. The epochs across the lifespan come and go, and I think we judge the duration of experience by its currency because involvement with events in real time gives the sense of time. The meaning of a "long" or "short" time is anchored in such reality.
Anyway I've been thinking for a while that what's important is not how much time we have left to live. After all that's not something we can actually ever know. What matters is what we do with the time we have. I'd surely agree we can't afford to waste it on irrelevancies, pipe-dreams, or bitterness. Far better to do what we can, when we can do it.
Re: Life is Short
#45I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once. When you realize how short time really is you…
Incidentally, one of the stickiest lessons I received from my Econ 101 prof was that if you ever have a choice to go out with a couple with kids or a couple without kids, you should opt for couples with kids, for they value their leisure time as though it was ground up rhino horn.
Re: Life is Short
#46I think the problem is definitely finiteness (not length).
I don't understand it when people talk about 'squeezing everything out of life' - As though you could extract real lasting substance/meaning from it. I don't believe it's possible to "Make the most" out of life - It all adds up to 0 in the end.
"Squeezing everything out of life" implies that you're literally taking the juice out of life and storing it somewhere safe/permanent - In reality, it is like squeezing an orange and then putting the juice back inside the orange.
Re: Life is Short
#47Marriage definitely made me prune bullshit from my life. I can only imagine what children would do.
I would include Anger as a subcategory of bullshit. It promotes irrationality and the after effects hamper you. In the renowned book "Emotional Intelligence" the author says that the best thing to do when angry is to focus on controlling it. The more it grows, the harder it is to escape.
Re: Life is Short
#48I'm (only) 23 and I've felt this for a while. I've been trying to leave my small no-name company for a higher calibre job in NYC for a few months now. I guess I'm lucky because I know what I want - but I need to wade through extreme amounts of bullshit to get there. I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary.
> I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary.
Be careful with equating "unproductive" and bullshit. Society at large only cares about your productivity, and there is always pressure for you to do "productive" thing that advances some imaginary life ladder.
From your POV and benefits, all those productive things might all be bullshit.
Re: Life is Short
#49An experience feels meaningful only with respect to others that don't. If it wasn't for bullshit we would never know what to cherish.
The bullshit and cherishable also seem to frequently reverse roles. Many things that seem like noise today, may return to foreground with profound meaning later.
I wonder if perhaps nothing is bullshit or meaningful after all. Experience simply plays this game of light and shadow to keep us entertained.
Re: Life is Short
#50Life is too short to not be involved in and/or contributing to anti-aging research in any way.
If Wright brothers (and other flight enthusiasts around that time) had not taken the initiative, academics, pundits, and "experts" had it settled that heavier-than-air flight is impossible.
It had to eventually happen because technology is inevitable, but we might have conquered flight in 1953 instead of 1903.
In the case of anti-aging, such a difference means you either die or barely make it past the last generation to die.