31–40 of 152 posts
Bollocks. My cats regularly imagine a future in which I'm going towards the fridge to provide them with food...... ...when the reality is I'm going elsewhere and just going to trip over them.
Live life for its own sake. The gift of life is life itself. What's the alternative? Twice in my life I've grasped the concept of death, and it made my heart race with an exhilarating feeling of suffocating claustrophobic for two reasons: 1. It's coming for me one day 2. Not just the lack of agency in the universe, but the lack of even the realisation of the lack of agency. All of this (wide sweeping hand gesture ack…
This is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad. Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.
I'll be a contrarian and post this:
>>No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's lifeSteve Jobs
There are as many ways to live, as many meanings to life, as many philosophies of the nature of things as there are beings in the universe. There's really nothing much to learn, because there are endless things to learn. One of my favorite comments on Hacker News was posted a few days ago. To quote: "On and on you will go, making sense of the world, forming notions of order, and being surprised in ways large and smal…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad. Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.
Why do you think that an end to death is close but not close enough for the average aged HN reader
There are as many ways to live, as many meanings to life, as many philosophies of the nature of things as there are beings in the universe. There's really nothing much to learn, because there are endless things to learn. One of my favorite comments on Hacker News was posted a few days ago. To quote: "On and on you will go, making sense of the world, forming notions of order, and being surprised in ways large and smal…
Depends how detailed you want to get. All of us have a need to be social and creative, IMO, and Gray would say each sex has its own traits which do not necessarily hold all the time but can be instructive. I gathered this from his "Men are from Mars..." book.
Congratulations, dear philosopher. "Living in imagined future" is called motivation. You just told people that they shouldn't have any motivation beyond primitive impulses (hunger, fear, lust) such as those found in a cat. I'm not sure this is good advice for humans, however.
Live life for its own sake. The gift of life is life itself. What's the alternative? Twice in my life I've grasped the concept of death, and it made my heart race with an exhilarating feeling of suffocating claustrophobic for two reasons: 1. It's coming for me one day 2. Not just the lack of agency in the universe, but the lack of even the realisation of the lack of agency. All of this (wide sweeping hand gesture ack…
This is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad. Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.
If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture.
When people express the desire to live forever, either here on earth or in an imagined afterlife, I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.
Live life for its own sake. The gift of life is life itself. What's the alternative? Twice in my life I've grasped the concept of death, and it made my heart race with an exhilarating feeling of suffocating claustrophobic for two reasons: 1. It's coming for me one day 2. Not just the lack of agency in the universe, but the lack of even the realisation of the lack of agency. All of this (wide sweeping hand gesture ack…
In buddhism there is the four noble truths, a teaching about living life and facing death. In short, what many people afraid in death (or in life generally) is the fear of losing, either losing their possession, losing their loved ones or how those loved ones will feel when losing you, losing your ability to do your job, etc. In the teaching, if someone is able to overcome that fear (suffering / dissatisfaction), he…
https://web.archive.org/web/20150709140148/http://www.nobelp...