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‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

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Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#31

Post by katzgrau »

brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

The most basic advice is to try to focus on the time you have with them now - really spend some quality time and don't put it off.

If you're anxious about the future, it's because you're spending you're time in this mentally fast forwarded space where you're dealing with the imagined realities of it.

Your imagined ideas of future challenges, in my experience, are usually much worse than the ones I actually deal with. IMO, anxiety has more drawbacks than advantages.

Let tomorrow's problems be tomorrow's problems. Enjoy your parents now.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#32

Post by phoe-krk »

melling wrote: post #30
phoe-krk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, your "simply" is probably the greatest understatement I've read on HN in 2023 so far. There's nothing simple about coordinating people like this, starting from facilitating communication across individual people to bootstrap the process and ending at grabbing enough attention of people on top to gain the necessary world-scale attention towards the problem.

“It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding…” You misread what I said. I never said it was a simple problem, I said it was simply a matter of deciding to solve the problem. The Apollo program, for comparison, took 400,000 people a decade to get to the moon, and 2.5% of GDP. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program If we agree the problem will be solved, t…

No, you misread what I said. "Simply a matter of deciding to solve the problem" is not "simple" by any means. There's no political incentive to solve cancer since isn't a problem that brings political advantage when solved, like there's no political "race to the moon" with a rival country that happened with Apollo. Race to the moon decided because USA and USSR went into a game of who gets there first; cancer has no such ongoing game and it's a much less spectacular aspect with results that are invisible when compared to videos taken on the surface of the moon.

Speaking of results, solving cancer would also mean that people get to live even longer than they do now, which, in an already locally overpopulated and locally aging society, would generate many more issues that death by cancer "conveniently" "solves" at the moment.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#33

Post by walkhour »

belter wrote: post #23
Buttons840 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was raised in a religion and I'm considering returning to it. It gave me peace, and although I know I may be deluding myself, I like the effects. I think I can hold both views in myself, this religion serves me, but it may be wrong and I understand it doesn't serve everyone and it's okay if others choose other religions or no religion. I will also be much more hesitant to give money to my religion. So far it has he…

I see the number of priests abusing children, and take that as an example that, neither religion made them a better person, neither they seem afraid of the after life they preach about...

And nevertheless the percentage of priests abusing children is lower than the percentage of school teachers doing the same. Make sure to bring that up every time you talk about the public school system.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#34

Post by baxtr »

renewiltord wrote: post #29
irrational wrote: post #27

> am 73 years old and I’ve had a difficult life, but a long and good one. I just got back from visiting my grandmother who is a few weeks away from turning 100. She still lives alone, cooks her own food, walks without assistance, has a tremendous memory and still has the mental acuity of any intelligent healthy young person. Her son, my father is 75 and is a physician and still works 60 hour weeks (which he considers…

Dude, we know. Everything has a long tail. If everyone in the tail for everything came and posted about stuff we'd be sitting here primarily reading comments that go: - $500k? I make $5 million and that doesn't even seem enough - 2 children? I have 5 children and that barely feels like a family - 3 vim plugins? I have 1E80 and even that is barely enough to write Hello World in Java

Long tail makes for good stories though.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#35

Post by cinntaile »

walkhour wrote: post #33
belter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the number of priests abusing children, and take that as an example that, neither religion made them a better person, neither they seem afraid of the after life they preach about...

And nevertheless the percentage of priests abusing children is lower than the percentage of school teachers doing the same. Make sure to bring that up every time you talk about the public school system.

> And nevertheless the percentage of priests abusing children is lower than the percentage of school children doing the same.

Are you sure this is what you mean?

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#36

Post by CrazyPyroLinux »

meghan_rain wrote: post #24
phoe-krk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, your "simply" is probably the greatest understatement I've read on HN in 2023 so far. There's nothing simple about coordinating people like this, starting from facilitating communication across individual people to bootstrap the process and ending at grabbing enough attention of people on top to gain the necessary world-scale attention towards the problem.

hahah it's the infamous HN Dropbox comment but on steroids

My startup idea is "Uber for Cancer!"

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#37

Post by Mobil1 »

bagacrap wrote: post #28
irrational wrote: post #27

> am 73 years old and I’ve had a difficult life, but a long and good one. I just got back from visiting my grandmother who is a few weeks away from turning 100. She still lives alone, cooks her own food, walks without assistance, has a tremendous memory and still has the mental acuity of any intelligent healthy young person. Her son, my father is 75 and is a physician and still works 60 hour weeks (which he considers…

Welp, my dad had an unexpected and fatal heart attack at 58. I would count myself lucky to live to 73.

Mine died at 59 while working in a hospital pharmacy.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#38

Post by arwhatever »

gamerDude wrote: post #3
brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

I don't necessarily have anything for pre-loss anxiety, but I did suddenly lose my dad. As in talked to him the day before and he was feeling a little sick and the next day I learned that he had died alone in his home. Without going into some of the sadder details, I can tell you what helped the most. I felt complete in our relationship in the moment. I still have times when I wish I could share something with him. B…

I had basically this same thing happen a few years back. Dad mentioned he felt ill in an online chat and then that was it.

He lived in a podunk and traveled little throughout his life - I lived in a larger metro area with some world-class outdoors, and just by luck it turned out he loved coming out to visit.

So we had him out to visit over and over and over, and that traveling around with him is one of the things I’m most thankful to have done.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#39

Post by sokoloff »

walkhour wrote: post #33
belter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the number of priests abusing children, and take that as an example that, neither religion made them a better person, neither they seem afraid of the after life they preach about...

And nevertheless the percentage of priests abusing children is lower than the percentage of school teachers doing the same. Make sure to bring that up every time you talk about the public school system.

Many have higher expectations of adults’ self-control than of schoolchildren.

For most professions, that seems to be upheld.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#40

Post by CrazyPyroLinux »

brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

Lately I've found a lot of practical comfort in the ideas of Stoicism (tempus fugit, memento mori, etc)

Somewhat orthogonal (and thus compatible with) any other faith/religion you may have.

I've found The Daily Stoic to be a good accessible on-ramp for these ideas: https://dailystoic.com/stoic-response-grief/ https://dailystoic.com/how-to-cure-anxiety/

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