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

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91–100 of 137 posts

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

#91
post #67

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

You have to really work at it to truly die alone. Someone somewhere is going to remember you fondly unless you were a complete asshole. This is often the fate of lifetime narcissists who no longer have the energy or presence of mind to maintain the façade. Even the most vicious of bigots have well-wishers at their funerals. You have to mess up hard to be less liked than a Fred Phelps type.

I think living a long time can go a long way in increasing levels of 'alone' when you die. Age of death is probably the single most predictive variable for how many people attend a funeral.

Let's discuss someone that lives a long time above the median lifespan. Maybe 95. Almost all of their former classmates, colleagues, siblings, cousins, partners, and peers are either dead or too sick to travel to the hospital/funeral. They've likely had mobility, energy, or cognitive problems that reduced their involvement in the community over the last 15 years. Many people 20 or 30 years younger that they might have mentored, raised, or inspired will have passed. To someone 40 years younger or more they would have always been 'old' in their mind, and generational gaps would conspire to make them further apart socially.

Someone that dies younger than median will often have more hospital visitors and more funeral attendees by the simple fact that more of the people they knew in life are alive and healthy enough to travel.

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

#92
post #45
post #9

“30 years ago I would have died of cancer; now I will die with cancer, but not of cancer.” And 30-100 years from now, the same cancer will be cured. It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding when to cure cancers.

Simply? Cancer is because cells do not copy their data exactly - sometimes because the copying process is imperfect and introduces faults, and sometimes because viruses introduce faults. There is a stupidly large number of different copying faults, so there is a stupidly large number of possible types of cancer. Cancer is entirely dissimilar to many other diseases of the body. To cure cancer requires either preventin…

It isn’t an unbounded problem, and we aren’t powerless. Our bodies even have mechanisms to handle copy faults, either destroying the rouge or repairing the damage. There are gaps and holes, but our bodies are not naive to the problem (which would make it orders of magnitude harder to solve).

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

#93

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

My grandfather wrote an autobiography (for family) and I found it interesting to read.

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes [0][1]. [0] https://www.fox4news.com/news/teacher-arrested-sexual-abuse-... [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/summit-middle-school-p...

Were the educators shielded from law enforcement: Article 1 > No, they were arrested by law enforcement. Article 2 > after first accusation, yes - school administration argued that the initial accusation was not credible. After additional accusation > No, the educator and their organizational leadership were arrested by law enforcement. Did the public school system moved teachers accused of child abuse into different…

[deleted]

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

#95
post #84

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

I have a former colleague who published his memoirs after his retirement, which I eagerly read, and I’m glad I did. Actually made me think random business memoirs could be a rich vein of untapped entertainment/edification.

Memoirs and autobiographies are often good, even when they come from everyday people. In general they are short, quick reads that are highly personal and offers their best stories, jokes, and lessons.

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

#96

No one probably wants to hear this but my partner's grandmother was in hospice. Her grandmother had so much anxiety about dying (she was in her late 90s) that the hospice just kept her doped up with morphine 24/7 (this is a lot more common than you'd imagine). When she was sober enough to realize what was happening she'd just scream. Anyway, that really did a number on me for the next few months. Seeing someone so di…

> , clearly unhappy with everything that had led up to that point

Did she express as much when she the bouts of anxiety. Curious to hear what specifically about her life that gave her so much anxiety about it ending.

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

#97
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?” — Jack Kornfield

I have been inculcated to ask those questions, yet I don’t even know the answer nor how to answer, let alone how to do it.

Don't worry about it. Who cares about that final 1% of your life. Why is all important that we model all our life around the thoughts in in that final 1%. Your brain prably isn't working that well anyways to have some sort of profound transcendal thoughts. Most ppl just thinking about mostly nothing in particular.

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

#98
“More diapers are sold for the elderly than for children.”

That’s an amazing annecdote

Today is my grandparents 95th birthday. They spent it crying that their child shoved them in a home (it wasn’t, the judge forced it), believing they lived with their parents until a few days ago

At the same time a 41 year old friend told us her cancer is “surprisingly aggressive“ and she might make September

Life is shit.

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

#99
The initial Covid breakout was a wake up call to me even though it didn’t fatally affect anyone I knew personally. It did change my perspective and wanted me to have a life without regrets. I am 49 and my wife is 47. My youngest (step)son graduated in 2020.

I also got a permanently remote job the same month at BigTech (I am assigned to a “virtual office”)

Last year, my wife and I sold both of our cars (we just bought hers the prior year), rented our house out (that we had built in 2016) to our son and two of his friends we have known for years, got rid of all of our belongings that wouldn’t fit in three suitcases and bought a fully furnished vacation home in a resort community in Florida that was a third the size of our house.

We only stay there five months out of the year from October-February. We city hop the rest of the year around the US staying in mid range hotels and take Uber everywhere.

I explicitly told my manager and skip manager I have no desire for a promotion and I at 49 years old am perfectly content at being an L5 (mid level) making a little less than a college grad Software Engineer three years out of school - I pivoted to (billable hands on keyboard) cloud consulting/app dev from enterprise dev. I make it a point to work exactly 40 hours a week.

I have never been so happy and whenever death comes. I can say I spent years (months?) living my dream.

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

#100
post #92
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply? Cancer is because cells do not copy their data exactly - sometimes because the copying process is imperfect and introduces faults, and sometimes because viruses introduce faults. There is a stupidly large number of different copying faults, so there is a stupidly large number of possible types of cancer. Cancer is entirely dissimilar to many other diseases of the body. To cure cancer requires either preventin…

It isn’t an unbounded problem, and we aren’t powerless. Our bodies even have mechanisms to handle copy faults, either destroying the rouge or repairing the damage. There are gaps and holes, but our bodies are not naive to the problem (which would make it orders of magnitude harder to solve).

I disagree.

Our cells are spaghetti code, the worst technical debt created by the random chances of evolution. There are multiple competing systems (e.g. telomeres) at cross purposes. Think trying to patch up bad software: you can perhaps make some small improvements to reliability, but overall there are so many thousands of errors due to design flaws that you cannot fix the system overall.

To fix cancer would require some extreme design challenges. We can fix a few of the bugs e.g. we reduce mutations by using sunblock. Perhaps we could copy some systems from other animals - hard but perhaps not impossible.

After we fix cancer, we need to fix cell aging, which the most obvious effects start kicking in about 60ish. Oh, and we also need to fix brains: they fail in complex ways. Human lifetime problems are fractal trees, not linear steps.

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