Life lessons from the death bed

Nietzsche smiles up from the abyss toward you.

I don't think there is any advice as such to be taken from these sort of articles, but that is balanced by the fact that most people operate without any particular regard for the eventual certainty of death and if they reflect on it maybe they'll do something differently. Strategies and goals that make sense when rolled out to infinity do not always do so well over 100 years. Seeing what people value on their deathbed can be a source of inspiration for what did and didn't seem to work.

Although, in my view, there is no reason to perceive a dying person as having special insight. If insight matters it can be achieved at any age. Literally the best strategy I've seen in the face of death is just to relax, go with it and try not to get too attached to life. And that mindset offers no guidance at all on what is good to do with the time we have.

Some insightful thought there right!!!

If you're interested in this, you may want to look at Daniel Pink's book The Power of Regret. Interview (audio and video options):

> Human beings are undeniably complex, and what motivates us can often be a mystery, even to ourselves. So, how do we go about gathering and analyzing the data that will help us answer the most fundamental questions about our lives and our purpose? The answers may lie in an unexpectedly rich source of knowledge, our regrets. While regret is likely to have a decidedly negative connotation for most of us, it is also extremely powerful and can teach us a great deal about ourselves and what we value. It is an emotion that is present in all of us, and social scientists (like anthropologists and sociologists) have been fascinated by the subject for decades. Today on the show, we are joined by one such expert, Daniel Pink, author of the book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. In our conversation, Daniel shares details about the research he conducted for his book, how he determined the four main categories of regret, and what we can learn from our regrets by confronting them head-on. We also discuss Daniel’s 2011 New York Times Bestselling title, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and what he thinks about working from home in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daniel is an exceptional storyteller and is highly knowledgeable on the subjects of regret, motivation, and the important role they play in our lives. To learn more about the many facets of regret and how it can help you thrive, be sure to tune in today!

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/246

Harvard has also been running a multi-decade (since 1938), and now multi-generational, studies on happiness and the current directors (there have been a few over the years) recently published a book with their current understanding of the data, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/harvard-ha...

* https://archive.ph/aCkTj

From a 2012 book from another director:

> According to The Atlantic, George Vaillant's main conclusion is that the warmth of relationships throughout life has the greatest positive impact on life satisfaction. Put differently, Vaillant says the study shows: "Happiness is love. Full stop."[8]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Study

Yeah. It has been very helpful to me once or twice in my adult life to get uncomfortably close to having no savings and negative cash flow, because it has taught me that I hate that. And that there are things I truly value - like living near amenities, traveling to see family, having a coffee and pastry in a coffee shop, going to a sandwich shop for lunch, buying books, going to the movie theater - that are costly, such that I am not nearly as happy living an ascetic as I am when I can afford those things. It has helped me feel a lot less guilty, a lot less like all the compensation I receive and ask for is just greed.

What I have landed on is that achieving "financial independence" is important to me because it buys time, but beyond that point I don't care. Or maybe a better, though jargon-y, way to put it is that it buys optionality, and that I value that very highly (and I think most people do).

I really like working. And I really like spending time with my family. What I really dislike is when I have to spend more time working, rather than being with my family, than I want to, in order to avoid that asceticism that I hate. And, having not yet achieved financial independence, that's pretty much always the case, because I need to work full time, and that's more than I want to work.

Financial independence also buys optionality in what kind of work I can do. Right now there is some stuff I'm really interested in that I would love to be working on in an academic setting, rather than a commercial setting. But I can't afford to do that, because the pay would not be good enough. And at other times, I've really wished I could afford to do work I would find valuable but which is just not well compensated; teaching, tutoring, community / public sector work, etc. But I haven't been able to afford to, thus far.

But of course the problem with all this is that "financial independence" is a very fuzzy line, and is a function of spending, and spending is often itself a function of income. So avoiding that trap is also important to me, and I'm not as good at that as I'd like to be.