Life lessons from the death bed

I'm still in my 20s, so maybe I still have some youthful arrogance and distance rattling about up in my noggin that makes this an easy and useless thing to say. I have witnessed the death of my father, and a couple of my friends from childhood are already dead. But I come from suicidal stock, so maybe that's part of it too.

I think at this point I fear more the nature of getting older, having seen some of the early, innocuous signs of it in myself. Still at the age where in another life I could die in some glorious way, valorizing youth. But I'm set up for the long haul in this life, even as I want to do something reckless.

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”

I can't honestly say whether I find eternal life more appealing than permanent death.

Recently, my two-year-old daughter asked me where she was in a picture of me and her mom. I made the mistake of saying she "didn't exist yet". She seemed horrified by the idea of non-existence. I had never considered before that the eternity of non-existence before birth could be just as horrifying as the eternal death afterwords. I actually find it kind of comforting that death will be no different than before I was born.

> 1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

> 2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

> 3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

> 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

> 5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I've (so far) concluded that the way to frame it is "If I were to go today, would I be — on balance — happy that I've done what I could with what I had?".

Life is a partial knowledge game.

Everything is a bet on some future outcome, whether it is "will I enjoy this menu choice in 5 minutes?" or "will this education/career choice make me healthier/wealthier/sizer in three decades?"

We live in times where we can more reliably live 8-10 decades and have a plausible chance of living long enough to see substantial healthspan extension science to indefinite lifespans, yet we could also not see the next sunrise...

So, it's just as valid a bet to go all-in on the Hedonic treadmill or organize every hour around life extension, or anything in between. Enjoy it all now and be hated by your future self (unless you're lucky like Keith Richards, still rockin' at 79), or spend less-enjoyable effort now and enjoy being in shape later, etc., etc., etc.

It is all place your bets, take your chances... (& we can often change course later as we learn about life and ourselves).

I first saw tacked to a door in a rock climbing school, one of my favorite aphorisms:

Good judgement comes from experience.

Experience comes from bad judgement.

The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen. You'll never be aware of having died or lost anything through your own death. It's just insanely difficult for us to internalize that idea because we're animals, we avoid death instinctively and fear loss instinctively.