Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Life lessons from the death bed

isonomiaquarterly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 196 posts

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#171

Post by sanderjd »

Clubber wrote: post #102
sanderjd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! This whole life thing is about striking a balance between "eat your cake today" and "spend your day in the field cultivating wheat to make the flour to make more cake in the future". In every moment of my life there has been some "cake" I could have "eaten" that would have been more enjoyable than all the hours I spent up in the middle of the night with screaming babies. But on my deathbed I'm certain it will…

Your children are your cake.

Sometimes! Increasingly so as they get older. But a lot of the time, personally I would say most of the time until they're four years old or so, it's more like plowing, sowing, harvesting, and milling than it is like enjoying a slice of cake.

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#172

Post by dghughes »

My Dad was a blue collar worker docks, janitor, painter, ships, loved fishing, loved hockey (Go Habs!). Dad died in hospice I sat there with him as he died. They pumped him full of drugs not saying what they were but I knew that he probably asked to not feel anything. I should say hospice is a great thing it's not a hospital bed that is a terrible place to be sick! The didn't even make Dad's bed!

One thing I didn't know at the time was about hallucinations. Dad said he saw a wooly mammoth outside his room in the garden. Dad liked to joke and so we though nothing of it. Later I found out that meant a person was near death. It's often a silly thing they see or a loved one not death or bad things.

Dad had been sick for nearly 20 years it was slow at first tiredness, he retired three years early, but then came the diagnosis of IPF and then five really rough years and one last bad six months. Such a long illness it seemed like a good thing to have time with him but sadness dragged on relationships. Mom was in denial until the moment he died (she went home no clue of how imminent death was). I didn't realize how much of my life it affected really about half my life.

Not even a month into hospice Dad died a 8:40pm on my birthday April 21 in 2012 as Rick Steves Travel was on PBS TV channel showing Rome. If anything I say anxiety is what killed my Dad he was much better physically in hospice but the weight of being there in that place as good as it was is incredibly heavy and hard to bear.

I am now astonished at how people older than Dad are walking around living their life no issues. Life is amazing we take it for granted.

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#173

Post by digging »

hotnfresh wrote: post #170
digging wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ceasing to exist will happen. It's guaranteed to happen. Not from your point of view! You can experience every moment leading up to your death and may be lucky enough to realize you're about to die, but it's not possible to be aware of the end of your own existence. It is always a future event. (Based on our best models, that is. Obviously the living can't possibly know what it's like to be permanently dead.) > The…

Yeah, I've done the stoicism thing and all that (since before it was cool, LOL). It's not like I'm crippled by anxiety about death. I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point.

> since before it was cool, LOL

You must be quite old, then!

> I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point.

What is the point then?

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#174

Post by frontman1988 »

MichaelRo wrote: post #153
techdragon wrote: post #14

Touching stuff... It could be middle age tainting my perspective... but sometimes I feel this sort of... not visceral , but very close and undeniable ... experience with death is easier for people who are young. Death isn't real for most people at 17, no matter how much they have seen, many see the death of a grandparent, or two, or perhaps even four, before reaching 17, but most still enter their late teens, feeling…

I don't fear death, I fear pain and torment. Which is pretty common in the old age and can hit you at any time, even in the young age. That's why my mental bandage for the very likely torture at the end of the line is medically assisted suicide. I don't delude myself that I will never need that, in fact I'm almost certain I'll get to a point where it will be the humane option. Everyone I got to know in my family died…

>medical euthanasia isn't an option

Aren't there plenty good open source alternatives to achieve this without aid from the government? Like something as simple as CO poisoning would do the job convincingly and cheaply.

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#175

Post by skeaker »

saiya-jin wrote: post #78
JofArnold wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone of the same age I feel the same. Sometimes I'm enjoying myself or finding it especially easy to be stoical about mortality. But sometimes it makes me breathless with dread for a few minutes. The realisation I was probably born a bit too early for technology to give me immortality saddens me; I only have so many weekends left to do hobbies and even fewer blocks of a few thousand hours to master something ne…

I dont get this obsession with immortality, if its unleashed then it will be to enhance slavery. Dictators that dont die, potential dark ages. Enjoy rather current times, we have it easy and pretty compared to whats coming

Quite hard to enjoy the current times if you're dead. I would take my chances with the immortality even in spite of some vague "dark ages" hand-wave scenario, thanks.

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#176

Post by hotnfresh »

digging wrote: post #173
hotnfresh wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've done the stoicism thing and all that (since before it was cool, LOL). It's not like I'm crippled by anxiety about death. I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point.

> since before it was cool, LOL You must be quite old, then! > I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point. What is the point then?

This:

> 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.

Isn't addressing the thing that (I think?) most people are worried about when they worry about death. I don't think most are worried about how bad they will feel after they die, which is what this is concerned with. It's totally beside the point.

The point is that we are conscious, now, and imagining what it means for that consciousness to end and for the entire future of the universe to not exist to us at all—really imagining it—can be rather unpleasant. Upsetting, even. It's subjectively identical to the end of the universe.

"But you used to not exist"—irrelevant, because 1) I do now, and 2) I at least get some kind of window into what all that was, since it's... the past.

"But you'll experience nothing, so it won't be unpleasant"—even less relevant. I'm not worried about that state of (not) being, being unpleasant. I'm not worried about existing with an awareness of having died, as mentioned in the quoted bit.

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#177

Post by digging »

hotnfresh wrote: post #176
digging wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since before it was cool, LOL You must be quite old, then! > I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point. What is the point then?

This: > 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. Isn't addressing the thing that (I think?) most people are worried about when they worry about death. I don't think most are worried about how bad they will feel after they die, which is what this is concerned with. It's totally beside the p…

> imagining what it means for that consciousness to end and for the entire future of the universe to not exist to us at all—really imagining it—can be rather unpleasant.

It's unpleasant, and it's difficult to imagine, that doesn't mean you should be anxious about your own death.

Again... from your subjective experience, I'm not sure it's even meaningful to say that you will die. You will only ever experience being alive.

You can't even be sure that the universe will continue after your death, either. Does it seem most likely that it will? In some models of the universe, it's actually infinitely more likely that it won't, because it all exists inside your (Boltzmann) brain.

Like what is the specific thing that causes anxiety? That's still not clear to me. Not-knowing, yeah, that can cause anxiety. And it can be soothed by changing your perspective, taking delight in the mysteries of existence. We all have a visceral anxiety about death which our bodies evolved to have, because it's quite useful for a living thing to want to stay alive. But that's not based in reason, and we can use reason to alleviate our anxiety.

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#178

Post by escapedmoose »

plasticchris wrote: post #85
escapedmoose wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reason to perceive a dying person as having special insight Have you ever had a near-death experience? Those often seem to be followed by a sense of clarity that inspires some people to live better. They seem to cut through the crud and reveal the unimportance of certain things, and highlight the value of other things

There have been a couple of times I knew death was possible in the immediate future and all was out of my control. I thought, what happens, happens. And I let go, relaxed and peaceful. But it is not easy nor useful to hold that attitude in everyday life.

Maybe it’s not easy, but many people find that attitude useful in a variety of circumstances. Maybe this is part of why some of us seek the advice/perspectives of the dying. Life is rarely peaceful unless we make it deliberately so.

Re: Life lessons from the death bed

#179

Post by CrazyPyroLinux »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #100
mtklein wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One bit I find easy to lose sight of is that if I do spend my day cultivating wheat for flour for a cake, to make sure to eventually make and eat that cake, and not just spend all my time getting better at cultivating more and more wheat.

I dunno, I've discovered a deep joy in cultivating, to the point where it has developed into my "cake" to simply cultivate. I don't mind if someone else ultimately reaps the benefits, since from my own vantage I won't regret having spent an extra day in the field, doing the work. To me, this is the goal; to be able to look up towards the sun every day, sore muscles and sweat dripping, and say, "thank you for this day…

Thank you for leading me to https://grugbrain.dev/
Post reply on HN