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What if you could do it all over? (2020)

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Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#121

Post by hirvi74 »

vharuck wrote: post #56
anonzzzies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never needed that: I like life because I know I will die soon and nothing I do matters. That is the thing I would've liked to know earlier.

>I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different. - Kurt Vonnegut

Reminds me of the quote:

"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."

~ Alan Watts

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#122

Post by runamuck »

ivape wrote: post #66
runamuck wrote: post #62

I "died" in 2018 and it felt like waking up from a dream. This world just melted away like an amusing afterthought. That helped informed my attitude to life: enjoy it, make life enjoyable for others, spread love.

Can you explain that. Was it a near fatal experience? I've heard from someone similar that once they processed nearly dying, they pretty much got all the perspective they ever needed.

Yes - near fatal. I floated away from my body, and saw myself in 3rd person view about 100 feet up. The vision became grainy, like a VHS tape. I had the same sensation that I have when I wake up in the morning after vivid dreams, and the memories (and world/ physics) of those dreams fade away - this world faded away. I remember thinking "oh, why did I worry so much down there?" and found it funny.

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#123

Post by mikewarot »

The real question is how much of my current knowledge would I take with me? If I don't get anything, all I'd do is repeat everything again.

The next is what the restart age would be... Too young and I might get myself killed by a vengeful father.

If I could go back to somewhere around my 20th birthday, with all I know now. Technology wise, I'd do everything I could to make sure Email was autheticated, zero terminated strings were abolished and get a BitGrid chip made.

Oh... And HTML would definitely be a language for the separate addition layering of hypertext markup, instead of the crap we have now.

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#124

Post by badc0ffee »

jmathai wrote: post #6

Family and children eliminated thoughts of my “unlived” lives. Life is hard. Focusing on gratitude helps me be thankful for what I have instead of thinking about what may have been.

This is basically the lesson in About Time (2013).

(I liked that movie)

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#125

Post by badc0ffee »

racl101 wrote: post #45
rwmj wrote: post #7

If you had perfect future knowledge (which is what this article is really about) you wouldn't want to invent Slack (or Google), which lets face it would have been a ton of work with a very uncertain outcome. You'd want to invest in Slack / Google at some early stage, do no work whatsoever, and enjoy the proceeds.

Pretty much. I always find it funny when people say: "I'd invent Google" when they could barely pass their first year Calculus class. As if stating the idea is all it took but not the engineering and well ... the actual difficult work. But everyone can invest. That much is totally doable.

Do those people know what PageRank is? Even if they did, could they implement it? (And would they be able to come up with their own name for it, given they are not Larry Page?)

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#127

Post by saulpw »

gchamonlive wrote: post #94
jebarker wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put! I would add that probably nobody achieves this consistently, it's a lifetime practice. So coping strategies like I proposed her can still be useful in the chaos of daily life.

I agree but I'd add that there is nothing to fix. Life is just tough and sometimes you cry because it hurts, and sometimes it fills you with joy and you rejoice. Rinse and repeat until you time has passed and it's now our descendants turn in this world. Maybe it's clearer in the form of a question: how are you completely sure you are NOT enlightened if you don't know what it is to be enlightened?

Because you don't just hurt, you suffer. Across the spiritual spectrum people report that "enlightenment" brings a radical reduction or elimination of self-inflicted suffering, and a profound inner peace. This jives with my limited experience of it as well.

Someone kicks you in the shin, it causes pain. If it triggers a whole internal loop of fear and worry and anger and revenge and trauma and suffering, then you've hit upon your ego which you're unable to let go of. If your internal experience isn't sticky, then before you know it, the pain has dissipated and you're on to whatever the next present moment brings.

That internal loop is what there is to "fix".

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#128

Post by hshshshshsh »

saulpw wrote: post #127
gchamonlive wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I'd add that there is nothing to fix. Life is just tough and sometimes you cry because it hurts, and sometimes it fills you with joy and you rejoice. Rinse and repeat until you time has passed and it's now our descendants turn in this world. Maybe it's clearer in the form of a question: how are you completely sure you are NOT enlightened if you don't know what it is to be enlightened?

Because you don't just hurt, you suffer. Across the spiritual spectrum people report that "enlightenment" brings a radical reduction or elimination of self-inflicted suffering, and a profound inner peace. This jives with my limited experience of it as well. Someone kicks you in the shin, it causes pain. If it triggers a whole internal loop of fear and worry and anger and revenge and trauma and suffering, then you've…

Are you able to sustain that? Or was this one off experiences?

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#129

Post by hshshshshsh »

khazhoux wrote: post #118
hshshshshsh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also selfish to bring humans that goes through immense suffering in their life so that you get meaning out of life or get joy from kids.

Humans reproduce. It's just what we do. We've been doing it basically as long as we've existed! It's some kind of weird hubris when people think they've awakened to some grand truth that life is suffering and therefore reproduction is cruel.

Do humans reproduce. Yes.

Is life full of suffering. Yes.

Is life full of joy. Yes

All are true.

Re: What if you could do it all over? (2020)

#130

Post by glimshe »

jajko wrote: post #53
glimshe wrote: post #3

My life turned out alright. Full of problems, pains and questions like everyone's else's but, in the grand scheme of things, I'm incredibly fortunate given the amount of poverty and misery in this world. I always liked the thought experiment of living my life again. However, I'm much more interested in the thought of living in the future . If I could do it again, I'd take the risk of living 1000 years from now. I kno…

Maybe you are tech nerd so all the probable tech progress would amaze you. But unless you yourself would literally do time travel (and be treated like a primitive Neanderthal), your level of satisfaction would most probably be the same since all amazing and cool becomes a new baseline rather quickly, and curiosity and longing for next future would be there again. We could also end up in millenia-spanning dictatorship…

I'm happy now, but I have a more optimistic take. I believe that humanity could make progress in conquering unhappiness, disease or even death. While happiness levels possibly didn't improve as much as we expected in the last 1000 years, we did eliminate much misery in the world. Losing loved ones to diseases is bad, among many improvements we made. So, I think that in 1000 years, our descendants may be living in an objectively better world - possibly even without the gadgets we rely on so much for our happiness today.
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