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

Nine things I learned in ninety years

edwardpackard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 405 posts

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#71

Post by psychoslave »

>“It’s not so difficult to be a buddha,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “Just keep your awakening alive all day long.”

And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall.

Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed.

Ok, that’s a lot of "witty remark I could make regarding" the text (and avoid doing instead). So, let’s take a bit of these advices in practice. Thank you Edward Packard for sharing with us some final reflections on life after a long one, displaying humility while presenting a vibrantly human figure.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#72

Post by isolli »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #40

Since he might not be known to most (especially a younger audience), the author is a writer best known for many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were hugely successful in the 80s. Jimmy Maher wrote about them recently https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/

Thanks for sharing. This part resonated :)

"Today, it’s all too easy to see all of the limitations and infelicities of The Cave of Time and its successors: a book of 115 pages that had, as it proudly trumpeted on the cover, 40 possible endings meant that the sum total of any given adventure wasn’t likely to span more than about three choices if you were lucky. But to a lonely, hyper-imaginative eight-year-old, none of that mattered. I was well and truly smitten, not so much by what the book was as by what I wished it to be, by what I was able to turn it into in my mind by the sheer intensity of that wish."

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#73

Post by Quekid5 »

summis wrote: post #53
ropable wrote: post #36

> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.

Overall I agree with this comment. A determinist would take this position even further and argue that there is nothing left that we could be in control of - it is causes and effects and maybe some randomness all the way down. Even those things we think are our free choices.

That's the thing about free choice. I don't believe it fundamentally exists, but I can't help behaving as if it does.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#74

Post by psychoslave »

shark1 wrote: post #59

> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind." I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.

Pleasure is not the same as happy. Probably no one, even the luckiest entity in the universe, can avoid to go through some painful emotion.

But how we handle raw emotions, within interpretation processes, is what makes all the difference.

Actually, an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly conceivable.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#75

Post by ErigmolCt »

It's unsettling how often we think we’re in control when we’re really just chasing impulses or clinging to stories we’ve told ourselves. The bit about sleepwalking through life resonated... Reminds me of how easy it is to let years slip by on autopilot, especially in high-functioning careers

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#76

Post by mi_lk »

colordrops wrote: post #43
Kurtz79 wrote: post #40

Since he might not be known to most (especially a younger audience), the author is a writer best known for many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were hugely successful in the 80s. Jimmy Maher wrote about them recently https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/

He's also the grandfather of David Cornswet, the actor playing Superman in the latest movie.

nice trivia

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#77

Post by psychoslave »

Quekid5 wrote: post #73
summis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall I agree with this comment. A determinist would take this position even further and argue that there is nothing left that we could be in control of - it is causes and effects and maybe some randomness all the way down. Even those things we think are our free choices.

That's the thing about free choice. I don't believe it fundamentally exists, but I can't help behaving as if it does.

Yes, that’s the ultimate argument against determinism. Either one actually sincerely believe in determinism and trying to convince someone else they are wrong about free-will are just displaying their inability to take their hypothesis to its full conclusion, or they are just trying to dispel their own doubts by bending other people opinions.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#78

Post by K0balt »

shark1 wrote: post #59

> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind." I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.

I would argue that perhaps you have confused happiness with joy, or I have confused happiness with a lack of sadness, or perhaps with satisfaction.

While I find that joy is a fickle and fleeting thing, I feel that I am happy most of the time, satisfied that things are as they must be, or at least close enough that the state of affairs does not poorly reflect on my efforts.

Sadness or grief make their appearance, but need not make life a poverty of happiness.

I think probably many people think that happiness and joy are the same thing, thus robbing themselves of happiness in an eternal pursuit of joy. If joy were constant, it wouldn’t be the joyful treasure that it is.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#79

Post by ErigmolCt »

shark1 wrote: post #59

> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind." I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.

If happiness were truly a "default" state, it would stop registering as happiness at all

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#80

Post by Keirmot »

zwnow wrote: post #7

[flagged]

I don’t want to argue with you. I just want to say I understand the pain in what you wrote replying to other people. Life can make people hard, but that doesn’t make your hurt any less real. You don’t owe anyone optimism, but you also don’t have to carry all of what you're carrying alone.

I’m going to echo what others have said, and please, I ask you to read this with the most generous light possible. You deserve support, and it’s okay to reach for it when the weight feels too heavy, you ought to seek help, mate.

Post reply on HN