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Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

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Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#101

Religion is the Earth's cancer. I don't see how this is special apart from the fact that this person belonged to one religious belief. I hope to see rationality and logic prevail over bullshit over the short course of life left for me and my fellow earthlings.

You must be an unbelievably horrible person.

Please leave HN and never come back.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. I feel like this sentiment is very common, but is implicitly stating that all of the other things, family, friends, personal health etc... are not games - when I don't see why that would be the case. Nothing distinguishes those things for me. Cre…

Spoken like somebody without kids. They trigger responses built into our brains that make family very much more important that all the rest. Thus, family isn't a game any more.

That's exactly why I feel having a family is nothing fundamental, it's just bunch of hard-wired hormonal failure modes. Not to say they aren't pleasant though.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#103

"Goldberg collapsed at a private beach-front villa near the Four Seasons Resort in Punta Mita, near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico" Today, 21,000 children died from causes that are preventable. I don't see any posts on HN about that. http://www.unicef.org/mdg/childmortality.html "Then said he also to him that bade him, When thou make a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy…

I also find it hypocritical that usually religion is bashed/downvoted to hell, yet its not the case when a rich person is doing it. I never heard of Goldberg till now... and I think thats the case for many people on HN.

Many people here will have know Goldberg personally, especially the people who setup, run and pay for Hacker News. Please consider their feelings, you are in their house.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#104

The prayer got me the most. "Let me not die, while I am still alive..." That's powerful stuff. The idea of asking for more time like a kid in a swimming pool - just 5 more minutes! I hope I do die while I'm still alive though. Dying after I'm done living sounds worse.

I feel the other way around. I'd rather die while I'm alive (doing or living through something really exciting) than completing something exciting, then entering the dawn of life realizing that I'll never do something as exciting again, and then dying. I wanna die in the middle of having fun, not in a retirement home.

I understood it differently. It's Sheryl saying the prayer, not Dave. It's not "don't let me die at the prime of my life," it's "don't force me to live on after losing everything that makes life bearable, a living death." To me, also, that is powerful stuff.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#105
post #49
post #3

Paul Buchheit wrote a wonderful post, after similar circumstances, that I often re-read: > On a more practical level, what matters most in our day-to-day lives is that we're good to ourselves and to each other. It's actually not possible to only do one or the other -- we must do both or neither, but that's a topic for another time. Sometimes, when I write about startups or other interests of mine, I worry that perhap…

Good message. In the old days we needed a Buddha, Jesus or a Krishna to remind us of the simple truths. Today we look for them in blog posts. Everything changes and nothing changes.

What is the New Testament if not a bunch of blog posts published together in a paper form? ;). Writing forms evolve and change names, but they're still fundamentally the same as ever, and as important as they always were.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the things that—on your deathbed—you expect to regret? Always found these philosophical shortcut tropes (eg. if you had just one day left...) amusing, but not particularly illuminating because they over-simplify life long achievements to mere regret-avoidance. If you are asking yourself that, then 1. You are privileged to be at that level on the Maslow hierarchy and 2. you already know the answer. Embedded i…

You should be a little careful. The odd thing about creative professionals, which includes most software developers, is that if you take Maslow's hierarchy of needs as the truth for the general population, for creative professionals this pyramid of needs is inverted. You see, most creative professionals are profoundly unhappy people. This is because the equation for happiness is usually easy - your expectations have…

A 32 year old lecturing a (supposed) 20-something about life experience. I guess cynicism is becoming younger and younger.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#107

Religion is the Earth's cancer. I don't see how this is special apart from the fact that this person belonged to one religious belief. I hope to see rationality and logic prevail over bullshit over the short course of life left for me and my fellow earthlings.

Generalizing, dogmatic attitudes, some of which are religious - and some of which are expressed in your comment - are harmful. It's just as silly - and intellectually easy - to blindly condemn culture and religion as it is to blindly follow them. There's a wonderfully epic two-part South Park episode that makes this point: http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s10e12-go-god-go http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s1…

It is not silly at all to condemn silly and harmful beliefs and children indoctrination. The more I see the more convinced I am that Hitchens was right: religion poisons everything.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we choose the society we want That's not really true. I don't think there's any meaningful sense in which anybody chose this society. We don't have that level of control.

Then we should dispense with the admonitions about reducing our focus on "the game", work, etc. in order to focus on "what's truly important in life". Eating is important.

That's why more and more people are pushing towards things like basic income and achieving self-sustaining technology levels. Because when basic sustenance is free to everyone and required maintenance work is minimized, one is free to focus on "truly important things in life" and do meaningful work, instead of engaging in bullshit jobs and "games" to earn the bread for oneself and their family.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#109
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK it didn't on bbc.co.uk. Perhaps bbc.com but I don't look at that. It's all about FIFA bribes and rollercoaster accidents.

I'm British reading from the UK. He died weeks ago. However, it wouldn't take much reading to realise that a) this wasn't just some dude who died and b) this isn't just some wifey who is talking about her grief.

So everyone else who dies is just dude and wifey?

Way to devalue 99.999% of the population.

My wife was a palliative care nurse. She taught me that everyone is remarkable but when it comes to dying, for one person to be valued higher than another based on social standing, celebrity status or perceived societal worth.

This is merely voyeurism.

Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband

#110
post #92
post #72

For those like me that are wondering what is going on, apparently some Silicon Valley executive died recently.

A human being died and another human being went through grief and wrote a moving post about her journey. Do you really need to apply (what I'm sensing to be) pejorative labels to it? Death may not be your typical HN fare, but it is a subject that touches all of us eventually, so far with no exception. I am glad that she was willing to write this and share it. My life is richer for having read it.

I don't think the parent was trying to apply pejorative labels or there was any malicious intent behind their post. It was more along the lines of being unable to parse the title, IMO.

It's also good practice to critically examine any written piece, regardless of whom it may come from. While you may derive aesthetic and ostensibly emotional value from it, not everybody may necessarily feel that way.

In fact, my life wasn't changed or impacted in any profound sense after reading this. You should keep in mind that not everyone may think the same way as you, or even share the same reality.

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