I don't like these "this is the time you live" sort of analyses. They make me uneasy and potentially depressed. So no thanks, backing out here.
Four thousand weeks
121–130 of 255 posts
Re: Four thousand weeks
#122Thanks for the existential dread.
Re: Four thousand weeks
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it lead to anything good if you will not stop it at certain point? Will you not end up with pure nihilism if it does not end?
Yeah. Absurdism is pretty rad. Embrace the abyss, and you will never have to gaze directly at it again. Life is inherently meaningless. That means it has any meaning you want it to. Comparing it to the alternatives of what I'm told life is supposed to be all about and mean, I have to say I like making it up as I go along far better. I'll never know everything, and that means I'll always have something to live for. Th…
Life can't be meaningless if it can also have whatever meaning you give it, unless you give it the degenerate meaning of 'nothing', though.
Hence my issue with this: If you need to use (1) "life is meaningless" as a stepping stone to (2) "therefore, life has whatever meaning you give it", you've already agreed to that constraint by default. I'm sure it helps a lot of people get from (1) to (2), but better still is to realize (2) is in a sense _deeper_ than (1) and you can just throw out (1) once you have (2) locked down enough in your psyche.
Re: Four thousand weeks
#124There are a few ways people take such a message - yes, life is precious, be conscious of what we invest our time in. This part makes sense. Yet, it is worth asking, what makes for a meaning life? What makes the 4000 weeks worth it? For some, they chase wealth, power, career success, get one's name recognized, etc - these are milestones to be achieved. Things to accomplish. Others will say, such accomplishments are no…
I agree - that is why I find such general instructions, such as "Answer all Emails immediately", as often emphasized by other "self-optimisation/productivity" articles, so irritating: Emails, as everything else, initially move to the (really long) 'open task list' - as mentioned in the article here. Depending on their importance, they may move to the 'closed-task' list, which is limited in length and sorted by priority. That means two things: a) emails will be answered in descending priority, meaning that some may be answered faster than other and b) some emails have such a low priority to me that I may fail to answer them at all - which is Ok. I have limited time available, so the outcome is if an email isn't important enough there is a chance it won't get answered, and I won't regret it.
Re: Four thousand weeks
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you let the bad emotions and feelings do their business, instead of constantly trying to escape from them, you wouldn't be feeling this way. You, and many others in this modern world, remind of Dostoyevskian characters: neurotic, overly-emotional, busy buzzing around, the cause of all their own problems. No one can sit still in silence, alone with themselves -- they're always running away. There's always some emot…
Or consider this, a person that manages to take out a loan and then dies before repaying can cheat the bank.
It has crossed my mind to take such a loan, spend it on waygu and Château Lafite and that euthanasia place (Dignitas?) in Switzerland. Cheat the bank and the pain of dying. But then again, I am curious to see how things turn out, and that I won't know until my computation is complete.
Re: Four thousand weeks
#126Not the kind to usually complain about UI but on my android browser there doesn't appear to be a way to bypass the date picker meaning that I have to scroll back in time a month at a time. 576 times to be precise.
Italic, 50%: Tap on the calendar's year to select another
Re: Four thousand weeks
#127I’m impressed by the beauty of this site and sophistication of the UI. However I _hate_ this type of messaging that does nothing for you except make your mental health worse. I don’t want to think about how many weeks of life I have left! Inducing existential dread is NOT what any of us need to start living our lives more fully (which I assume is the intent of this site). You wanna zone out on YouTube? Go for it. Tha…
As soon as it asked my birth date I knew it would estimate my death date and I closed the tab.
Re: Four thousand weeks
#128Once you can accept that your own life is insignificant and essentially meaningless, you can stop worrying about how many weeks, days, months or minutes you'll be here for and just appreciate the moment in which you are living. Perhaps you can even be grateful that you have lived at all.
To quote Dawkins:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds. How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state, from which the vast majority have never stirred?
Re: Four thousand weeks
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that nothing makes any of your categories better than the others: achievement, fun experiences, relationships. But if I look back on my life so far, something that does seem worth optimizing for is intensity/high quality. I've had experiences that I enjoyed every minute of (for example because they were new, or doing things that I love). Periods of hard work that stand out in my memory because of how much I l…
Yes, I agree. It is not so much about what we do or experience during our given lifespan, but what instead matters is the state of body-mind we are in, while doing or experiencing.
"It's about the journey"
Re: Four thousand weeks
#130I hadn't really calculated what percentage my life I've used up. This is so anxiety inducing. I'm realizing how much of my time I've wasted. I need to live more.