My favourite part: > "Celebrate your birthday, goddammit. You are lucky to have each one."
My birthday just came up around then; I prefer to celebrate every day, not just once every 365. But that's just me.
Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband
231–235 of 235 posts
Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband
#232> Judaism calls for a period of intense mourning known as shiva that lasts seven days after a loved one is buried. It's strange to me to prescribe how long people should mourn. Some people are appalled when someone seems to get over someone quickly after they've died. But if they are truly not sad about it any more, I say good for them. What does it help the deceased for the living to be sad over them?
I think it's not a bad idea. If something on this catastrophic level happens, you're going to be unprepared. If you have a societal framework of how to go about your grief, I can imagine it will help some. It won't make anything better but it might provide something to hold on to when the hour is darkest.
Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband
#233Paul 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…
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…
You have a basic misunderstanding of perception. It's common, everyone has this, the idea that you're this bag of meat separate from everyone. What are you supposed to do?
But, you will be good to yourself, and to others, if you discover who or what you really are, on a level where it cannot be described by words. It makes sense, therefore, to put your effort into that discovery.
The products you create - cool, but irrelevant as well. Bucheit is right about that. It's a game.
Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the things that—on your deathbed—you expect to regret? Will it be that you didn't spend as much time as you could've with your parents before they died? How about with your siblings? Maybe it was all of the times that you didn't make it to your kids' soccer games, piano recitals, school plays, or graduations? Or will it be that you didn't spend nearly enough nights at the office fixing your social media star…
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…
"My main distinction is that personal happiness is not a goal of mine, but rather a side benefit from accomplishing something that has lasting tangible value for more than just myself and the people I am immediately exposed to."
Speaking of unfounded presuppositions... how do you know that this would make you happy? If you'd already done it, you'd already be happy. If you haven't, you can't know. Unfounded presupposition, then.
I don't want to make a semantic argument here though; the reason I think it won't make you happy is that nothing outside yourself, nothing external, can make you happy. You are, at the core of your being, already happy, already whole, already loved. Nothing can change that. You can uncover it by asking questions and by discovering and then questioning all the unfounded assumptions that govern your beliefs and opinions.
Re: Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 32 year old lecturing a (supposed) 20-something about life experience. I guess cynicism is becoming younger and younger.
I was more cynical than he is at 32 when I was 14. On the one hand, I've learned to be more idealistic, but on the other hand, with how things are these days, what sort of worldview do you expect kids to learn? Since when should youth be so flagrantly ignorant as to form a worldview of sunshine and daisies while terrorism, corruption, and destructive climate change take up most of the headline space?
First of all here's the good news: You have been deceived! By the media!
The media is making money by reporting on "things that could kill you". It's getting more efficient at that over time, so if you do watch the news - and I implore you not to - you will start to believe the world is a bad place. That is because you will never, ever hear anything positive in the news. Because it won't sell.
For every crime in this world, there are ten million selfless acts of love. If the news reported on both equally, it'd be very boring. You'd constantly hear about somebody helping another, or putting somebody else before themselves, and you would never even get to the crimes. Not enough time.
For every murder in this world, there's a friend risking his own life for another. Or 10. We won't know. For every war, there's a million times more peace.
Look at the facts, people. Is it so hard to understand? Is propaganda, dull, dumb, and effective as it is really so hard to get around? Open your eyes, and turn off your TV, newspapers, and the associated websites.
There are three reasons why watching news is a huge waste of your time. 1 - negative bias to an extreme that is hard to imagine, as described 2 - non-actionable items. Each time you consume news in any form, ask yourself: What can I do about it? What do I have to do about it? Why did I need to know this? Am I just rubbernecking here (hint: YES, you are!)? 3 - Propaganda and lies. I used to read my local paper front to back every day. And there were a handful of reported-on news where I was an eye-witness. A demonstration, an accident involving me. And even for these harmless items, the news was just plain wrong. THIS WAS NOT WHAT HAD HAPPENED. But it was in the paper. Facts had been altered. Not even maliciously, just to make better story, or because the journalist on the ground couldn't see everything, or whatever. Now if the stories I had direct first hand knowledge of where wrong - how about all the others I knew nothing about? How accurate is that going to be? It's not.
And war propaganda. Just read up on Goebbels, every nation in the world is today doing the same things, and the patterns are so easy to spot you will wonder how you could ever miss them. All the media, particularly in the US, but also other countries, are full of it.