The Fight

This, as any would be, is certainly a valid way to respond to a brush with death. But implying that this is somehow a lesson to be learned by everyone, suggesting that others should live their life this way, seems misguided to me in context.

Contemplating your mortality shouldn't necessarily convince you to double down on your current priorities (especially if those priorities are centered around banal platitudes like "doing something remarkable with your life," which are probably masks to keep you from thinking about what really motivates you.) It should cause you to reevaluate them.

The fact that you will die, the fact that everyone you know will die, and the fact that eventually the universe might become a field of equidistant neutrinos means that it really, really doesn't matter what you accomplish. All roads, if you stay on them long enough, lead to the same place. There will be no progress. There will be no one remarking.

I would say that the lesson to be learned from thinking about death is just that there's no reason to adhere to anyone else's values, or to feel pressure to do anything in particular. You should do what you want, what makes you happy, even if it's humble.

Existential steps backward can be a tool to remove yourself from things that aren't really helpful, like for example a hyper-competitive capitalist rat-race justified by language like "fight the status quo" or "great visions of the future" that, instead of contributing to humanity, is mostly really about love, insecurity, and fear of death (like so many human pursuits).

"Fighting" here, the battle between the heroic pursuit of accomplishment on the one hand and the "insidious machine called quo" on the other, is just the author reporting his own conflicts about what he wants to do. Part of him wants to expend massive amounts of energy attempting to out-compete the people he sees as his peers. But another part of him doesn't want to do that, which is why he loses motivation and doesn't always end up behaving the way a hero-CEO might. There is not some kind of evil, inherent inertia at work that all people must fight against. Instead, there is only ambivalence and subconscious motives.

In my opinion, if you really internalize death and it's implications, the notion that you can justify prescribing ways of thinking or behaving just starts to look absurd.

Not sure how much I buy this. I had a similar situation to the OP in high school - a friend and mentor passed away and in the wake of his life I felt the need to Find My Purpose and conquer the world. While I realize with almost a decade under my belt that ForrestN has point - any individual mark tends to blur and disappear, I would still argue that during the days where I am fighting for something, those are the days where I feel good and alive. The days where I let ambivalence win are a waste.

I will say, the biggest difference in how I view the mark I want to make is that my scope has widened. Creating a product that changes the world, spending time with family, helping pass laws that make life Better according to my admittedly limited worldview all work.

Really well put. But to me, you bailed out, or at least contradicted yourself with the phrase, "instead of contributing to humanity."

You set up a nice concise statement of Sartrean pointlessness, and then you appear to invalidate it completely with such a broad notion full of Big-Picture-Feel-Good-Meaningfulness as "contributing to humanity." You just kind of slipped that in there as if we all Know What You Mean. As if it wasn't the exact same species of content-free sloganeering as "fight the status quo" or "great visions of the future."

Finessing an emotive appeal to purpose in the midst of purposelessness with an abstract notion of 'humanity' doesn't make it any less vacuous, at least given the thrust of the rest of your comment.

Sorry if that comes across as harsh -- I actually liked your post and thought it was well-written. But if we're all just dissolving slowing into equidistant neutrinos in an eventual cosmic Cold Death, why should 'humanity' writ large have any more purpose attached to it than my own or any individual 'humanity'? Is that really 'internalizing death'? Moreover isn't the notion of internalizing death and absurdity merely another 'prescribed way of thinking' among many equally pointless strategems?

...and things have gotten pretty dark for HN on a Sunday Night. Flaming Lips anyone?

I agree that words cannot convey the experience of loss. But I don't think that means that you can't do some good with it.

The trick for me has been to try to exemplify and communicate the lessons I've learned, not the process by which I learned them. Being more joyful in the moment. Being more compassionate in the face of suffering. Facing death and loss squarely when it does come up. Declining to participate in the American game of pretending that death does not exist.

Also, I think you can sometimes talk effectively about the direct experience of loss. For example, I got a lot of positive feedback on this, despite the darkness of the topic:

http://www.quora.com/Death-and-Dying-1/What-does-it-feels-li...

There are plenty of other cardiac abnormalities that can cause sudden cardiac death. Wolff-Parkinson-White (and other conduction pathway disorders), prolonged Q-T syndrome, etc...