[rblion]

Thanks!

Honestly, I just realized that life is short and most people go to their death beds without realizing their full potential because they are occupied with social concerns. Many people drop the quality of their life by living an unhealthy lifestyle that is disconnected from nature.

This all really set in for me after my grandmother, who I was very close to, passed away in December after having a stroke in November. I helped take care of her because she took care of me when I was a boy. Also, my 43-year-old cousin passed away from ovarian cancer in July. Got news of a kid I met only once being murdered during a robbery, he was only 24.

These realizations are put into practice with each breath, thought, word, and deed with the Eightfold Path that Buddha laid out 2,500 years ago. It's as relevant today as it was back then.

[jlokier]

People close to me have died, and I found rather than adding desire to realize full potential, it took away my enthusiasm, because it emphasised the pointlessness and futility of everything I could do and might do.

When those you love are gone, the emptiness is so obvious. Even though the trauma and grief gradually heal, any sense of purpose seems like an empty, made up story. You know you'll die at some point too, everything you do will be undone, and the world probably isn't real anyway. Why even live?

It doesn't stop me working on projects. But they do seem relatively pointless in the end.

The one thing that seems to give things I do value, is when others value them. I'm never sure if that's because they see something I don't, or if they are deeper into self-made illusions.

I don't mean trivia like clothes, status, social media. I mean things others really value, like time together, listening, caring, assisting, relief from poverty, their health, happy times, friendship, that sort of thing.

So from that point of view, I think social concerns of a certain variety are to be prized. Maybe they are the only thing that has meaning.

[rblion]

What you are describing is dukkha and it is something we all know deep down. Aging, sickness, and death are facts of life, this is part of samsara.

This can be seen however a person wants to see it. I am ennobled and encouraged by it, I value life more having seen death up close.

There is a balance and everything is interdependent, so nothing exists in isolation. I do my best work and thinking when alone at my desk or out in nature. Time away from society makes me value time with my family more.

I serve others and create value for them through my agency and I serve society at large with the things I am developing, maybe attending YC for. I have always strived to be of value to society, to make something of lasting value. Now I am.

Instead of living from the mind, I now live from the heart. It looks 'dumb' to the intellectuals but the 'simple people' of the world know this to be wisdom.