[ericmcer]

I recently read a story about two people on their death beds, both had worked hard and achieved success in their fields. One was happily reflective and talked about what a journey life had been, the other was upset and remorseful, talking about how much time he had wasted.

I wonder if the contents of your life are secondary to your semi-hardwired emotional state. I am naturally somewhat anxious and hate wasting a day; conversely, I have friends who seem totally content after 9 months of unemployment and video games. Maybe it does not matter what you achieve, boxes you check, friends or relationships you make along the way. At the end if you are an unhappy person it will not be enough, and if you are naturally content it will all seem ok.

[wpietri]

Could be. but it could just as well go the other way. Maybe the people who spent a lifetime trying to figure out what they wanted and really nail it will be the ones who are pretty satisfied. While the people who were on cruise control will say, "Wait, now I'm questioning my choices!"

I suspect that's how it will work for me. Being naturally somewhat anxious has given me a lot of practice looking back and iterating. The areas of my life I'm most comfortable with are the ones where I've done the most work thinking about who I am and what I'm doing with my time.

[Bakary]

I had a realization similar to this not too long ago during a manic episode. The philosophical beliefs and impressions of the world and our own selves that we hold are a byproduct of our general mood and are essentially post-facto rationalizations.

On a side note, I find it strange that so much attention is given to a person's final days and whether regret will experienced then. They should not count much more than any other series of days. In fact, they are the ideal time to feel regret since your problem will be soon resolved!

[pavlov]

The truly great thing about dying is that you won’t regret it.

[Bakary]

"Death is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not" — Epicurus

[giovannibonetti]

According to the documentary Happy [1], happiness is ~50% genetics and ~50% about what happens in your life. The most intriguing part for me was that major life events like getting married (happy) or becoming disabled (bad) don't affect so much happiness in the long run.

[1] https://www.thehappymovie.com/

[vlovich123]

Careful how those stats are collected/computed. I don’t think statistics techniques and the methodology that’s used to run these kinds of experiments is anywhere good enough to make such bold conclusionary statements. It sounds nice in theory but in practice social sciences are to other science disciplines (that can make such definitive statements) as tabloids are to news papers. It’s a cheap imitation from the viewpoint of the strength of the conclusions. I hope they get to a better footing eventually but that entire field is way to arrogant right now in the strength of the conclusions they make based on bad science (limited population studies, small effect studies, rarely/never publishing negative results which is a kind of p-hacking en made, lack of reproducibility, etc). That also ignores the fact that epistemologically they have a weak footing of not actually concretely describing their terms (ie happy, sad, good, bad, etc) or how they can measure these things (what is 1 happiness unit?).

Once you start seeing links establishing how to actually measure this stuff with technology, then the results will be more meaningful (easy to replicate experiments, easy to do things en masse more cheaply and quickly).

That being said I still have respect for the work being done. It should still be done rather than wait for better tech but the incentive structures for that field need to be drastically different to better reflect the quality of using that data to make decisions (maybe a generally agreed upon ban to feature it in “public” media/journals, more careful reporting by science journals to limit to the results of meta studies or major reversals of what might be orthodoxy, publishing lists like Math does of what are open problems and what are assumed to be the conclusion even if not proven yet, etc). There are reforms to be made but until that’s done these studies do more harm than good as people latch on to whichever they want that sounds good to them rather than what’s actual reality).

[ekianjo]

> At the end if you are an unhappy person it will not be enough, and if you are naturally content it will all seem ok.

Yeah, regression to the baseline (happiness). Which is why trying to change your own life based on other people's dying regrets is utter stupidity.

[leetcrew]

for sure. it's easy to say "I wish I'd done X" when all the effort required for X would already be in the past.

[loco5niner]

> I am naturally somewhat anxious and hate wasting a day; conversely, I have friends who seem totally content after 9 months of unemployment and video games.

I was that unemployment and video games friend... I was satisfied at the time. Now I'm married and 'more' mature and look back at all the opportunities I had and wasted.

[Melting_Harps]

> Maybe it does not matter what you achieve, boxes you check, friends or relationships you make along the way. At the end if you are an unhappy person it will not be enough, and if you are naturally content it will all seem ok.

Honestly, COIVD made me confront and explore that very subject incredibly deeply--month's long trains of thought about past experiences--, despite previously being in therapy and generally considering myself quite introspective; it also coincided with learning about how many founders in startups have many commonly found mental health issues (anxiety is almost always there) that lend themselves to enduring startup culture's grind.

That anxiety and restlessness is fuel that gets you to keep pushing to the next milestone when everything else is failing all around and its an incredible source, but the question then becomes: at what cost? For me being unhappy was just the cost of admission to apply my skill set to an immense complex problem; seeing incredibly sad things like currency collapses and Society's wrecked by hyper-inflation fucking sucks but it became my norm, what came after in that journey was an even higher cost altogether.

Failing to address that critical psychological factor is why I think burnout is also so common, you lose sight of the what and why you did something, which often starts as simple as thinking it was simply 'cool and interesting' thing to do with one's limited time and not simply testing how many times can you can endure going beyond your mental and psychological limits before it completely adversely affects your health in a way you that you may never actually recover from.

Which I think is something that is never discussed in founder/startup culture until after someone like Tony Hsieh dies and most just scratch their heads and try to figure out 'why?'

I can't say I'm completely over this either, as I think some ambition still lingers depending on the project ideas, but I've been forced to have to make sure I don't take on 'too much' and solely focus on one path now after being too many burnouts from doing 2-3 at any given time, but also realizing the value of the skill set you've gained as a result of your experiences. And having confidence in that instead of being obsessed with keeping up with every new update and knowing you can bring yourself up to date as needed.

I've also started to take advice from the cautionary tales that I previously ignored or that I simply didn't feel apply to me. Everyone is susceptible to these consequences and the only waste of time is to not at least consider how it could occur to you and try to learn from their mistake(s) to avoid repeating the same.