[ForrestN]

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.

[wpietri]

I mainly disagree with this.

It is extremely hard to comprehend how short life is. Most people actively avoid knowing. They tell themselves stories about eternal life, or they act like they have all the time in the world. When circumstances conspire to wake us to the transitory nature of life, it can be incredibly valuable.

I violently disagree with the notion that the heat death of the universe "means that it really, really doesn't matter what you accomplish." That's like saying it isn't worth cooking a beautiful meal because 48 hours later it will all be poop. That there's no point to love if the body will soon be dust.

Nothing lasts, but that doesn't mean that nothing matters. If you want intuitive proof of that, go rent Rivers and Tides:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_and_Tides

It's a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy. Much of his art is ephemeral. The transitory nature of it make is more beautiful, not less.

[brianchu]

I interpreted ForrestN's statement much differently: "it really, really doesn't matter what you accomplish." Given that emphasis, I don't think what ForrestN said is incompatible with your analogy.

The point is that the heat death of the universe means that some things, like the drive to "contribute to humanity" are not goals that are inherently superior to other goals, such as "cooking a beautiful meal."

This point is clear when ForrestN says "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." Cooking a beautiful meal certainly falls under the category of "humble things that make you happy."

[ForrestN]

I love that you made a contemporary art reference (my field) even if Goldsworthy isn't such a good artist.

It is worth cooking a meal if you want to. It's worth making a line of rocks. It's worth programming a cute tumblr theme. Just don't pretend like you are doing those things because they are inherently better things to do than watching TV or lying in bed. These activities are all animated by your feelings about them, which your brain can't turn off regardless of how steeped in death you are.

You think Goldsworthy's work is beautiful. I don't. And that's fine. Not everyone has the same feelings and preferences. I'm not saying no one should "fight," just that they can't really argue on the basis of death that other people should.

[swombat]

That's like saying it isn't worth cooking a beautiful meal because 48 hours later it will all be poop. That there's no point to love if the body will soon be dust.

What a fantastic answer to that assumption. I'm writing that one down in a corner of my mind for later use (sometime between now and the heat death of the universe). :-)

[davesims]

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?

[brianchu]

It isn't necessarily clear that ForrestN advocates "contributing to humanity." I think that was more of a statement that while goals like "fight the status quo" are ostensibly for the purpose of "contributing to humanity," they're actually motivated by "love, insecurity, and fear of death," without making any value judgments on these goals. That is, ForrestN is explaining how fighting the status quo doesn't even fulfill the stated motives of those who wish to fight against the status quo.

[ForrestN]

I probably wasn't clear enough. I was saying the opposite, arguing that an appeal to contribute to humanity is not viable in the face of death. And further that most people who think that is what is driving them are really being driven by something else.

[jordo37]

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.

[xianshou]

The crux of your argument is the claim that, if the universe becomes a field of equidistant neutrinos, no action or thought in the meantime matters. The implicit assumption behind this view is that events only matter to the extent that they leave a legacy. In particular, it asserts that things only have ultimate meaning if they extend to temporal infinity. I believe that how one reacts to Curtis's post, and to your statement, depends on the following question: to what extent can something temporary and finite have meaning?

Imagine this scenario:

A man stands on the shore, miles from any other human presence. He is desolate, alone. For the past twenty years of his life, he has worked ceaselessly on a critical open question in mathematics, the solution to which would make it feasible for humans to travel across galaxies. Educated at the best institutions, mentored by the greatest geniuses of his day, and encouraged by his incredible past successes in the field, he had begun to work on the problem with as great of fanfare as can exist within an academic community. Gradually, as he had toiled without progress, his reputation had faded and he had become increasingly reclusive. Eventually, divorced and estranged from his family, he had pruned away every aspect of his life outside of this one question. The man walks slowly back and forth, wracking his brain for what had gone wrong in all his previous approaches, what key had escaped him.

In a blazing flash of insight, he understands. The wrong turns, the twisted equations and garden-path lemmas, the towering perplexity of twenty years - gone. He understands. It is true; it is real. With the mere publication of one proof, even the sketch of the dazzlingly unlikely intuition, humanity will dance across the stars within a century.

In the next moment, a titanic wave engulfs the coast, obliterating him in one painless moment.

Does his epiphany matter? This is the limit of your supposition: a moment of supreme realization and an achievement that only a few among billions could hope for, lasting as short a time as could matter to a human being. What you think of meaning in human life depends on what you answer to that question. If you believe that his epiphany does matter, you also believe in the meaning of temporary things - of what leaves an impression, but not a legacy.

In this case, the "fight against inertia" does matter, but only as the genuine pursuit of a deeply felt aim, rather than lust for meaning swaddled in the language of social contribution. To use the language of "Drive," people feel most fulfilled when they have autonomy, mastery, and purpose; less pedantically, we are only happy in the deeper sense when using our abilities to their fullest extent. Chasing your visions and striving for achievement matter as a consequence not of the goal, but of advancing towards it. It is important to know that your goal matters to others, and that you have the means to achieve it, but it does not register on the scale of personal meaning whether it is ever achieved. Only the motion, the overcoming of inertia, differentiates between personal meaning and lack thereof. Mathematically, although everyone's life begins and ends at zero, that fact in no way diminishes the value of the integral in between.

Happiness, success, passion and meaning are four qualities that attract some of the most contentious attention from both HN readers and young people in general. I would argue that they share a common quality: they are only achievable at the highest level as byproducts of action, not goals in and of themselves. Pursuing them directly drives them away; if the young Mark Zuckerberg had been in it for the money, he would have gone to Microsoft, and if the young Steve Jobs had made it his goal to find meaning, he would have stayed on perpetual pilgrimage in India instead of starting Apple. The victory of ambivalence and subconcious motives comes from mistaking the yearning towards these things for the path that leads to them.

Internalizing death, if you believe in the meaning of temporary things, does justify certain ways of thinking and behaving. It means knowing that you will, relatively soon, be rendered forever passive and motionless. In the meantime, you may as well move.

[ForrestN]

My point isn't that everything is meaningless necessarily. I would say that the more one thinks about death the harder it is to make arguments for meaningfulness. I wouldn't make an argument for meaninglessness, I would just say that you can't really extrapolate a positive value system from the fact that life is short.

It feels like you're arguing in favor of narrowing our vantage as a way to preserve meaningfulness, which is totally valid to me. But it's basically using a belief (the meaning of temporary things as you put it) as comfort. My point, as was pointed out below, is that you may as well move but you also may as well stay still.

As an aside, it seems strange that Jobs is the illustrative example here, as if it's primitive that we should all want to be Him. Given the option to gain a problematic and presumably painful personal life and what I understand was a totally unnecessary early death along with creating apple and "changing" an arbitrarily tiny subset of human history, that seems like a very easy thing to decline. I take his decision to avoid treatment to reflect profound pain that I would love to avoid.

[thewisedude]

I concur with most of your arguments, I do concur with you that there seems to be over importance given to Job's personal-life than it should. But, your last paragraph about Job's life seems to be out of line with your philosophy. You are claiming that Job's death was unnecessary. Unnecessary in whose terms? Is the purpose of life living the longest possible life? Here, by saying that his death was unnecessary or untimely, you are implying there is a time for a person of his stature to die. Now, its no more about making decisions that make you happy or not worrying about the shortness of life, or the lack of meaningfulness of life, but rather you are now preaching how somebody should live their life(or make certain decisions) just like the author or the article is trying to do.

P.S- I do think Steve Jobs contributed greatly to his field and I admire him & his products. The arguments made above are purely for discourse

[ForrestN]

I guess I was making the observation personally that my priorities are very out of sync with wishing for Jobs' life. I don't think anyone else should have the same priorities as I do. I'm terrified of dying and would like to life as long as I can. I would also feel badly if I knew I died earlier than necessary for psychological reasons.

[brianchu]

ForrestN is not (as I interpret) saying that nothing matters. Just that evaluating the "matter-ness" of something based on some objective like making a difference to humanity is baseless. If staying passive makes you happy, then take that route. If proving mathematical theorems makes you happy, then take that route.

You seem to be saying that the pursuit of a goal in of itself matters, something that is not really at odds with what ForrestN implies, which is that the end product (the result of accomplishing a goal) doesn't really matter, given that all paths end at the same destination.

I especially take issue with your last sentence, which feels like a cop-out. "You may as well move" is a poor reason to move. "You may as well stay put" has just as much validity.

[oblivion]

"Does his epiphany matter? If you believe that his epiphany does matter, you also believe in the meaning of temporary things - of what leaves an impression, but not a legacy."

There are two things here I'd like to comment. First, the question is incomplete, it can be either "does his epiphany matter to the man?" or "does his epiphany matter to the reader?".

The first version has the obvious answer "Yes", of course it matters for him, he doesn't know he'll die soon, nor does he care at that moment.

For the second version the answer, for me at least, is also "Yes", but for a different reason than the one you give. I say his result matters because now we know (we'll we don't theoretically as he didn't get to tell the world) that the question has a solution which means that somebody somewhere will be able to rediscover. I think knowing there is a solution is a huge win for any hard question because you know there is a purpose in your search.

[sneak]

Your words are inspiring and a joy to read.

[kamaal]

The fact that you are going to die isn't a scary thought in itself, whats scary is the 'when' part.

>>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.

Let me tell you why this is true. Its true because "doing something remarkable with your life" isn't a goal at all. At the maximum its really a vision. A goal is something that can be measured. Wanting to make $5 million in the next five years is really a goal. And its a interesting goal to chase. No matter how much interesting and challenging work I may be doing, realizing the fact that nobody knows about it beyond my cubicle is the biggest demotivating factor in my life.

I don't want to want to work on the project that forces to jolt down 100K lines of code, no matter what that project is. I want to spend most of time in life having fun, doing recreational stuff. And I'm sure many want to do the same.

Realizing that given the effects of age on energy, vitality and vigor a person can have, coupled with uncertainty about death that you may really have to sprint in your early part of your life, so that you can have all the fun in some part later.

[hef19898]

And maybe even worse than the when part, the "how".

[ignostic]

Ahhh overly-precise HN. Gets me every time. People find meaning in big events, and I think the world is a better place as a result.