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 startup's bugs?
I don't remember the exact genesis of this, and I really wish I did, because it has literally reshaped my life, but a few years ago, I started asking myself the question 'If I were to die tomorrow, would I regret the way I have lived my life?' And I was somewhat surprised and horrified to discover that the answer was absolutely, categorically "yes."
I dropped out of the startup rat-race, took a good-paying 9-5 job working with people who I (still) really like, and started focusing on the other 128 hours in the week that I wasn't working.
I would hate to die tomorrow, but, if that's what happened, I would be satisfied with how I spend each day of my life. My quality of life and happiness have increased significantly since I first started asking myself that question.
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 in your statements though are a lot of, in my opinion unfounded presuppositions. One, that through force of will, the relationships that you describe can be made positive - something forcefully unfounded in my experience. Two, that someone's startup, social or otherwise, is a trivial farce and there is no real added value - again see my previous statement about common misguided arguments.
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.
You should be a little careful. The odd thing about creative professionals, which includes most software developers, is that if you take Maslow's hierarchy of needs as the truth for the general population, for creative professionals this pyramid of needs is inverted.
You see, most creative professionals are profoundly unhappy people. This is because the equation for happiness is usually easy - your expectations have to be lower than your achievements. As a side note, this is why the renowned mid-life crisis happens, because that's the point in your life when you realize that many of your dreams are impossible.
But going back to creative professionals - our expectations are off the chart. It's because we've been taught that we can achieve anything, with our imagination being the limit and hard work being the currency. It's because many of us come from families of high achievers. Yes, we are profoundly unhappy because our expectations are usually much bigger than our achievements. This is the reason for why many of us are idealists, for why we want to change the world. Many of us are also atheists, but all of us want to achieve some form of immortality, therefore that's the reason for why many of us want to build things that are long lasting.
I used to say the same things as you did. You may not feel the above right now, I'm going to make the assumption that you're in your twenties, which means you've got the energy to be hopeful about the future. But take it from a 32 year old that is going through a mid-life crisis 10 years earlier (or maybe it's just a burnout episode, I don't know), but this youthful energy is going to dissipate and you're then going to feel the emptiness in your life. And I'm lucky, because I have a wife and a 4-year old whom I love very much and which represent my reason for getting up in the morning.
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?
People have been asking this same basic question for years - heck, vast swaths of literature have been devoted to this basic question. The shortest answer I can come up with is that, if you look at it with a wide enough lens, the world fundamentally sucks. War, terror, corruption and the like are part of the human condition so as long as we exist, so will the darkness. In my mind, the key is to turn off the news, shut down a web browser and simplify, but my key likely won't work in your lock.
Have you ever read The Sun Also Rises?? Hemingway struggles with similar questions and he's a far better writer than I am!! :)
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.
before that it was the threat of nuclear war, ecological collapse, and economic stagnation. before that it was the draft, violent racial injustice, and a nearly complete collapse of legitimacy of national leadership. Idealistic youts have always had reasons to be cynical. (and sadly typing up this list, I see how many of the reasons to be cynical remain powerful generation after generation)
Exactly my point! Cynicism is often well-warranted, especially if you actually have high moral ideas. What people ought to be scared of are the people who aren't cynical because they simply don't care.
> 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?
Maybe because:
1. Headlines don't equal reality. Do we live in a worse world than before, or do we just have better ways of spreading information, and that such headlines tend to sell more than more benevolent news?
2. They perhaps wouldn't be doing anything about it anyway. Many cynics tend to be complainers rather than complainers + doers. What good does it do if you're a cynic if all it does is that it makes you sit around and mope? And if you are living in a good place with good people, and you aren't out to change the world having a positive outlook might be better for you own good than worrying about people in distant lands that you don't intend to try to help anyway.
Oh I don't know. Maybe the common dismissal here on HN of any positive outlook or belief in oneself as being the result of naivete and lack of life experience. That in time they will resign themselves to realize that they are as useless as the cynic sees himself and others.
I see what you mean. It did sound a bit too inevitable and forceful, perhaps.
That said, I didn't read it as a dismissal or even outright cynicism. Rather, it seemed like a personal experienced they wanted to share as a bit of a warning. Which I think is really good, because I and many people I know feel similar looking back.
But looking back in that manner doesn't mean I don't look forward with hope. It just means that I wish I'd been a bit more careful at times about what I pursued, as I definitely feel more of a struggle in the energy department that I didn't feel a few years ago.
I think this is a good writeup and your point about expectations is spot on. That doesn't mean that we lower expectations though, that means you keep driving till you meet them - however Sisyphusian it may seem.
By the way I'm 31, married with three kids and just recently joined the software/startup world - so your send up doesn't really fit my profile. I haven't seen any dissipation of "youthful energy" yet - if anything my energy is just more and more focused as the years go by.
It depends what you value. If you value your work on products above everything else then fine. The reason that people commonly say things like "the time with people in your life is what really matters" is because that actually matters to people more than anything else - I don't think either can be dismissed.
My personal stance is that I'm yet to be convinced that technology really has a lasting tangible benefit other than for maybe 5% of the population. For those 5% specialised technology will have made huge changes e.g. being able to see or hear for the first time. But why does it make such a huge change to people's lives? Because they can communicate more with the people they love, with the world around them.
And let's be honest pretty much all technology gets 'productised' to be sold, and to do that people have to be convinced to buy into it when they don't really need it (I'm open to being convinced otherwise).
I love working on technology but for me it's one of the smaller (but definitely fun) games that play out in life.
I am incredibly privileged to be at (or near) self-actualization, but—then again—so are most of the folks who have time to spend here on HN.
And regret-avoidance is an interesting beast: for me, it is incredibly hard to balance short, medium, and long-term goals, and understand when I'm actually pursuing a long-term goal vs simply wasting my time on something that will never really matter.
Props to Zuck for building something that a double-digit percentage of the world uses every month, but he's the exception to the rule. Most of us will not be so lucky(?), and it behooves us to spend our time wisely.
"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.
Everyone says: "No one on their deathbed regrets not spending more time at the office". Perhaps that's true. But I bet there are people who, on their deathbed, regret not having been more able to provide their families with financial security, or not doing a better job on something important they worked on.
You might die tomorrow. But it's more likely that you won't, and you should plan accordingly.
(I am not arguing that today's culture of overwork isn't harmful. I think it is, and I think most people in tech startups should probably be spending less time working. And if that what-if-I-died-tomorrow question is what it takes to get someone to think about what they really want to be doing with their lives, that's great. But it's still something of a cheat, and if you draw the conclusion from it that you should be optimizing your life for minimal regret on premature death then I think you're probably making a mistake.)
Now it depends by what you mean by that. Many people's idea of financial security is very different, some see it in ability to live comfortably with materialism, others see it as not having to worry about the next meal and your shelter.
If the financial security is materialistically based, I feel working more for that will be regretted.
"Or will it be that you didn't spend nearly enough nights at the office fixing your social media startup's bugs?"
For me, that quote would ends all auruments.
(I had a liver scan a little over a year ago, over some vague(probally psychosomatic?) pain in my upper right quadrant. Driving home from my primary care's doctors office with the ultrasound script in hand, I took a detour and went to the beach. I called certain family members and just told them "I just wanted to say hello." The whole day was kind of a blur, but I didn't take any part of that day for granted. I splurged and got an $8.99/lb salad. It tasted better that day? All my aches and pains went away that day. It was a bad day, but a wake up call. I ended up being o.k., and started to take life for granted--again. I won't die wealthy, but I will die knowing I treated kind people well. I don't think I will ever overlook the selfish, narcisstic one's though. I will die knowing certain people do awful things in order to "get ahead" in life. I will never forgive them completely. Yea, I have a sister who trampled on family in order to get ahead. I don't hate her, but I honestly don't knows how she can enjoy it all--when it was gotten so ugly?)
Thank you for sharing. My father passed away 6 days ago and I am going through this process. I am staying in the "rat race" though no longer care to rush, rushing isn't important - taking the time to bring good, kind people together who have the talent needed to succeed when put on task is all that really matters.
It's pretty interesting, although none of the five will shock you.
Good for you for focusing on creating the life you really want. Too often people sleepwalk through life, only to wake up in their 40's and discover they've lost so much time and are disenchanted with the decisions they've made.
Actually, I think I would regret all the stuff I could build if I were alive a little bit longer.
People who are creative and say otherwise are just lying (to others and to themselves probably). Or maybe, like you wrote, they are living a life they suppose they should live, instead of the life they actually want to live.
"Or will it be that you didn't spend nearly enough nights at the office fixing your social media startup's bugs?"
There's a snarky response in here somewhere that would get to the core of how code is trivial and not a 'legacy' whereas product might be, but I'm scared it will uncover something uneasy about the nature of the work most of us here feel is an integral part of our identities...
> Or will it be that you didn't spend nearly enough nights at the office fixing your social media startup's bugs?
That's kind of an unfair comparison like saying that you might regret not spending nearly enough time telling your kids to clean up their rooms. I won't regret the tedium of work, but I may regret not spending enough time in whiteboarding sessions with colleagues that I respect.
> What are the things that—on your deathbed—you expect to regret?
What does it matter?
Let's say the deathbed will last seven days. That's nothing compared to the rest of your life (let's say ~70 years). Why would you guide your life according to a projection of what you will feel in a mere seven days of your whole life?
Why not ask more immediate questions: is anything I do right now, day to day, that I could do differently in order to live a more fulfilling life? A more fulfilling life day to day of course, not necessarily fulfilling memories for some distant deathbed future.
I guess what you say is actually what that means. Not a literal deathbed realization.
There is no end-game, there is no winning, no failure, no goals in life except what you put in it. The only thing that will decide if you are worthy or not is yourself. Yourself today and yourself tomorrow up to the day you die.
Financial gain is a dangerous goal in life because it very often has a very poor ROI. On the other hand, your whole biology, tweaked by million of year of evolution, made it so that taking care of people around you is very often the best bang of happiness for buck.
But then whatever, plenty of religion / philosophies to rationalize yourself into happiness almost regardless what you decide to do.
> I guess what you say is actually what that means. Not a literal deathbed realization.
Then why not just say that? Compel me to self-improve. Don't guilt me in to some existential dread.
> On the other hand, your whole biology, tweaked by million of year of evolution, made it so that taking care of people around you is very often the best bang of happiness for buck.
Evolution compels you into procreating and taking care of that offspring. But there are many more motivators than good feelings. As long as you passed on your "legacy", it doesn't matter whether you did it out of joy or out of fear and worry. As far as the cause and effect of evolution is concerned.
I don't think it is about feeling satisfied on the deathbed. We imagine the deathbed as the place where we finally understand what is important and what isn't, and then try to apply this knowledge to the limited timespan in between. It is a way to take a step back and evaluate our lives.
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 startup's bugs?
I don't remember the exact genesis of this, and I really wish I did, because it has literally reshaped my life, but a few years ago, I started asking myself the question 'If I were to die tomorrow, would I regret the way I have lived my life?' And I was somewhat surprised and horrified to discover that the answer was absolutely, categorically "yes."
I dropped out of the startup rat-race, took a good-paying 9-5 job working with people who I (still) really like, and started focusing on the other 128 hours in the week that I wasn't working.
I would hate to die tomorrow, but, if that's what happened, I would be satisfied with how I spend each day of my life. My quality of life and happiness have increased significantly since I first started asking myself that question.