All true, but as devil's advocate: there is code out there in the wild written 50 years ago that we care about.

Banks, power plants & other utilities, satellites, etc. spring to mind, sure, but even the more mundane.

If you're on OS X/macOS, here is the source code to the command line utility `cat`: http://opensource.apple.com//source/text_cmds/text_cmds-71/c...

Released by Berkley in 1989 making it at least 27 years old already, there are lines of code in there probably going back to the 1977 release, because this of course goes back to old school Berkley System Distribution release. 40 years old, next year, then. Can't see it's going to be modified much in the next 10 years.

I expect there is code being written today that will be considered useful enough to still be used in 50 years. I know a guy who worked on weather modelling for the Met Office - I bet his code is still in the models being run in 50 years time. It might have been modified, but there is a real chance his code stays intact.

Code has a half-life, not a use-by date. Work on code that embraces that, and write code with that attitude.

If you're working on some crappy app or site you _know_ will be dead in 2 years time, you might be OK with that. You might not. If you're not, go look for the careers where the half-life is extended.

"Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die." - Morty

Nothing you do, or statistically anyone does, matters after you move on whether it's moving on from that job or moving on from this mortal coil. Regret needs to be framed in the sense of did you regret what you did at that moment for that moment.

Thinking about your accomplishments in the frame of years after your dead is going to just depress you to the point you're going to consider making that end come a whole lot sooner.

Give your grandchildren something to care about? Why would they? By the time they come around, everything you've done is old news. Then your great-grandchildren, well they won't know anything about you. Your great-great-grandchildren won't even know you existed, just like everybody else on the planet. Don't do things to try to create a legacy that no one cares about.

I regret plenty, but I also don't care that I'm a meaningless nothing in the universe.

I find "What will your grandchildren think?" to be a decent heuristic. For example, I admire my grandparents a great deal for their community service. My grandmother is in poor health, but she still gets around for charity board meetings. In her prime she was a pillar of civil society in my home town. Thinking of what future generations will appreciate pushes us to think outside of ourselves.

I know less about my great-grandparents, but I admire them for emigrating to America and struggling to make a better life for their kids.

Granted, on the cosmic timeline their actions don't amount to too much (because nobody's do). But I definitely feel the impact of my great and great-great grandparent's decisions.

> Give your grandchildren something to care about? Why would they? By the time they come around, everything you've done is old news.

Spend time with your kids, keep your marriage together. Love your family. They'll (eventually) see that you did, and they'll care very much about that.

A related quote that's sticking with me well at the moment is "no one wishes they spent more time on their phone when they are on their death bed".

But it's a stupid way of seeing things because people choose consciously to use their phones as much as they do on a daily basis - not being forced or having nothing else worth doing. Regrets usually carry a lot of bullshit.

I understand your point but its not really fair. The choice is not always conscious when there are a thousand behavioral analysts on the other side of the screen trying to make you use their apps more and more.

I would say its the lack of a conscious choice that makes us using our phones so much.

I don't quite get the behavioural analysis bits. I spend time on my phone reading the news, reddit, HN, a couple blogs, WhatsApp with friends and I also play games here and there until they bore me. The game I logged the most time in is a port of a game made by a shareware-style developer back in the ninetees.

Where was such analysis involved in driving my usage patterns?

The act of being "on your phone" isn't necessarily bad. If it's arguing philosophy with people on HN, maybe not a great way to spend time compared to, say, communicating with your family or building relationships.

My grandchildren are going to love my design documents.

What about the code you wrote that earned you a living and perhaps some savings? And helped you explore your talents?

50 years from now AIs will extract history from your HN comments. Maybe some people/AIs will write PhDs about HN comments. You are representing mankind :-)

actually (although borderline delusions of grandeur territory) your code can make quite a bit of an impact in "real life". and the beauty of it is you don't even have to work for google or facebook to get your system to be "touched" by a very large number of end users.

what things have an impact for you?

Thanks for sincerity.

Well, million years from now on, nobody will care about any impact you did

And after the heat death of the universe nothing will matter! Let's just all do nothing.

I think the point is to do what you think is meaningful (or at least enjoyable).

Worrying what your future grandchildren think about you is a ridiculous way to live your life.

> you think is meaningful

It is easy to get your perception of meaningful poisoned by ideas like religion, so one has to be careful how he spends his precious moments in his window of consciousness

If the think the events in the story "the last question" could happen then that might not be true.

Unless you are extremely lucky chances are fifty years from now, nobody will care. Everything you think is time will cease to be useful to them. Your Great Grand Children won't know you as a person. Hell they won't even remember your name.

Even if they do, it won't matter to you because you will cease to exist.

I only met my great grandfather once before he died, but I remember his name, and my parents still have the artifacts he left behind. He was a carpenter, and made several wooden pieces we still have, including a turtle footstool, a doll house, and a garage for toy cars. He also made a kid's rocking chair which sadly got destroyed over time. I played with all of them plenty when I was a kid.

I plan on keeping these things in the family as long as possible.

Make things and leave them behind, and hopefully your family will still cherish them. I write and make board and video games, I'm hoping some of those will stay in the family. I also want to get into woodworking once I own a home, and make custom components for my games.

As a counter point: My grandfather was a carpenter too, and my family was somewhat poor, so the save everything mentality was often in play, and straddled the line between sentimentality and fiscal responsibility. I loved (and love those still alive) my family, and cherish all memories I have, but the _stuff_ I feel is more of a burden. It was genuinely hard getting rid of stuff because it was so ingrained that they had to mean something to me because of their legacy, but it was just crap that I had no use of or liked.

Once I managed to disconnect the stuff from the people/memories, I felt a huge relief just decluttering. I have maybe a book or a note from people, and of course photos, but I have procured only furniture/cuttlery/paintings/etc that I like, not those I inherited "just because". And I'd gladly see my children just chuck everything I don't have time to get rid of before I die, and hope that they remember me fondly as a person, not as someone dumping a houseful of emotional and literal baggage on them.

I'm likely projecting, and am sorry/happy if this is not your situation, but I identified up to a point and wanted to suggest to people like me that decluttering/chucking out old junk can be very relieving.

You both share a common passion. That's your shared luck I guess.

What grandchildren? The likelihood of me having kids at this point is extremely remote. The way I see it, if you're going to have kids, you have to meet a good partner in your 20s or even teens, and at the very very latest, your early 30s. I'm beyond that now; back in those ages, I never managed to meet someone who wanted to have kids and had an interest in a guy who wasn't a loud-mouthed extrovert.

My big regret: not moving to the PacNW when I had the chance in my mid-20s. Things would probably be extremely different for me now if I had. Or maybe I should have tried moving to Asia; women there appreciate intelligent but quiet men who have good careers.

So if I'm really really lucky, 50 years from now someone will still be using some code I wrote. That's really the best I can hope for as far as having "an impact".

You're a male. You can reproduce when you're 80 years old. Plenty of men have children in their 40s and 50s. You can make it happen if it's what you really want.

That is what everybody says, but realistically, to get a young woman to have kids with you at old age, you need to be quite successful financially. Maybe some young women prefer older guys, but I suspect in general they are not that keen.

There's plenty of women who prefer "older" guys, but that means something like 5 years older, and no more than 10. The extra maturity is attractive to the woman, and women seem to become emotionally mature faster than men.

But that still means that if you're 50, the best you're likely to do (unless you're rich) is a woman who's in her early 40s, and that's really too old to have kids without assistance, and you'll run a greater risk of Down's.

Even if you're really rich, the 20-something girls who'll want you are going to be materialistic airheads, and will get boring pretty quick, and will not have any real feelings for you.

You can reproduce at 80, but sperm quality goes down with age, so there's a higher rate of birth defects.

The other problem is finding a willing female. I don't know about you, but I would not expect to find a 25-30 year old woman wanting to have kids with me when I'm in my 50s, and really don't think that's realistic even at my current age (early 40s). Maybe you're better at talking your way into much younger women's pants than me.

I can also look for women around 40 like myself (which I've done), but here there's tons of problems: 1) many already have kids, and don't want more; 2) the ones that do are usually never married and suddenly are realizing they don't have much time left to have kids. Many of them are never-married for a good reason... (they're so nutty that no man sticks around for long). And they're frequently desperate, but in a bad way: they won't give anyone a chance because they want to find Mr. Perfect after a single date. They have completely unrealistic expectations; I've seen it many times here.

As an aside, I went on a Tinder date with a 43yo woman a while ago. We talked on the phone before meeting up, and one of the first things she told me was how she wanted kids and had already tried one round of IVF!! Talk about TMI... Of course, if she's on fertility drugs and taking IVF, that means that 1) she's likely infertile already, and 2) considering I'm just starting with her, it's likely she'll keep doing IVF while we're dating and end up with some anonymous donor's kid, and not mine. (And if we did have a kid together, it almost certainly wouldn't be conceived naturally.) Luckily, I guess, she didn't want to meet up again after the first date.

Honestly, I think it's a lost cause. At this age range, it's just too hard to find someone that wants kids and is in a good position to have them, and still is a great partner in every other way. The dating pool is simply too small, and most of the people in the dating pool have way too many issues.

Luckily, I just started dating someone who's really nice, very attractive, and really likes me, but she doesn't want kids. Considering this is the first woman I've had more than 2 very casual dates with since my divorce 2 years ago, the idea of passing up this opportunity just isn't appealing.

And if you don't want children?