The thought may be freeing to you, but many others become paralysed by it, obsessing about “the right choices” at every moment.
An alternate view: it is because we only have one limited life that our choices don’t matter. We and everyone our choices touch will die, and nothing will have mattered. Depending on your situation, that thought can fill you with dread or be profoundly calming.
> Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
That is both impossible and (I’d argue) unhealthy. I wouldn’t waste my last minute cooking a meal, yet I need to spend an hour doing it now to survive another day. “The right choice” and living every moment as if it were the last seldom overlap.
The Simpsons had a great joke on the platitude: https://youtu.be/lkAaQQal2ck?t=20
I had been struggling with the same issue. The opposite (“our choices don’t matter”) is depressing.
However, two things help me:
The first is “Optimistic Nihilism” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14) - a view very close to Zen/stoicism. The second is that ALL choices matter, but their impact is finite and subject to randomness. I used to think that all of my choices were forever and set in stone. While technically correct, it misses that the future changes only a bit. We might be tempted to think that “the grass is greener”, or “I should have bought Bitcoins”, but it is like “I miss I didn’t join my friends when they went to a cassino”. Moreover, it is FAIR that a finite effort results in a finite result.
If on your last day, you want to spend it with loved ones, and say, in nature or with music, then that's how you should be trying spend your life in general.
It's a heuristic, no a literal instruction book.
And some things you do are not for survival, yet they continue to be the right choice if you’re not living your final day. Like mending your favourite t-shirt. Cooking a meal was an example which just happens to overlap with survival. The point stands.
> If on your last day, you want to spend it with loved ones, and say, in nature or with music, then that's how you should be trying spend your life in general.
> It's a heuristic, no a literal instruction book.
What’s the point in saying it, then? If it amounts to “in general, you should try to spend your life the way you want”, don’t (effectively?) all living creatures do that by default without being told?
If it’s literal, it’s impossible to follow. If it’s figurative, it’s meaningless. I used “platitude” deliberatedly:
> a remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful
I try to live my life so that when my last day comes, I won't want to suddenly have been doing everything different, and try to correct at the end. That's what it means. Some people have a harder time finding that path, and need to remember to check in with themselves more often.
That’s OK. This is just a discussion on the web we’re both likely to eventually forget. Were we speaking in person, I’d find it valuable to discuss it further, ramblings and all.
Worth noting that of the two points I expressed in my original comment, I find the other one to be the more interesting of the two.
> It seems like you feel like you life a life where you are happy with the choices you make. Not everyone gets this.
I feel confident in saying the answer to the first sentence has no bearing on my opinion on the matter. By that same token, I also agree with the second sentence.
> Some people have a harder time finding that path, and need to remember to check in with themselves more often.
Fair enough. Someone said “it’s never your successful friends posting the inspirational quotes”, though (assuming it’s true) that could just very well be because those are precisely the friends who don’t need external reinforcement.
I feel that given more time and a better setting to discuss, one or both of us might begin to tweak our view. I would have enjoyed that. Thank you for a constructive (though brief) conversation.
Sure, eventually. It's one thing if people are getting cancer or having heart attacks later in life. It's a little concerning when a fairly large number of younger people are afflicted. The rate of cancer has risen about 30% for young people since the seventies. So it seems that there's something wrong in our environment or lifestyles that could be increasing risk. That's very concerning in my opinion.
https://www.healthcentral.com/article/cancer-rates-rising-in...
And on the subject of dying from a heart attack in one's 20s. That's "significant", but 1 in 100,000 is pretty rare. Some could be congenital or obesity related, but the majority in that age group is due to substance abuse. That's a factor people can control, and thus not as scary to most people.
Obesity was 13% in 1970. Now it’s 42%.
Obesity can increase cancer risk by 50% https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/ho...
we are breathing, drinking, eating and staying in contact with cancerous substances 24/h day. I'm surprised the human body is so resilient and we don't have 80% of under 40s with cancer tbh
the fix is to: - stop burning fossil fuels - stop producing and releasing in the environment plastic and toxic waste - switch to a sustainable diet and ditch intensive farms using chemicals to boost production
the technology is here but it would require the innovation of many industries, and without governments pushing for it a profit driven industry obviously wouldn't never change
Then you have to add the mental and physical health that is going down the drain. Lonely and depressed people stuck in bad jobs that can't have a decent life. Suburban sprawl, car-centric urbanism, alienation and isolation of communities and such
Do we know what the population limit would be for us to sustainably support people?
Once the body hits a tipping point with excess white body fat, the fat becomes a sort of parasite which gets preferential treatment in consuming calories and nutritional resources out of the bloodstream, starving the organs while the body is bathing in an abundance of calories and nutrition.
If this turns out to be the whole story it is really quite insidious!
I don't know of a single-prong approach to solving this issue. Maybe wegovy will come down in price and help people break the cycle, maybe keto is the way to go, intermittent fasting may be helpful, finding saturated fats or supplementing with stearic acids and eliminating antioxidants to help promote fat oxidization... The list goes on for potential cures and we still haven't even begun work on solidifying the direct cause of the disease.
And yes, obesity is a disease. It's not just lazy people shoveling doritos in their faces and reaping their just rewards. The foods that we are provided are not balanced nutritionally and they have been designed by food scientists to not trigger the satiation mechanism so that we will consume more of them.
So yeah, when you eat processed foods your brain is tricked into thinking one more bite will satisfy, but the satisfaction never comes. Then you overindulge, getting lots of fast carbs and unsaturated fats, your body produces insulin, the calories get converted into white fat, the white fat grows, eventually becoming a parasite that eats your food first while you still haven't dealt with the initial issue, you become obese and since your white fat gets to eat first every time you eat you become more fat before your organs and muscles get the leftovers.
That's positively devilish, and right now the solution seems to be to intermittent fast so that your other organs get moved ahead in the nutritional priority list, to eat keto so that your body begins rapidly oxidizing fat, to limit vitamin C and other antioxidants until you get closer to your goal weight to limit your body fat's resistance to oxidization, and to supplement your diet with chemicals that help your body bypass the labyrinth of obesity you've found yourself in.
And despite all of that, we still don't know the full story.
https://fireinabottle.net/category/the-scd1-theory-of-obesit...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sugar-and-fat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
Also read that fat cells don't really get destroyed, just get deflated. It really does act like a parasite.
I know some of that may be due to the idea that you 'beat' obesity and so you get lax with yourself. At the same time, something is blatantly, horribly wrong with the food that is available when it causes obese people have to satiate their fat before their own organs are allowed to eat.
Not only that but our diets can cause someone who has literally cut pounds of deflated body fat cells out of their bodies to grow it back in a matter of years. That's insane, that's the kind of stuff that makes me think of Famine in Good Omens. In the book, Famine ran a food company that fed millions of people but the food had no nutritional quality, indistinguishable from "real" food but surgically designed to be entirely made of empty calories and grease and salt so that his victims could eat until their stomachs burst, grow fat and miserable and hate their own bodies and ultimately starve to death if their hearts didn't give out first.
This is definitely not peer-reviewed research so please don't take it too seriously, but I came away convinced that there is more going on here than "people suddenly started eating too much and being lazy in the 1970s": http://achemicalhunger.com/
Now that we know, with certainty, what a disastrous choice this was, it will take time to switch back. Most people are still convinced saturated fat is the bugaboo it has been painted as, and that sugar is A-OK, and government policy is still overwhelmingly directed that way.
What can be done with half the US maize crop (of what is left over after 1/3 has been diverted to make into alcohol to add to gasoline, enriching Archer Daniels Midland at taxpayer expense) when it is no longer enzymatically converted to sugar is an open question. Does the world want that much maize?
There's so much we've learned over the past century, and yet it feels like know almost nothing when we try to dig into complicated life science topics.
People became far more mobile. Lots of diseases now seem to have some relation to viral exposure.
Note also that the study is a retrospective study, and comes with all the statistical cautions that are inherent in that methodology.
Nor did I. Environmental and lifestyle factors are a huge domain covering vastly complex interconnected systems, many of which we know almost nothing about. We're just now starting to look at epigenetic effects now. How many substances are we exposed to that can cause issues in the next generation when a large number of things we're exposed to have only been tested for short or medium term exposure, or simply not tested at all.
Although, anecdotally, it feels like the bulk of changes out side of tobacco is focused on cure research and not as much on preventing environmental factors. Perhaps that's mostly that cures make for good news and restrictions on using certain products or chemicals are viewed as draconian (especially with things widely loved or used like alcohol).
When all other causes of death are removed, only cancers will remain.
No. Living longer means we have to live with our decisions. People who live short lives don't have to live with decisions that fucked the later generation years after they're long dead. The population limit on this planet isn't natural resources, but pollution, followed by heat dissipation because humans are all 100 watts space heaters.
Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
How about we just live our life as best as we can? Trust me, it's miserable living without hope or wallowing in self pity.
People already have to live with their decisions - and humanity as a collective sucks at looking towards the future at the cost of the now. Living longer won't magically change that.
Well that's an.. interesting take
English-speaking culture is steeped in Christianity (even modern 'wokeism' is just another, more radical iteration of calvinism), and Christianity is a doomsday cult; we're fascinated by doomsday narratives, the end of the world, mass death- we're in love with these stories; look at zombie movies etc. The overpopulation meme is certainly going to be partially fed by how appealing 'the end of days' is to the western mind.
(Right wingers have a doomsday narrative, too, it's just a biosocial one rather than an ecological/geographic one; modern technology and the resulting societal shifts lead to selection against intelligence, and societal decay propagates irreversibly, leading to a future of stupid, lazy, and most importantly small-souled bugmen.)
The people that I do see promoting this sort of population limit theory are new age hippies, vegans and the like. Recently seems very popular with more college educated folk. 'How can you think about having kids when you know how bad it is for the environment'
Speaking in general terms, cancer is not a disease like a common cold.
you don't say
I am at peace with that, for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life
This suggests a Malthusian, zero-sum world in which no new net value can be created. Someone could have said that 200 years ago, yet living standards are higher than ever in spite of more people than ever. Poverty rates worldwide continue to fall.
And it's not just cancer, there are many ways one may pick the unlucky straw: it is not widely known, but the number of people who die from a heath attack in their 20s is significant. Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
This doesn't mean we need to accept death when it can be prevented. The promise and hope of technology is to expand human potential and not have to settle for fate. Someone again could have said this 200 years ago about any other medical condition that is now treatable or curable today,
This is the sort of defeatist logic that is popular online these days, but we won't have to settle for just giving up.
From my point of view if you look at the state of humanity objectively, it's pretty obvious that most of us are living our best lives compared to any time in history. Even the fact that we understand some of the damage we might be doing to the planet is a huge leap forward, since understanding the problem is the first step to finding a solution. And we have more tools and solutions than ever before in history: earth observation/space travel, genetic engineering, renewable energy, powerful, cheap and abundant computing, rapid prototyping etc, etc.
It'd be a rather drab outlook to life if browsing Hacker News were indeed something I'd be contented with being my end.
I spend my days shitposting here and on Reddit. This is what my world is, not traveling or doing something “wonderful” and “meaningful.” If I keel over right now, would I be discontented or upset about how things ended? Not at all.
This is my life. Why would I be surprised that it ended how I lived it?
Can't judge, I've spent a lot of time shitposting on Reddit myself, I just got tired of what I was doing and what it was causing on me about last week, let's see what I do now.
But I don't want to warp my perspective on life so that "finding my lost pet", "finding love (and love again)", "first day of a new life in a different country", "that mushroom trip that was actually useful", etc. to weigh not too much more on the scale of things than "slacking off in Hacker News", all so I can be more comfortable with mortality. There's more ways to be comfortable with mortality anyway, heck, forgetting about it until death is imminent is probably better, works for a lot of people for sure.
But it may just be a matter of delivery, you relax the wording a bit, and try to live every week as if it were the last one, or every month, it lets you cherish things that are more meaningful or actually enjoyable.
Wonderful
Fertility rates are declining globally, even in Sub-Saharan Africa:
https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...
Unless lifespans radically expand, we will eventually start to run out of people. If this were 4chan, I would tell you outright what I really think of you, but since it isn't, I won't.
I am pretty sure that once society decays enough that people start thinking of making war again, expect a population boom to happen.
Thank you for this wonderful thought! I always struggle with mortality and my place in the world. You offered me a window into the grander scheme of things, that doesn't fall back on God or you are just a small speck in the grander scheme of things.
We are all here to keep our species going and hand over the marathon stick to the next generation and then step aside.
I also think that means the next generation or two will have so many people on the planet that literally everyone who ever lived could still be alive and it would be the same.
Scarcity is not the problem. Death is so far inevitable, but it is not necessary.
https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived...
I’m against this advice because aside from the usual objections like practicality, it’s fundamentally based on fear of missing out and not having lived a good life. It’s a kind of striving and all striving leads to suffering.
If you want to spend your afternoon navel gazing or looking at fish in the pond, that’s the true thing you should do. Free and easy wandering.
Although it seems to be that there is starting to be backlash on that.
This common claim that "we need to die to make room for other people" is not obviously true, good discussion here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ufjFuHmJoysXrKXYQ/what-exact...
Also, don't be so quick to accept death as a good thing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhuman.... It's basically the worst thing that can happen.
For the individual, not the species as a whole. Or for the planet as a whole.
Sure, we might not lose some existing fantastic thinkers and doers, but what happens to the new thinkers and doers? If Sir Isaac Newton was still alive, would Einstein have gotten the attention he did, having to fight against a well established hierarchy of scientists built over the millennia? Would governmental seats ever change? Would slavery have ever gone away in a world where human rights would have no need to progress?
That said, no matter how well you play, the game does end eventually. I like to think that, like poker, despite the variance, you have some degree of influence on how well the game ends.
But is death loosing?
I don't view death as the antithesis of life, more appropriately I think it mirrors conception/birth.
I think of death more as a finale, the conclusion to your story be it grand or mundane. I also wonder if not for death would we cherish the events in life as greatly as we do? Think of the thinks that gave you pleasure as a child that you no longer care for as they have become stale and boring. Perhaps it would be so with living had we not death.
Many contributors have already made good suggestions how to reduce the risk of getting cancer, or how to deal with it; but I found most posts quite _technical_.
Speaking in general terms, cancer is not a disease like a common cold. The human body sooner or later is bound to decay, which pretty much starts once one is fully grown, and mutations get less often corrected by the wonderful repair processes our bodies are equipped with. Occasionally, mutations lead to uncontrolled growth of malign tissue, some incidents of which are bound to lead to death, others not.
And while it is absolutely a good idea to life healthily and to take care of one's physical and emotional well-being, one should also never deny that we are all mortals, and cancer as well as traditional diseases can and eventually will wipe any individual out. I am at peace with that, for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life.
Because it is a statistical process, we can forecast how many are affected, but not which individual, and everyone can try to minimize one's chances to be affected, but this does not mean they will live forever. And it's not just cancer, there are many ways one may pick the unlucky straw: it is not widely known, but the number of people who die from a heath attack in their 20s is significant. Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.