Sure, I don't love cleaning kitty litter, but if I lost the ability to clean it, and I didn't have the ability to have someone else live-in and clean it for me, I wouldn't be able to have a cat, and that would be _immensely_ saddening to me. The same goes for a cutting a lawn; not being able to cut your own lawn means potentially not getting to enjoy _having_ a lawn, given that part of the enjoyment is presumably in actually getting to spend time in it, take care of it, etc.

This isn't even mentioning the fact that the loss of routine can itself be jarring, and of course all of the sibling comments explaining that the real loss is agency. That said, I think it's worth realizing that even though you and I aren't in the group of people who particularly enjoy chores (and those people do exist!), the reason they exist at all is because they do actually accomplish something useful, and not being able to perform them means either losing those benefits or having to rely on the goodwill of others to take care of them for you. Given that the "others" tend to be those closest to you that you care most about, is it really that hard to imagine that someone might feel like they're burdening their loved ones rather than reveling in the "freedom" that comes from not being physically capable of mowing their own lawn?

He didn't lose the ability to cut grass. He lost the ability to decide to cut grass. He lost his autonomy and that can be worse than death

Seems like this should be obvious, but it's not about the grass. It's about the loss of agency.

Arguably, the absolute most human, personal thing we can ever do is choose which things do and do not provide meaning to us. There is no deeper, more inalienable agency than that.

I am looking at you like that, because you're speaking without first having thought at all.

Imagine the thing you love most in all the world to do. Imagine losing that - as, some day, you certainly will. Then, if you still feel like it, try again.

I don't think the user you replied to didn't think about it at all. They thought about, and found strange, the fact that cutting grass was the thing someone loved _the most_.

It's sad to see the user be downvoted to oblivion and dismissed completely, especially if the guidelines forbid this. No arguments, just "you're wrong".

It is unsurprising. Seliger was a fairly close presence on HN during the end of his life, and not everyone here is well equipped to understand and account for the effect on themselves of sharing such pathos. It isn't something Californian or American culture handles well in general, and even then HN participants constitute an unusual cohort selected partially (if not intentionally) for a habit of privileging rationality over emotion - which isn't at all the same thing as skill in managing one's emotions, especially at their heights. When someone speaks intemperately in such a moment, as here, in that light it reads easily as if selfish and contemptuous of the entire circumstance, and receives a response in accord with that reading.

I don't think that's unjustified, even if I did take the time to unpack it a bit for our mutual interlocutor here. It was not my first instinct to do so. Someone whom a lot of people here care about was within days, possibly hours, of dying. At a time like that, someone who speaks out of turn may very confidently expect to be slapped down for it. It's worth explaining why that's the case, because all else equal a better understood error is less likely to be repeated. But it was an unmitigated error, and the response it received is the one it deserved.

Why the hell are you challenging that on a topic such as this? What is wrong with you?