20 ms·

Life is Short

• the_watcher 11y ago
  This is probably my favorite thing pg has ever written. He's right in so many ways, but my favorite is just his reminder of "don't wait."
  • silverlake 11y ago
    This is my least favorite. I respect his advice on startups, but little else. This sounds like the stuff Oprah used to say.
    • Svenstaro 11y ago
      Which freely available works on this matter would you recommend reading instead? I'm interested in seeing what kind of philosophy other people prefer.
      • akkartik 11y ago
        http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/discourses.1.one.html http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/discourses.1.one.html (I'll throw in, with all humility, my philistine take on philosophy: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/09/geopolitics-for-individuals http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/09/geopolitics-for-individ.... It was inspired partly by Paul Graham's previous http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, which IMO is far superior.)
    • eruditely 11y ago
      You sound like an idiot. How in the world is this comparable to something oprah says? This reminds me of how Karl Popper critiques people's opinions, at times he rejects both the pro/anti side of something, as he did in anti-naturalist history vs naturalist history arguing that both were based on a misunderstanding of the logical content of the thing in question. In this regard you have misunderstood the logical content of the essay in question, drawing a contrast on two things that are not.
      • dang 11y ago
        > You sound like an idiot. This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please edit incivility out of your comments when posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
        • eruditely 11y ago
          Why? The other side gets to drown us in attacks and we can't fight back? Sorry moderator your civility warnings are unwarranted and its why people lose these sort of fights. If a Nobel prize winner will get pushed out in England due to being flanked from all sides, while the nice people can't fight back.
          • dang 11y ago
            Everyone always perceives themselves as "fighting back", i.e. sees the other side as the aggressor and oneself as merely defending. Since this bias is shared equally by all, it's guaranteed to produce nothing but escalation unless we develop the ability to be a bit more objective and respectful in our arguing.
            • eruditely 11y ago
              >"Since this bias is shared equally by all, it's guaranteed to produce nothing but escalation unless we develop the ability to be a bit more objective and respectful in our arguing." Do you honestly believe that it is 'us' who will escalate? Or is it them? Does it look like they're looking for anything else? Look at the egregious response to the essays. Yes, i'm sure we are the ones at fault. I guess i'll stop, but you are wrong in a very plain and ordinary way and I think that request was in poor taste.
  • jsprogrammer 11y ago
    He's also wrong in ways. Bullshit may not 'trick' you, but you may 'buy in to it' and that possibility is not considered in this writing by pg, where he believes that bullshit is either forced on him, or that 'it' somehow tricked him into believing it while not considering that he may be leaving a trail of his own bullshit right behind his self.
• anunumoose 11y ago
  Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement. It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from. Anyway good luck!
  • the_watcher 11y ago
    I didn't read it as him suggesting that he'd stop writing, just that he'd make a conscious effort to stop defending himself from online attacks. I agree that it would be terrible if he quit writing his essays.
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    • jl 11y ago
      Don't worry, he won't stop writing essays. I was going to expand this thought but when I thought what some of the responses might be, I thought, "Life is too short!" and left it as is :)
    • aamar 11y ago
      I think you're interpreting pg correctly. But isn't posting an essay "arguing online"? An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics. I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.
  • tremguy 11y ago
• talsraviv 11y ago
  > The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life... I'm glad he pointed out this seemingly small detail. This took me a very long time to understand. EDIT: It reminds me of another great post by Paul Buccheit. It's so important to have the 'heroes' of startup culture explicitly spell out these values: > I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing. http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.fr/2012/03/eight-years-today.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.fr/2012/03/eight-years-today.ht...
• plasticchris 11y ago
  Life is very long - TS Eliot
• xenadu02 11y ago
  I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once. When you realize how short time really is you ruthlessly cut bullshit.
  • evgg 11y ago
    What is your reasoning behind labeling building one's own PCs as bullshit, as opposed to buying Macs?
    • dack 11y ago
      I just took it to mean he doesn't really value spending his time building a PC when a Mac fulfills his needs. If you truly enjoy building PCs, then it's not bullshit.
      • SturgeonsLaw 11y ago
        I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to see this response. It's all subjective! Personally, I love the quiet, "zen" feeling of distraction free focus on technical work. For me, that's my anti-bullshit. I wish I could spend more time doing things like building PCs! Of course, with all of us being different humans with different experiences and different mindsets, YMMV.
    • deleted 11y ago
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    • babuskov 11y ago
      When time is scarce, you start to prioritize things that are really important to you. If your main life goal is to ship great software, then building your own PC is just taking away precious time. As DHH said in Twist interview: "If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong"
• EugeneOZ 11y ago
  Great post, thanks. Today I also was thinking about how it sucks to getting old. I'm 32 but I see how I'm getting older, my friends getting older and youth looks much brighter :) Value your life and time, young people, enjoy your bodies, don't risk your health, make more love, travel more :)
• RKoutnik 11y ago
  It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the country to join a startup. While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for that move. Yes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realized just how unglamorous startup life can be and the unfailable pg started to, well, fail. On the other hand, there's something about the following sidenote that is profoundly human but works quite the opposite of the painful shock implied in my first sentence: > I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!" This is almost universally true. It is incredibly reassuring to know that even the greats struggle with this and antagonists pursue us through all walks of life. I'll admit, I've held back from publishing articles that all of my reviewers liked because I worried about the inevitable negative backlash that comes with standing for anything on the internet. Maybe one day I will publish. If so, this essay helped a great deal in getting me there.
  • oskarth 11y ago
    > While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for it. This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.
    • RKoutnik 11y ago
      Oh, I fell for those sour grapes hard (and might I say, you're absolutely right). It's trivially easy to find "think"pieces supporting any opinion under the sun, making my insistence on declaring grapes sour even easier. It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...
  • unclebucknasty 11y ago
    Hear, hear and well said. That inevitable backlash is there indeed and can stymie you out of the gate. The thing is, those who have bold ideas and/or stand for something tend to also be more sensitive to this negativity. I suppose we know that, at the end of the day, our ideas are nothing in a vacuum. As much as we'd like to blaze the trail, we need people to follow or join, not attack and tear down. Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all. This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.
• reasonattlm 11y ago
  Life is short. So why not do something about that? Are we not meant to be the very essence of creation? Is this not an age of revolutionary progress in biotechnology? Just this past week I helped out a young company whose founders are working toward clinical translation of a method of clearance of senescent cells, one of the very first actual honest-to-goodness narrow focus rejuvenation therapies to emerge from the labs. This is something that works to repair and reverse a form of tissue damage that contributes to near all age-related disease. This is far from the only approach to human rejuvenation presently under development. But, you know, life is short, so pay attention or not, up to you.
  • jk4930 11y ago
    Love your website. Keep up the good fight. Thanks.
• salmonet 11y ago
  I've noticed that recently pg's twitter has a lot of comments that you would see on a typical stay-at-home mom's Facebook wall. It's refreshing to see someone with the financial opportunity cost of pg opt to stay home and hang out with the kids.
  • fegu 11y ago
    While his opportunity cost is higher, he has the luxury of having "enough", i.e. being financially independent. His focus on reducing bullshit in life and spending more time at home would not be possible to the same extent without the bank account. What we see here is the typical thoughts of a middle aged man who has already made his fortune. Nothing to see, move along.
• math 11y ago
  I lived in Sydney for 8 months and Brisbane for 4 years. When thinking back, both feel like a distinct part of my life to a surprisingly equal extent. Maximizing the number of distinct phases in your life seems to me to be important in making it seem longer.
  • ajeet_dhaliwal 11y ago
    Very good point. A visit somewhere entirely new for just two weeks feels like 3 months of comparable memories to the two weeks in my regular mundane life.
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  • erikpukinskis 11y ago
    This rings very true to me. It points at another approach to getting the most out of life: change as much as you can. Maybe once everyone in your family had had a few of those magical Christmases it's time to look for something else fun.
• deleted 11y ago
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• VieElm 11y ago
  This is article is contradicting itself although it may not be so obvious. I imagine dwelling on regrets can be classified as a bullshit activity. It certainly does for me. I am sure you can infer the rest of my argument. Just do the best you can with your time. If you become unhappy with how you spent it you can use that to inform you on future decisions but you can't change the past. The pain of having missed significant time with someone you care about is severe, but it is also a thing you can't change. I am not saying pg is wrong, I am pointing out a problem. Life may be too short to worry about how you are spending your time.
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• jzwinck 11y ago
  > One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option. This also has a darker cousin for some parents: since spending time with one's children is always a viable and valuable option, spending time without them becomes difficult. People without children often notice that most of their parental friends disappear. This despite the prior protestations of many that "We'll still do things after we have kids." Undoubtedly some parents work more efficiently than their childless selves (this is also motivated by a desire to earn money to support the kids). But can they socialize more efficiently too, in particular with people who don't have kids?
• p4wnc6 11y ago
  Some practical ways that readers can implement this advice: 1. Don't work for a start-up, since they don't impart salary-winning experience to you, they don't pay you or provide reasonable benefits, and they also don't allow you the freedom to work on big ideas that they usually promise. The lines used to sell naive engineers on working in start-ups are as paramount to life's-too-short-bullshit as anything can be. 2. Don't agree to work in Agile/Scrum-like one-size-fits-all software management environments. Almost every single aspect of these systems is bullshit and will waste your time and break down your morale while draining away your productivity in the best years of your life. 3. Don't work in open-plan offices or even offices that merely have cubicles. It's been settled for a long, long time that even in dense urban areas, providing private offices for individual knowledge workers is extremely cost effective for businesses, as productivity, work-place cognitive health, job satisfaction, moral, etc., all go up substantially. Generally the only reasons for open-plan offices are (1) bullshit trendiness in which an organization performs a shallow copy of some other organization, (2) hyperbolic focus on short-term costs, which means you should be thinking that the upper management doesn't know what they are doing and are bullshitting you -- it's similar to seeing a company stop providing free coffee as a money-saving tactic. It's bullshit -- coffee is so cheap and the productivity and good will it brings are so valuable that it's virtually never a reasonable plan to cut it; and (3) environments where upper management get off on surveillance and cognitive manipulation, and so it becomes a company cultural value to cram everyone into big rooms where you function more like a piece of office furniture than as a worker. Personally I would also add that life's too short for enterprise C++ and Java (the languages themselves are quite fine, but anyone telling you that some legacy system couldn't have been maintained and incrementally brought into a better state by 2016 is, once again, bullshitting you and see you as nothing but a glorified code janitor). I think if I could give any advice to young developers, it would be that if they want management types to respect them throughout a prosperous career, they have to avoid the bullshit of the items above. If you let a manager or executive bullshit you by duping you into working for a start-up, by getting you to agree you are a child whose own creative thinking about problem solving can't be trusted and so Agile/Scrum cookbook management is needed and you must play your part, or by getting you to agree that your natural inclinations for privacy, clarity of thought, protection of productivity and time, should all be sublimated so you can be a "team player" by wearing headphones that cost more than your employer's 401k matches for the year so you can just barely function 10 feet from a foosball table, you've already lost, and it will take years to undo the damage.
• tmsh 11y ago
  This is the best essay I've read since the Addiction one. Cheers.
• cmacole 11y ago
  This was a really powerful essay. Don't know if using "8" is a good way to measure if there are not a lot of something. 8 light-years is pretty far and 8 tons is pretty heavy. But overall, great insights. My favorite: "One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin."
• jfaucett 11y ago
  This article resonated a lot with me. It verbalizes what I've been trying to do over the past year or so with my own life. For me a lot of the BS elimination on the first pass was just getting rid of distractions and interruptions, so I cut out the phone/email/chat, etc all during my working hours except for certain times, like 10 minutes after lunch and just before the end of the day. The noise was all driving me insane. The next step was to remove things from my life that cause stress and are not worth the effort because of the BS they involve. Whether that's just life situations or clients it has been very refreshing. The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage. Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about and the personal sense of well-being and accomplishment has improved drastically. So I have no intent of doing anything other than continuing to go down this road, I've gotten in better physical shape, better health, enjoy life more, have learned a new language, visited many new places, my stress level has dropped by at last 200%, its been a very positive journey so far.
  • iDemonix 11y ago
    I'm trying to achieve currently what it seems you have already achieved. The problem is I cut everything out, but then there will be a moment at work where you're waiting for something (in my job for example, waiting for RHEL to install), and you decide to glance at Facebook. Then you do it a couple of times. Then you get home and decide as it's raining you won't go cycling. It all builds back up and I'm back to square one. It feels like trying to kick smoking. I have a list of stuff I want to do (fix up my motorbikes, finish my 'day van', get back in to DH mountain biking) and a list of stuff I do (video games, drink, NetFlix, Reddit), and I always seep back to the latter one. Might give it another go soon, life is short after all.
    • jfaucett 11y ago
      I think the biggest thing is to start very small. Seriously, very very small. I had for years done more or less what you describe. So I finally just decided to start super baby simple and have one tiny little goal and accomplish it. For me it was hard to eliminate looking up my news sites when I had a free minute or two. Eventually, I just deleted my bookmarks and edited my /etc/hosts and that did the trick for me. But I didn't try to cut out those distractions and start a workout routine at the same time. Also I didn't try to start anything else until the last goal had become kind of routine (like brushing your teeth in the morning). There are still many things on my list to see and do and there's still stress in my life, but I feel with this method of one micro step at a time you slowly chip away in unnoticeable steps until now for me a little over a year later you've made a big noticeable dent. oh yea, I finally quit smoking too :) EDIT: most of my goals also had to do with eliminating stress. For instance, my "learning the language" was to just turn on the radio and listen to interesting talk shows in swedish and occasionally look up words, all which was very relaxing for me. My exercise is swimming which is super enjoyable for me and something I always look forward to (even when I didn't have the time to do it). I don't know what it would be like if you do not actually look forward to or enjoy your goals...
• japhyr 11y ago
  My father's death taught me to finish the things I start. He was a software engineer in the 70s and 80s, and he taught me how to program when I was a little kid. When he died in 2011 I went through his computer, looking at the projects he was still working on. It was profoundly sad to think that these projects were frozen, that no one would ever use them. The experience of looking through his unfinished projects led me to make the transition from hobbyist programmer to professional. It was hard to stop playing with a bunch of different projects and make myself focus on one single project, but in the end it has been extremely satisfying to finish what I start. I wish my father was still around to see what I've done, but I might never have finished anything without the lesson of his passing.
  • kjhughes 11y ago
    Your father's still around, recognizing the value of completing projects, and sharing inspirational stories with us. Thank you for your post.
• throwawaymaroon 11y ago
  Poor PG, who only sees people telling lies about him when they vehemently, sardonically disagree.
• sjg007 11y ago
  Obligatory: http://www.theonion.com/article/open-minded-man-grimly-realizes-how-much-life-hes--19273 http://www.theonion.com/article/open-minded-man-grimly-reali...
  • dennisgorelik 11y ago
    Bingo: --- While Richman has vowed to cease being open-minded to absolute horseshit, acquaintances reflected on his approachability. "I love Blake," coworker David Martin said. "He's such a good listener. A lot of people are closed-minded and self-absorbed, but Blake always makes an effort to hear where I'm coming from. The world could use more people like him." ---
• vdnkh 11y ago
  I'm (only) 23 and I've felt this for a while. I've been trying to leave my small no-name company for a higher calibre job in NYC for a few months now. I guess I'm lucky because I know what I want - but I need to wade through extreme amounts of bullshit to get there. I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary.
  • NhanH 11y ago
    > I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary. Be careful with equating "unproductive" and bullshit. Society at large only cares about your productivity, and there is always pressure for you to do "productive" thing that advances some imaginary life ladder. From your POV and benefits, all those productive things might all be bullshit.
    • vdnkh 11y ago
      What's productive to me isn't always considered productive to society, but I do "objectively productive" things like exercising and personal projects.
      • deleted 11y ago
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    • sotojuan 11y ago
      Yeah. I don't consider playing video games for an hour or so to wind down "bullshit", provided they do not stop me from achieving my daily goals. Not only are "unproductive" activities like film, video games, socializing/hanging out very enjoyable for me, but the most interesting people I've met do a lot of them. All in moderation.
      • mercer 11y ago
        A few years ago I finished my studies and became a freelancer. It took me until this year to realize that in the effort to 'value' my hours, I forgot how essential and valuable it is to spend time doing things that are relaxing and that might seem unproductive at first sight. It reached a point where I would often work in the weekends, forego any vacation, feel guilty about the hours I did 'nothing' (out of sheer necessity), and sometimes even apply a little too much pragmatism to my friendships. I'd ask myself if the interactions were useful or somehow furthered my personal development or career, and forget that, while this is not an unimportant question, the value of a friendship can be the time spent enjoying each other's company. This important realization came after I had worked a lot, built a relatively stable career with enough clients and a good portfolio, saved up enough money to allow me to not work for at least a year. I had reached my goals, so to speak. But instead of stopping work and doing things I always put off, or creating things I'd been wanting to create for a long time, I ended up with a (mild) burn-out and a severe existential crisis: now that I had nothing to really worry about, I had no clue what to do with that freedom. What am I, and what do I enjoy doing, after years of neglecting to explore this? Currently I'm working on finding more balance, and savoring the little and big things in life. But even now, I need to make sure I have some work because when I stop, my mind just kind of panics from the freedom I have. So I'm taking it one step at a time. Picking up gaming again has been one of those things I savor again.
• thebear 11y ago
  Somewhat unbelievably, I still have that 1960's jeans jacket with the patch on it that says, "Do it today, tomorrow it may be illegal." And, all hail the Internet, that thing can still be bought online: http://www.holidays.net/mlk/store/Old-60-s-70-s-Protest-type-Patch-Do-It-Today-tomorrow-It-May-Be-Illegal_272105666913.html http://www.holidays.net/mlk/store/Old-60-s-70-s-Protest-type...
• jrapdx3 11y ago
  Good timing on the topic, I mean "how short is it?" when it comes to life duration. I'm at a stage of slowing down, cutting back after working for decades "at the front line". Like everyone says, it all zoomed by so fast. Or did it? I think it reflects the point of view, when we're involved in work, all the details to take care of, we feel overwhelmed, busy, time isn't rushing by at all. But once it's history, the past, all of that is suddenly doesn't exist, it has no reality and it is packaged up in memory as though it was just a brief moment. Kind of like closing a menu what's there is hidden, except we're not reopening it, at least not the same way ever again. Time is relative, as Einstein said, it goes quickly sitting next to a pretty girl, but a boring lecture drags on forever. The epochs across the lifespan come and go, and I think we judge the duration of experience by its currency because involvement with events in real time gives the sense of time. The meaning of a "long" or "short" time is anchored in such reality. Anyway I've been thinking for a while that what's important is not how much time we have left to live. After all that's not something we can actually ever know. What matters is what we do with the time we have. I'd surely agree we can't afford to waste it on irrelevancies, pipe-dreams, or bitterness. Far better to do what we can, when we can do it.
• jondubois 11y ago
  I think the problem is definitely finiteness (not length). I don't understand it when people talk about 'squeezing everything out of life' - As though you could extract real lasting substance/meaning from it. I don't believe it's possible to "Make the most" out of life - It all adds up to 0 in the end. "Squeezing everything out of life" implies that you're literally taking the juice out of life and storing it somewhere safe/permanent - In reality, it is like squeezing an orange and then putting the juice back inside the orange.
• zallarak 11y ago
  Marriage definitely made me prune bullshit from my life. I can only imagine what children would do. I would include Anger as a subcategory of bullshit. It promotes irrationality and the after effects hamper you. In the renowned book "Emotional Intelligence" the author says that the best thing to do when angry is to focus on controlling it. The more it grows, the harder it is to escape.
  • simonswords82 11y ago
    I've been married and divorced. Now with a new partner who I've been with for nearly a decade and we've got a kid. I'd say the pruning of bullshit from marriage is about 10% of that for having children!
• vinayak147 11y ago
  An experience feels meaningful only with respect to others that don't. If it wasn't for bullshit we would never know what to cherish. The bullshit and cherishable also seem to frequently reverse roles. Many things that seem like noise today, may return to foreground with profound meaning later. I wonder if perhaps nothing is bullshit or meaningful after all. Experience simply plays this game of light and shadow to keep us entertained.
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  • Nagyman 11y ago
    Bullshit :) You can have no crime and still know that which is crime. I understand what you're saying though. The meaningless can become meaningful with chance, the right connection, or by repetition. Some view video games as wasted time, but how many gamers met their significant other or became a programmer in such situations?
• fizixer 11y ago
  Life is too short to not be involved in and/or contributing to anti-aging research in any way. If Wright brothers (and other flight enthusiasts around that time) had not taken the initiative, academics, pundits, and "experts" had it settled that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. It had to eventually happen because technology is inevitable, but we might have conquered flight in 1953 instead of 1903. In the case of anti-aging, such a difference means you either die or barely make it past the last generation to die.
  • copperx 11y ago
    Surely you mean cancer research? It is much more likely to kill us all than old age.
    • fizixer 11y ago
      Why do young people not have cancer? (save for rare genetic forms).
      • erikpukinskis 11y ago
        Some cancers are the result of damage. I.e. asbestos in your lungs. Children just haven't punched enough time on the clock to have as many of those experiences. By the time you are old your probability of exposure to at least one of those experiences gets pretty high. That's not aging doing the deed, it's living. Also, some cancers take time to develop, which would make for fewer diagnoses in childhood.
        • fizixer 11y ago
          Well, one of the least ambiguous definitions of aging is "accumulation of damage at the microscopic/cellular level", that includes both accumulation of foreign matter over time (e.g., accumulation of asbestos particles, or cholesterol) and accumulation of damage due to matter or othewise (e.g., damage accumulation due to daily asbestos exposure without asbestos actually accumulating). So you essentially supported my point. If you have a different meaningful definition of aging I'd like to know.
• seansoutpost 11y ago
  Paul,you don't know me. But this could not have been more perfectly timed. Thank you, so much.
  • artursapek 11y ago
    I'm somewhat active in the Bitcoin community. Are you the person who runs the bitcoin-friendly homeless shelter? Do you suffer from people writing bullshit about you, too? I imagine you might, in your position.
• brhsiao 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, what does the vb in vb.html stand for?
  • foysavas 11y ago
    Most likely, 'vita brevis'.
    • brhsiao 11y ago
      Thanks!
  • bootload 11y ago
    "what does the vb in vb.html stand for?" possibly, shortened 'aVoiding Bullshit'.
  • hardbyte 11y ago
    visual basic
• seansoutpost 11y ago
  Paul,you don't know me. But this could not have been more perfectly timed. Thank you, so much.
• unclebucknasty 11y ago
  In a very real sense, though, isn't it all bullshit? I mean, it depends on whether you choose to accept or reject the current Matrix as normative human life, but there is an argument to be made. For instance, it is kind of funny to say this or that company is more or less bullshitty, when the whole structure is such that requires the masses to work for some company, else essentially be deprived of the resources required for their subsistence. So, most people will have to earn their subsistence by participating in a scheme that allocates more to someone else's subsistence. Maybe it's the best we can do, but on that scale, the bullshittiest company of all is only marginally more bullshitty than the least.
• xyzzy4 11y ago
  On a zoomed-out log scale of significance from 0 to infinity, bullshit activities would rank almost equally important as non-bullshit activities. So just let life happen. Nothing you do is extremely consequential or important regardless. If you're stuck in traffic, you could've been reading a book. If you were reading a book, you could've been cleaning your room. If you were cleaning your room, you could've been working on a side project. If you were doing that, you could've been working on a better side project to get rich. But that would be less important than curing cancer, which is less important than curing old age. However, even curing old age pales in significance to the fact that entropy will dissipate all energy in the universe. How are you going to prevent that? And what if there's multi-verses that need to be fixed too somehow. You didn't fix the past either. Maybe you should've worked on a time machine instead of solving entropy problems. And what about all those people in poverty getting malaria because you were working on some b.s. problem? It never ends. You could go crazy dwelling on this stuff too much.
• alexandercrohde 11y ago
  Summary: - Poses the hypothesis that "Life is short" - Proposes an 'objective' basis for this feeling: some of his most meaningful life events happen 8 or less times - Transitions that the shortness of life justifies avoiding "bullshit," while acknowledging that's a loaded term. - Proposes examples of "bullshit," traffic jams, unnecessary meetings, bureaucracy, and arguing online. - Suggests arguing online is an example of a habit that is addictive, yet bullshit. - Defines bullshit as things that won't matter to you in the future upon reflection. - Proposes ways to avoid bullshit - Proposes a way to savor time Analysis: - I'm not sold on the metric of measuring something by how much we value it upon reflection. - I don't think the premise "Life is short" needs to be established to justify "avoid bullshit." - The argument is fairly loose in that 99.9% of our lives are bullshit by his definition. Is 99% of sex bullshit? Interesting piece, smarter than your average bear.
  • alexandercrohde 11y ago
    I'd be curious to understand the downvotes. I felt I gave this essay a very objective treatment.
    • dang 11y ago
      Probably because HN threads are supposed to be conversations and that kind of summary interrupts a conversation.
      • alexandercrohde 11y ago
        That theory wouldn't explain why all of my other such summaries have done so well though.
• numlocked 11y ago
  And for a completely different perspective, we have Kurt Vonnegut: [Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] “Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
  • ajju 11y ago
    I often feel much like Vonnegut, and yet, I don't think it contradicts the ideas in the essay. Vonnegut really enjoyed "farting around" and didn't think it was bullshit.
    • alexashka 11y ago
      The difference is it sounds like Vonnegut was quite content to go for a stroll and chat up the sales clerk. This is in stark contrast with 'I wish I spent more time with person X'. When you live a simpler life, you have simpler pleasures. When you live a high-brow life, all of a sudden you grasp at experiences because you're not sure when the next one is going to come around the corner. Hence missing people, or feeling like you will never get to do X again. When you enjoy the smell of 100 flowers, the absence of a couple doesn't inspire your mind into a frenzy of 'optimizing away the bs' because you know, when you're a multi-millionaire who doesn't have to work another day in his life, is it really spending time on bs that's the problem? Maybe it's the bs ideas in the mind and in this essay :)
      • noobermin 11y ago
        You can do both. I love seeing the blue sky and clouds and I love just walking outside even if a bike ride or bus ride would be faster. I also want to not be late for work, and have enough time to finish my errands. I want to have comfort and pay off my student loans and see Europe before I turn 35 (had to move the goal posts, unfortunately). It comes down to balancing things. Also, chatting with a sales clerk, really, experiencing life is not a "simple pleasure" for some people, me included. If I had all the "important things" but couldn't see a white cloud for the rest of my life, I would consider that a failed life. In the end, we all have what we call "important" and what we call "bullshit", and it does vary from person to person.
• lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  > We had the best time a daddy and a 3 year old ever had. A couple of years back I was working remotely in UK for US clients - so my day started later. Which meant I woke up with the kids, fed them, played with them, walked them to school. My abiding memories are cuddling a child in an arm each watching early morning TV before starting the day. We should all be so lucky, except it's not luck - it's consciously as a society designing work around community and family not the other way round
• transfire 11y ago
  I've been saying this for years... Seems to me we should all drop everything else we are doing and start working on age-extension technology. Once that's solved we will all have plenty of time to do anything else we want.
  • xiaoma 11y ago
    And how many more years will you wait before you do that? How many more years can you wait and still be able to make a difference?
• dennisgorelik 11y ago
  > When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Not really. Contradiction means pointing to possible holes in our assumptions. So online discussions - are a way to test our assumptions and learn. Online discussions is a playground for training our decision-making skills. Of course, we should maintain a healthy balance between learning in online discussions, other ways of learning and actual decision-making (work). But that healthy balance should probably include more than zero time in online discussions.
• rbrogan 11y ago
  Life is short, art long. If you cannot escape the bullshit, you might at least make an art of bullshitting. ;)
• deleted 11y ago
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• ianamartin 11y ago
  Am I the only person on HN who doesn't have this problem? Other people's bullshit has never bothered me. I regularly just turn my phone off and pick up the pieces when I feel like it. Maybe that comes from my musician background. I don't know. Or maybe I'm just the most inefficient person in the world because I don't give a shit about anything. I just do what I think is necessary when I think it's needed. I think I'm a fairly productive person. I get things done. But I don't worry about it much. I spend most of my thoughts and energy on my family and my girlfriend, not work. Okay, that's not fair: I spend quite a lot of time reading books. Is this a real problem? Or is it a straw man?
• deleted 11y ago
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• bansarefun 11y ago
  I had the same thought as the parent. His last essay was, by a wide margin, his least well considered, most nonsensical, and most widely criticized essay. It was, by a wide margin, his worse ever work. And now, suddenly, his next essay is on life being too short for bullshit and arguing on the internet? Yes... this seems to me like one thing: it seems like Paul Graham knows he wrote a god-awful, indefensible, steaming turd of an essay; and he's running away. He wants to stand by his self-entitled beliefs. He wants to stand by his ridiculous mischaracterizations of those he attacked. He wants to stand by all that bullshit. And he's standing by his awful essay by claiming engaging with critics of his steaming turd would be a waste of his life. Yes. This is another new low point for pg. pg, you're over. You used to be important... and you'll continue to think you're important. But you are now the past, and the future will be found somewhere else. Enjoy your bubble where everybody tells you that everything you say is gold. Enjoy never growing or learning again, because you've sealed out voices that are willing to tell you when you're wrong. Enjoy pretending you're perfect. You're done. You're a joke. pg. you're the past.
  • S4M 11y ago
    I personally didn't like too much that essay about inequalities, but I think your comment is unnecessarily nasty. I believe arguing with commenters like you is exactly the bullshit PG mentioned.
    • iiiggglll 11y ago
      His tone might seem unnecessarily harsh at first, but when taken in context of the amount of ass-kissing that goes on here, it starts to seem more like an appropriate counterweight.
      • Aeolun 11y ago
        You can be a counterweight without being an asshole. If not, you're just contributing to the problem.
      • giantqqq 11y ago
• datashovel 11y ago
  My take on this is the essay exposes a pretty significant flaw in the human condition. The more capable a person is to ignore the bullshit (ie. enough money to retire comfortably immediately) the less likely they should be doing so. And yet having the ability to "ignore the bullshit" is an integral component of what we've all come to recognize as "living the dream". In way too many cases the "bullshit" exists because too many capable people are ignoring it. That is unless "bullshit" is defined as all things that don't matter to anyone. In which case why would we assume anyone is focusing on those things anyways?
  • deleted 11y ago
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• pasbesoin 11y ago
  People telling me to stick it out. Wait for things to improve. Wait until grad school. That the onus was always on me to adapt to the system and its (their) practices. Worst. Advice. Ever. If I have one thing to contribute, one iota of value to extract and pass on from my life, this may be it. P.S. Substitute "extortion" for advice, in many circumstances, for a sense of how it really worked.
• omarish 11y ago
  Loved this article. It really reminded me of some of Seneca's writing, specifically _On the Shortness of Life_: > Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.
• xlayn 11y ago
  I've thinking about the entry... and every once and then you think about it; and realize: it's about choice... What will be the best use of your time? When someone ask for the best flavor of linux, or program, or car; depending on the forum you may get the answer "that depends on you", and you may read a lot of different opinions on why people think their version is the best "for them". With that comes a small problem: deciding the best use of your time, plan for the rest of your life may be incredibly complex. An alternative B plan could be planning around: "What I don't want on my life" -I don't want to be in the middle of traffic because is less time with my family... -I want to spend less time on the internet to go the gym.../I want to stop being a gym rat to learn something on the internet
• wallflower 11y ago
  "You’re still young and healthy. Maybe that’s why you don’t understand what I am saying. Let me give you an example. Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful—as painful as actually being cut with a knife. You will be turning thirty soon, Mr. Kawana, which means that, from now on, you will gradually enter that twilight portion of life—you will be getting older. You are probably beginning to grasp that painful sense that you are losing something, are you not?" From 1Q84, Haruki Murakami
  • shorttime 11y ago
    Book description for those that may be interested: “Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.” —The New York Times Book Review The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector. A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
• beeboop 11y ago
  Absolutely my favorite post of his. Rings so true for me right now. Writing this comment is "bullshit" but it makes me feel better to express my satisfaction with reading this post. I need to connect with people more and spend fewer months and years of my life in isolation.
• blinkingled 11y ago
  PG says Life is Short. There are still 101 people arguing^W discussing it - on an online forum no less ;)
  • heraclez 11y ago
    This
• ajeet_dhaliwal 11y ago
  I think that the death of a close loved one is a prerequisite to truly understanding how short life is. Having children helps too but I don't think it is enough on it's own. I do absolutely agree that children are the best at focusing us on what is important. I have known how short life is for a long time but I encounter people on a daily basis, most far older than me who don't seem to realise it or if they do are acting irrationally. When I see them wasting their time on things that are clearly not important it doesn't bother me too much because it is their time to choose what to do with but what does make me angry is if they try to involve me in the 'bullshit' too, to use the term used in the essay. At work this can range from petty disagreements or the colleague that creates busywork. I wonder how many people start startups recognise life is too short compared to those who do not, it would be interesting to find out.
• rajacombinator 11y ago
  Good essay, one of the few recent PG ones I've agreed with.
• heraclez 11y ago
  Off HN I go?
• xjay 11y ago
  Life is short if your ego is high. Life is long if your ego is low.
• arbre 11y ago
  Quote from the dalai lama: Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
  • eswat 11y ago
    That quote is not actually from the Dalai Lama, or at the very least there’s enough evidence on the interwebs to suggest this is the case (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/525471-man-surprised-me-most-about-humanity-because-he-sacrifices-his https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/525471-man-surprised-me-mos...).
• gyardley 11y ago
  Life is short when your life is good. Make too many bad decisions (or have too much bad luck) and it turns out life is really, really long.
• azakai 11y ago
  > In middle school and high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important thing in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them. That doesn't mean they were wrong when they were kids. On the one hand, we want to believe the adults because they have perspective and experience. They were those kids. But on the other hand, we should also believe the kids because they are actually living it.
• 55acdda48ab5 11y ago
  > Life is short, as everyone knows I've never got this sentiment. Life is the longest thing anyone has ever done. Life is long, very long. I think back ten years ago and it seems like an age ago. It was. I'm early 30s and I feel like I've lived a long life; seen a lot and done a lot and had my kicks. That I've maybe got another full 60 years if I play my cards right is amazing to me. It seems like eons. The only funny thing about time I've noticed is that as you age (and if you read) the past gets closer and closer. When I was a kid finding out people were born in the 1940s was amazing. SO long ago! Now Napoleon's reign seems very relevant and modern to me.
• ilyaeck 11y ago
  Live is too short to read this article in full :)
• ebbv 11y ago
  This is the first pg essay I have read and fully agreed with at the end without reservation. Good advice.
• chrisweekly 11y ago
  Beautiful post. As a father of young children, and a cancer survivor, these words resonated more with me than anything I've encountered on hn in a very long time -- maybe ever.
• pcote 11y ago
  The downside to "don't wait to do the things that matter" is what to do when you empty that bucket list early. I've covered the geeky bucket list stuff. (making video games, blogging, open source contribution, IT jobs, BS in CS, ect.) I've covered the more stereotypical bucket list stuff too. (Skydiving, performing onstage, time with friends, writing the novel, marrying the right girl, ect.) At this point in my life, there's nothing new that interests me that hasn't already been done. It's made life pretty boring at this juncture. I've lived out all my dreams and now it's all just like "Okay, now what?"
  • jmorrow977 11y ago
    For starters, have you visited every major city in Europe, including historically famous cities, sites of historical battles, capitals of smaller countries? Sampled the local cuisine in each? Tried the local hobbies? Danced in a local club? Walked the Via Appia in Rome, visited the site of the "300 Spartans" battle against the Persians? For closer to home, assuming you don't want to travel the world or you've already done that, I personally don't think I'd ever get tired of just enjoying life. Going to my favorite places, watching the city below from the top of a large hill, alternating favorite restaurants, continuing to spend time with friends, reading new books, and continuing scientific and intellectual pursuits. If you want to discuss this further feel free to email me at jmorrow977@gmail.com.
    • pcote 11y ago
      As I said, "things that interest me". Social clubs, traveling, and world historical landmarks are great if that's what interests you and I'm happy for people who enjoy those sorts of things. Learning new things is one thing we can both agree on as always being worthwhile. All that being said, the best "new thing" I can think of is finding creative ways to serve others using what I know about. My blog is one such way though there are no doubt others as well. Giving to the world is a pretty good way to beat back boredom.
  • deleted 11y ago
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• statictype 11y ago
  Great piece. This may be the first pg piece I share with my non technical friends and family
• elwell 11y ago
  "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart." Ecclesiastes 3:11
• crimsonalucard 11y ago
  You as pg's wife have vested interest in pg's reputation as your well-being is intrinsically tied with his reputation and well-being through marriage. Your words are not totally empty though as it is still supporting evidence, it is just not solid evidence and it is not something I will totally accept, unlike the op. The probability for this essay to pop-up right after PG started a fire with his economic essay is just to small for there to be no connection. Could be, that this essay is in itself bullshit. People lie to themselves to hide truths that are painful but self evident. I think this essay could be such a lie.
  • geofft 11y ago
    I am no fan of pg's worldview but I think there are less conspiratorial and more good-faith ways to attack it. I genuinely accept what jl said, but even if I didn't this just isn't a point worth pressing (unlike, oh, "you have presented no evidence that increasing economic inequality is inherently necessary to the social good which you wish to do, as opposed to simply a convenient approach with externalities you could avoid but don't care to"). Whether or not this essay is self-deception, if he does not believe that it is and cannot be convinced that it is, there's nothing productive in arguing further and certainly nothing productive in doing so aggressively.
    • crimsonalucard 11y ago
      Sure. What is productive or nonproductive is your opinion and I can partly agree with your opinion. However, I'm not on HN to be productive (who is?). I'm just here to introduce my thoughts in a way that I perceive logical. Also please note that although I was obviously disagreeing with paul on economic inequality I was not explicitly debating the topic. I was simply pointing out potential bias of a post made by a biased source and the possible validity that this recent essay was in response to the backlash caused by pg's economic article. Additionally, I spent deliberate effort to craft my post in a way to avoid aggression as much as possible. I specifically stated that jl's statement can be classified as supporting evidence but it's still biased evidence and that it needs to be taken into account. >I am no fan of pg's worldview but I think there are less conspiratorial and more good-faith ways to attack it Your OP was a conspiratorial attack. I am just defending your original opinion.
• hellofunk 11y ago
  >And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was. But not if you had 8 private jets, or 8 cars, or 8 houses, or even 8 telephones. This is a rather arbitrary statement.
  • billythornton5 11y ago
    Get fucked faggot.
  • veidr 11y ago
    So true! For instance, if you had 8 pathologically pedantic Internet commenters, you would end up with 8 comments just like yours.
    • hellofunk 11y ago
      Thank you for that lovely contribution.
• dwilkie 11y ago
  Thanks PG after reading this I realized life's too short to read bullshit Paul Graham essays
• dwilkie 11y ago
  Thanks PG after reading this I realized life's too short to read bullshit Paul Graham essays
• jmcmahon443 11y ago
  Mr. Graham: I believe you meant "ensure" not "insure" here: "Indeed, the law of supply and demand insures that: the more rewarding some kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it." Thank you.
• FreedomToCreate 11y ago
  Wonder what he thinks when he was investing in OMGPOP, Reddit and 9Gag. How many hours have those sites clocked off of peoples lives. Don't get addicted :)
• giantqqq 11y ago
  His mention of 'arguing on the internet' as one of the few specific examples of time-wasting behavior makes it hard not to read it as a reaction. I absolutely believe he values time. But I also absolutely believe that he is using this as a public excuse as to why he's running away from the criticism of his previous essay; a previous essay which was quite possibly the most flawed piece of writing he's ever let loose onto the Internet. It's just really, really convenient that one moment he's making ridiculous assertions about what people mean when they're upset about income inequality... and now he's talking about why life is too short for him to have unpleasant conversations. It reads like cowardice. It reads like a cowardly billionaire who wants to grossly distort the actual concerns of real people; who doesn't want to listen to anybody who doesn't think he's a god; and who wants to live in ignorance. I'm sure time is meaningful for you... but maybe you should ask him if there wasn't some reason that he suddenly finished this essay. And if maybe it wasn't because he's a thin-skinned jerk who can't handle the fact that his previous missive was really poorly thought out... maybe he can't handle interactions with people who don't think he's a God. pg has had a ton of my respect for a very long time. But between these two essays, I've realized that pg is no longer a useful or good man. He's passed into that world where he simply cannot accept the notion that he might sometimes be wrong; and he'd rather live in ignorance of that. He'd rather believe he is perfect, that he is a god, than face the fact that he wrote a really terrible essay, an essay that showed a complete disconnect from reality. But hey... you're married to him so you're a billionaire too, so I bet you thought his reality-deficient spew was also really great. And that's one of the best things about being a billionaire; you can afford to live in a distorted reality that has no connection to the real world. You can do so, and it will be comfortable for your entire family. Nobody will say anything to your face, because you are too powerful. So yes... enjoy your time... enjoy your ignorance... enjoy shitting on the world and denying reality. Enjoy making excuses for your husband's ignorant brand of politics. Because he's going to get worse for the rest of his life. Rich white men rarely get less entitled as they age. pg won't wake up and be Bill Gates, realizing that this shit is fucked up. That would require a connection to reality that he has clearly lost.
  • carlisle_ 11y ago
    I might have agreed with you but the way you're presenting your argument makes me want to dismiss you outright. There's a lot of ad hominen and strawman in your post, maybe you want to rethink how you're making your point?
• SimeVidas 11y ago
  Don’t know about life, but my attention span is too short for long posts. Thanks Reddit.
• deleted 11y ago
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• orthoganol 11y ago
  This could be a strong argument for and against doing a startup: For - act today on your dream, which uses a startup as its vehicle; Against - sacrifice years, maybe a decade+, of your short life, because you thought it would make you rich or is considered prestigious in your circles.
• jroseattle 11y ago
  Life seems really short as soon as kids enter the picture. The best line I ever heard about kids and life was this: With children, the days are long but the years are short. These days, I find myself trying to find the "work/life balance", which is really just me managing the ebb-and-flow of time between work and family. What I've learned in that process is that while work provides some satisfaction that meets an internal need, it will never ever hug me back. Take time, hug your kids, leave your work every now and then. The years won't seem so short that way.
  • deleted 11y ago
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• gpsx 11y ago
  Life is too short for us individually. But I think it is interesting that life is probably just the right amount of time for us as a species, that is if evolution has successfully selected our proper genetic lifespan. If individuals live longer then the species evolves slower and it can not adapt as well. Evolution is measured in generations, not absolute years. Of course the optimal lifespan will change over time. Today we aren't really facing so many physical survival challenges, but if we extend life longer then we may slow down our speed of innovation.
• dang 11y ago
  We've closed this thread to comments by new accounts because of trolls. If you have a new account and want to comment here, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
• SixSigma 11y ago
  Not only is is short, it's not very wide either - Steven Wright
• oli5679 11y ago
  240 comments so far (mostly debates amongst strangers) on an essay recommending never to debate online with strangers....
• pilooch 11y ago
  > dealing with other people's mistakes I stopped right there :( If you're not willing to deal with other people's mistake throughout life, you're probably so self-centered and full of your own certainty that what can be argued after is probably not worth reading. bye now :)
• somberi 11y ago
  Blake's take on this: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
• resca79 11y ago
  Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. Steve Jobs
• nthnclrk 11y ago
  Rather than engage in the mindless and genuinely inconsequential debate regarding the previous essay, I'd like to bring some attention back to the fact this essay is a genuinely fantastic piece of very clear, appreciable thought.
• falsedan 11y ago
  so… he's not dying?
• jasonwen 11y ago
  I never wanted to have kids, maybe I'm too young for that. By reading this it definitely made me a step closer to be open to have kids in the future. Thank you for that.
• jasonwen 11y ago
  I never wanted to have kids, maybe I'm too young for that. By reading this it definitely made me a step closer to be open to have kids in the future. Thank you for that.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• simula67 11y ago
  What if bullshit leads to doing well in things that you care about ? For example, I don't like posturing, building portfolio on Github etc, but if it leads me to getting a better job at a place I can solve complex problems thereby becoming a better engineer, I would like that very much.
• EGreg 11y ago
  I wrote something about this very topic years ago: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=49 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=49
• petercooper 11y ago
  I think Seneca said something on the topic that meshes even better with HN and the startup way of life than this essay: The state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations but must regulate their sleep by another’s, their walk by another’s pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.
• zhte415 11y ago
  20 years is 1% of the time since the Bible was written to today. Life is short, so is history, and the impact we can make is enormous.
• known 11y ago
  Sounds like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump
• nice1 11y ago
  I do not always agree with PG's essays, but this one is spot on. Identifying BS is the major task we all face, and having children is a big help - this has been supremely true in my own life. Granted, this does not solve specific problems, but it gives a sense of direction. Without it we are cannot see the forest for the trees.
• marincounty 11y ago
  I actually liked the message in this essay. That said, I've wondered why we put so much stock/interest in PG's essays? I've casually read some of PG's essays, and came away with a few observations: 1. It doesn't appear he puts a lot of thought into his writing. His thoughts are not new. 2. He's a C- writer. (I'm a horrid writer, but I know it.) 3. He shouldn't dash off an essays while imbibing in any chemical. I'm not saying he does, but some of these essays, and Twitter blurbs--seem to appear on the weekend. 4. It's kinda like saying lets all listen/read everything Donald Trump says because he's wealthy. Actually Trump is probally the last person you would want to listen to if you wanted to be a realestate mogul. Why--because he leaves out the the real truth to his wealth creation; a father with a lot of money, having the money to hire the right people, and monetarily comfortable enough to take chances with money. Buying Realestae, and expecting it to go up on value is kinda a given--right? I could jam an ice pick through my eye socket, and sever my frontal lobes, and still utter, "Buy Realestae--where--people want--to live." 4. I might have missed something in PG's latest essay, but I imagine he's a little rattled, like a lot of middle aged men, over all the male deaths we have had lately. As to Life is short--that's nothing new. A hospice nurse told me, on more than a few occasions, she never met anyone who wished the worked more in the end, with that opiate drip pumping chemicals into the vein. Relationships are what's important. I need to work on cultivating mine. I've put up a wall, and should learn to forgive people for being people. If I don't change soon, I'll be that guy with the morphine drip--thinking I wished I lived differently. I'm alwready thinking, I've wasted my life.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    You're making a lot of assumptions here that you haven't a shred of proof for.
    • marincounty 11y ago
      I read his essays, although just casually. His latest essay was assumptions? There was nothing factual in it, other than "Life is short." Yes, these are my observations. Yes--I have no proof on most of my assumptions. Doesn't negate the question, why we put so much worth in what these guys spout off? (I never return to argue. This was a fluke, because I was shocked so many of you got so riled up over PG's essay.)
• codeshaman 11y ago
  One added word entirely changes the rationale of "life is short" for me. "This", meaning "current". Add the belief that there is another (form of) life after this one and suddenly the equation changes: This life is short. But then there's another one coming. The scientists in us agree - of course there is no evidence of life after this one, despite the messages transmitted to us from our ancestors - in the form of stories, traditions, superstitions, beliefs, religions. Depending on who you ask - we either go to a place were we stay forever (heaven/hell/spirit world) or we come back to life as another being or life form. But the body dies and rots away ! Technically the body has died many times during it's lifetime - cells die and others are created - or rather - create themselves according to the instructions in the DNA. The DNA is the one that moves forward through time, all the other pieces of our bodies rot away. But not the whole of it, just 50%. Half the DNA vanishes into void. But "I" will no longer "exist" ! That's a belief. And also quite vague, because - who/what is this "I" ? Is it my body, is it my brain, is it something which lives inside the body/brain, is it all imaginary ? Well, think about anyone - someone who's not near you right now - who is he/she ? Right now, he/she is a thought. Isn't everyone, dead or alive, just that - a thought ? Isn't "I" a thought then ? If so, what is life then ? A story ? Your story. "Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells." - Marcus Aurelius
• jacquesm 11y ago
  If you can't see past the link to the other essays here please try to isolate this one for a bit, especially if you're young and you don't have kids yet. This essay is rich in realizations that come with age, and in some sense I would have potentially gotten a lot of mileage out of it when I was 20 or so (but then I would probably have lacked the background to fully comprehend it), and even more when I was a young first time father. One gem in here that has not been high-lit by other commenters in this thread that stands out for me because that's one that I did figure out very early on in life (and this served me very well) is this one: "As I've written before, one byproduct of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask "is this how I want to be spending my time?"" Please do ask yourself that question often, and if the answer is 'no' or 'maybe' then simply don't and save yourself a lot of grief and regret in the long run.
  • shimon 11y ago
    I'm a new father, and it's striking how things that previously seemed broad and philosophical get pressingly real as you become a parent. Parenthood is full of great joys but also intense logistical realities: your time gets heavily scheduled for care and play. And when you see a child developing new abilities every week, your 5x/week decision on when to head home from the office becomes a very clear trade-off between working more and collecting a unique experience with the most compelling person you've ever met. For people who aren't yet parents, it compares a bit to the way your thinking about money matures when you get your first job. Suddenly a shirt equals two hours of labor instead of some abstract quantity of a theoretically finite resource. This triggers in many of us a quest to figure out income, so we can get the things we want. But even the affluent among us can't just throw more time at all the things they'd want to do.
  • ThomPete 11y ago
    I have two kids, I have had two melanomas so far. I understand what it means when people say life is to short. But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is? That sounds like a weird idea. Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that? If anything PG is a thinker and a good one at it. He doesn't get everything right (who does) but he is a smart enough thinker to be able to develop his thinking. You can read his essay in three ways. 1) Life is too short, I don't like writing essays about things that interest me anymore. 2) Life is too short, I just want to kick back and enjoy my family and the money I have. 3) Life is too short. No matter how you turn it around I fail to see why he would give up writing something that he surely enjoys doing. Especially when you have the power to actually get people to take you serious. (Perhaps thats the problem?) So why should life be too short for that? Only PG knows. But I think he is proving that either some of the "conspiracy theorists" in this thread are not wrong, or some of his critiques of his last couple of essays are not wrong either.
• FatalBaboon 11y ago
  It is funny how one of the top comment is a very long debate about how this article is good or not, completely missing the point. The sooner you realize life is short, the more you will make smart use of your time. The same goes for faith: the sooner you realize there is no life after death, the more you will make smart use of your time. Your brain runs out of electricity and fluids, and poof you go.
  • ue_ 11y ago
    I disagree on the point about life after death. I don't think that having faith that there's something after necessarily leads to valuing your time less now. Especially when you don't know what's in store for you next - a good existence or a bad one. With that kind of uncertainty, I'd certainly value the time I have now - at least I know what it's like now. There are also two ways of thinking about what's "smart". For the faithful, the smart thing to do is racking up merit (or studying or whatever) for your future rebirth or heaven etc. For the materialistic people, the smart thing to do is to enjoy the time you have right now by doing what makes you feel good. Both groups of people think the other is being silly, foolish or something else.
    • FatalBaboon 11y ago
      For the faithful, racking up merit, studying etc are indeed noble pursuits no matter what. But I was more speaking about all the time spent in churches, praying etc in the mislead hope of having eternal life.
• mikemajzoub 11y ago
  From one stranger to another, thank you for posting this essay. I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my life, and your essay came at just the right moment. (This is one of the reasons I love the internet.) If anyone wants to use IoT data, personal search queries, etc., to build a recommendation engine that increases the probability of 'reading the right thing at just the right time in life', I'd sign up for it! For subtle/complex things, this seems like an overly-intimidating task, but to get started on the project, someone querying illness, loss, etc., might benefit profoundly from this. You'd be essentially be creating a 'skewed Google' that returns what the user _needs_ rather than what the user _wants_ at the moment. (That said, don't pursue such a project at the expense of spending time with family... :) It's a tough balance to strike, isn't it?) In peace, Mike
• BatFastard 11y ago
  Life is too short to be in a hurry While that seem contradictory, it is not. When we are in a hurry we make unneeded mistakes, we don't enjoy the process of what we are doing, and we don't do things that reflect our true selves.
• hownottowrite 11y ago
  Last two sentence contain all that's important here. "Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short."
• vasilipupkin 11y ago
  fantastic essay. I would just add that life is too short but it is also in a sense very very long. Lots of new chapters and new windows open even as old ones close or narrow. It seems like two entirely contradictory ideas, but I think they are both true at the same time.
• AbdulBahajaj 11y ago
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• dantheman 11y ago
  I really liked this essay. I've been spending a lot of my time dealing with bullshit, and it's exhausting. Essays like this provide me a reminder to step back and re-evaluate -- is what I think true, has the situation changed, have I changed. What should I do next. There's a lot written on how to live a great life, but in the end more and more I think, you live great stages in life. At any stage, you optimize for it and with an eye for being prepared for future stages.
• pass-word 11y ago
  There isn't time,so brief is life,for bickerings ,apologies,heartburnings,callings to account.There is only time for loving and but an instant.
• huuu 11y ago
  In another related thread I posted: Cut away branches that suck energy but don't bear fruit. For me this is my bullshit filter.
• AYBABTME 11y ago
  I love this essay, and I love the mindset of being aware that your life is limited and your time should not be wasted. I find it is avery enabling realization. A personal favorite quote of mine: "Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again." Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 2:4)
• GlennS 11y ago
  The original (or is it?) 'Ars Longa' is a nice, short read. Worth a pause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis#Translations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis#Transla...
• xCathedra 11y ago
  A lot of these points sound similar to the famous resolutions of the young Jonathan Edwards. I try to make a habit of reading them at least once a year for many of the points Paul mentions in this article. http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4xNTo3NDoxLndqZW8= http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWF... a few examples: "6. Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live." "9. Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death." "52. I frequently hear persons in old age say how they would live, if they were to live their lives over again: resolved, that I will live just so as I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to old age"
• deleted 11y ago
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• victor22 11y ago
  Great essay. I've always tried to get out of bullshit with some complex thinking, but at the end of the day, most of it could be avoided faster if preceded by a simple "Is this bullshit?" question. For example, I just realised I wasted 1 week of my time with meetings with an "investor" I knew was bullshitter, because I didn't want to ask myself this question.
• sanderjd 11y ago
  > There has always been a stream of people who opt out of the default grind and go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional sense, but life feels more authentic. This could become more common. That part really struck me. I've long thought that the most incessant effect of the student loan phenomenon is that debt indentures you to working a conventional job in a country at a similar level of economic development as the one where you have the debt. You can't just "drop out" and go live somewhere cheap in southeast Asia where it doesn't take much income to live, because your debt payments are not adjusted for standard of living imbalances. This is probably obvious to everyone, but I think it's worth noting that it is something holding a lot of people back from doing a lot of what is suggested in the article.
• kyaghmour 11y ago
  The vast majority of humans on this planet do not get to choose where they spend their time; surely Paul realizes this. Instead, children making clay bricks and parents sending their children off away to work as maids (or worse) do so because they need to survive first and foremost. I have four children of my own and I'm sceptical of the proposed idea that somehow life is best spent by maximizing time with them. Don't get me wrong, the best moments in life are with my children. Still, one's contributions during our brief passage in the form we like best (walking and free thinking humans) surely should aim to contribute far more than the self-gratifying (and possibly narcissistic) time spent with one's children. In short, if you do have the luxury of choosing where you actually spend your time, make sure you're giving far more back to the rest of this race than to yourself.
• snarfy 11y ago
  This article assumes the purpose of life is accomplishment. Don't forget to stop and smell the roses.
• wellpast 11y ago
  > The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms. A similar thought scares the shit of me. I can code for hours on end (in the "flow") toward even perhaps the most trivial ends established by my employer. On the one hand, you could say I'm doing what I love in life. On the other,d darker hand, it seems like I'm squandering so many hours of my life playing this (effective) video game where I code for points (money).
• sireat 11y ago
  "Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short." As a 40+ parent, I savor the time with my children, parents and friends and I prune the bullshit in work down to minimum. The big problem: How do you choose what matters if nothing matters on the grand scale? Life is so short that at 40+ you realize you will never get to do even 0.1% of your bucket list. So which rock do you push uphill? In other words at 20-30 you can be adventurous and make mistakes. At 40+ you have promises to keep and miles to go before you sleep.
• keerthiko 11y ago
  > It is possible to slow time somewhat. pg mentions this, but what he says after is not even the best advice in this same essay for it. The real insight is here: > The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms. The way to slow time down is to break all your routines, and never be in a flow. Have no typical days. Don't have a schedule. Don't have a favorite restaurant, a default outfit, or hang out with the same people more than once or twice before seeking new people. This is nearly impossible for most people to do, because doing these things SUCK. And time is slowest when everything feels like it sucks. I only know this because this was what my life was for 2 years when I was on the road as a digital nomad. It sucked, but was the most rewarding period of my life as well, because it truly was time slowed down. I learned and experienced such a larger spectrum of things in the same time frame than anyone I knew, including myself from any other time frame. I don't endorse it as a long-term way to live life, but I highly recommend everyone spend at least a year of their (preferably younger, pre-family) adult life living thus to learn truly how much can be fit in a human life if you frame it right.
• rdiddly 11y ago
  Know what's funny, life is short, and life is too short for a lot of the crap you'll spend your life doing, but you'll do it anyway because... that's life!
• blakethorne 11y ago
  "One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future." Great advice. But I sometimes struggle with this as it requires a bit of forecasting (you need to put yourself in the 'future' mindset before deciding if you'll care -- this can be hard). My heuristic is this. It works about 95 percent of the time. Ask yourself: What motivated the person who made this? If the answer is, simply, "anger" "money" "boss made me" "had to hit my quarterly numbers, or some similar reason, you're probably better off skipping it. You want to look for the answers that are more genuine: "love" "practicing a craft" "desire to build something." This generally helps me decide if something is worth putting in my brain (or my body). It helps me avoid M&Ms (junk food) and to guilt-free enjoy my mom's homemade cookies over the holidays. It helps me avoid clickbait and spend time reading quality essays.