12 ms·

The Deathbed Fallacy (2018)

282 points by mefengl 1y ago

xianshou 1y ago
Bravo! Planning your life in order to minimize deathbed regrets has always bothered me, because the nature of humanity is to want what it hasn't got. If you assume that, on average, people make correct decisions to work hard and pursue what matters to them at the opportunity cost of not enjoying quite enough free time, then their final wishes will naturally include the time they gave up to live the life they had. If, however, they had fully indulged the desire to enjoy and maximize free time, their wishes might instead have revolved around the unfulfilled potential thereby relinquished. The problem, of course, is that the feeling of regret considers what may have been gained without reflecting on what would have been lost. Now the right way to deal with this is some sort of self-consistent closure, where present you and past you with the same values and access to the same information (which could be anything from zero to complete knowledge of then-future outcomes and downstream effects) would make the same choices including both upside and downside. But that would be too complex for motivational advice, which is primarily about creating an inspirational mood, somewhat about positive first-order consequences, and not even a little bit about recursive self-consistency.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  I doubt that the reflex to want what we don't have is in our nature. It wouldn't be selected for. That's how you kill off the herd in the spring and starve the following winter. We work to ensure that others want what they don't have because we've built systems that rely on them continuing to do so. It creates a sort of logic that defines for us what counts as rational behavior. But when that logic meets another one and they each evaluate the other as irrational, there's no reason to expect that the want-what-you-dont-have logic is somehow more valid. If it seems so, it's just that more of us are under its spell than the other.
mathgeek 1y ago
Planning for how you'll feel on your deathbed is like planning for how you'll live in retirement (not speaking of the financial aspects): it's wonderful to know you planned well if you end up in that situation, and there are certainly benefits, but don't forget that you may never get there.
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  And, a lot of people are really bad at predicting how they'll react in situations. Re retirement: ironically (in this context) it is apparently a reason why some people are soon on their deathbed
- knallfrosch 1y ago
  "but don't forget that you may never get there." Isn't that the whole genre of "I wish I had reconciled with person X?" That "you may never get there" thought is top of mind for many.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
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roenxi 1y ago
The article is accurate but I think it also misses one other important perspective - getting advice from people who have major regrets of the form "I wish I’d" is sampling for the sort of people who made major mistakes. Just because they are dying doesn't suddenly mean they have their life sorted out. Metaphorically. Arguing with a dying person is a major faux pas but they're ultimately still just people and as fallible as ever. The people to learn from are the ones who, on their deathbed, say "that life went really well, I did X, Y and Z and it was very rewarding". Which is basically where the article was heading, although going straight to happiness research is probably better again.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  I think my experiences with the 4 people I’ve seen die so far all four were sad they were leaving the world (already), but also satisfied with their lives (though they definitely had regrets too). Everyone has regrets.
  - fullshark 1y ago
    Having regrets mean you actually made decisions with consequences, and paid attention to their impact. They are unavoidable if you want to live with purpose and thoughtfulness.
    - esafak 1y ago
      That's not true. Maybe you simply avoided making any decisions and went with the flow. That is something you could come to regret.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    Well, yeah. Regrets are cheap and plentiful. Which raises the salient point of why deathbed regrets would suddenly become a source of wisdom. But they are often a sample of things that the person thinks they were consistently miscalibrated on over their entire life so it isn't clear why they'd suddenly gain clarity into what they should have done instead. The top 5 list in the article is some really basic stuff. And a lot of people do get that wrong (most people, really) but (1) if they get told they will persist in making the same mistakes and (2) there are a lot of people in absolute sense who actually get those things about right if you look for them and practice a bit. You don't need to be dying to regret those things and the dying still probably don't actually understand what they got wrong. If they actually understood the mistakes they were making they wouldn't make them and most people keep making stupid mistakes like not expressing their feelings or working too hard instead of talking to people for entire lives of 50+ years. Expressing feelings and not working too hard are actually pretty easy things to do if you keep chipping away at it; these people probably don't really understand what they did wrong.
constantcrying 1y ago
I think the author misunderstands the argument. He argues that it is irrelevant what other people believed they should have done when they were close to death. But the argument should rather be, that you should look ahead of your life right now and consider whether what you will be doing will be something you regret in the future. It is not a fallacy at all, it is introspection about your future. That you might change your views later is essentially irrelevant to the point. The point is to take a completely different perspective on your life, one where your life is behind you.
- TOGoS 1y ago
  This is something I try to do every day. "What would future me like me to have gotten done right now?" Future me doesn't really care if I spent 3 hours playing Minecraft, but they would be pleased if that shelf I've been meaning to build for months were finally done. But also, my brother died recently and left behind a house that was kind of a mess, and that has added "dying me would like my friends/family to be able to easily find the important stuff among all this clutter."
bowsamic 1y ago
I totally agree and it really bothers me that people put so much weight into last regrets
plastic3169 1y ago
I’m in the middle age slump. There is more talk around me about death. Some of our parents died in their 50s and this perspective of ’this might be the last decade’ is creeping in. Yet the same person talking might have still one of their grandparent alive! I am not so interested in the short life. I am happy today so don’t know how else to prepare for that. I keep worrying about living to a 100. Not very likely, but likely enough to be a risk worth consodering. If I am still to live for 50+ years I can’t start hating everything new that is happening. I probably need to do more learning. Need new friends and cant’t solely live the family life. More sports and active life than before. Retirement is not even on the horizon in this scenario.
g4zj 1y ago
I don't know if this is so much a fallacy as it is a questionable assumption which disregards prudential reasoning.
gitroom 1y ago
Yeah I get this, always catch myself thinking about how much life is left versus how much I want to actually do. Makes me wonder what even counts as a good use of time.
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lolinder 1y ago
I think the author fixates too much on this one construction of the idea of deathbed regrets and misses that this is just a single modern incarnation of the positively ancient and cross-cultural idea that you should plan your life around the knowledge that you will die. Marcus Aurelius wrote: You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. [1] And the Tao Te Ching: The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. [2] A relevant Buddhist concept is called Maranasati [3]. And in the Quran: And donate from what We have provided for you before death comes to one of you, and you cry, “My Lord! If only You delayed me for a short while, I would give in charity and be one of the righteous.” But Allah never delays a soul when its appointed time comes. [4] And the Bible: The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘... I will store my surplus grain. ... “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ [5] There's something fundamentally human about contemplating one's own impending death and making changes to one's life accordingly, and nitpicking the exact wording of a single manifestation of that human impulse misses the forest for the trees. [1] Meditations 2.11 https://vreeman.com/meditations/#book2 https://vreeman.com/meditations/#book2 [2] 50 https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati [4] https://quran.com/en/al-munafiqun/10-11 https://quran.com/en/al-munafiqun/10-11 [5] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A16-21&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A16-21...
- zzzeek 1y ago
  this is the perfect response to this post and here we see the big difference between the pure engineering /logic mindset vs. the liberal arts mindset. When I see these posts on hacker news that are all about some deep philosophical issue, but the writer seems to be approaching the issue as though it were a Google interview question to be solved in isolation of anyone else's experience or knowledge, it emphasizes what a profound blind spot exists throughout much of the tech community, and how the ever more apparent disdain for liberal arts that exists in tech is truly pernicious. Reading up on what humans around the world, across history, across disciplines, and even shudder across cultural backgrounds and gender, have to say on questions that are not actually very novel is essential if you're actually going to open up your text editor and write a blog post about it.
fullshark 1y ago
I don't really think everyone goes around optimizing for their deathbed thoughts, but uses the framing to try and understand what to optimize for with their time on this earth. The framing becomes more prominent when their current situation is lacking in some way and their subconscious is telling them so.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Reminds me of that wordy speech, attributed to Steve Jobs (spoiler: his last words were actually “Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.”).
- coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  Morphine?
deleted 1y ago
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gus_massa 1y ago
Reason 4: The list is cherry picked, unless they have cameras and record everything people say close to death and then they make an statistics. So someone collected a list of items that considered interesting, but memory is flimsy so people most of the time don't have an accurate memory of the frequency of the items in the lists and the items not in the list.
nurettin 1y ago
we need a universal rule: deathbed doesn't count. Your life's work and philosophy should not depend on a single time point. It is how you live that matters.
raffael_de 1y ago
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bombcar 1y ago
The deathbed argument is simply a rhetorical one - examine your life, determine what you really want out of it, and ask yourself the hard question if you’re doing it.
- njdas 1y ago
  Good point. I get a sense of conflict from the author, and his reaction to 'ignore' may be due to difficulty with this hard question. He has some good points, but they don't warrant his conclusion.
- aaronbrethorst 1y ago
  It’s also a useful exercise to do repeatedly throughout your life. Would I want to look back at my life and realize that I spent all of my time working on building legs for Zuck’s avatars in the metaverse or would I rather have spent more time with my son?
  - massysett 1y ago
    The whole point of the post is that building legs for Zuck's avatars might be the thing that allows you to spend what time with your son that you can. Many people work very hard for miserable salaries and they couldn't spend more time with their children if they wanted to.
    - ajmurmann 1y ago
      These types of examples IMO show how good we have it now. The worst thing we can say about the job is that it feels meaningless. A subsistence farmer wouldn't have made the same argument about working the field. A 1900 miner wouldn't have made the same argument about getting dust lung in a mine. We've reached a point that we can complain that our WORK doesn't provide meaning. It's an incredible luxury and we aren't when seeing that we have it. Years ago I had a consulting gig where we ported a f2p game from iOS to Android. It was a rather tedious engagement and it was clear kids would spend their parents money on in-game crap to their parents surprise. We all felt bad about it. Meanwhile the office was kinda annoying because there was frequent fuseball and nerf battle noises. One day I looked around and realized that I was sitting in an ergonomic chair at an height-adjustable desk, drinking free water that was flown over the ocean from Italy so that I could consume it. At a similar age my grandpa fought in Stalingrad, spent time in a gulag and then became a poor subsistence farmer who worked odd jobs on the side. I was in heaven and didn't know it
hshshshshsh 1y ago
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gopherloafers 1y ago
Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise and founder of the School of Orphan Wisdom speaks a lot about this. The “wretched anxiety” he observed as head of palliative care in Canada he claims stems from fear of being forgotten. Which is tied to a particular Western failure: not honoring our elders who have died, and the amnesia of cultural memory. His book is a good read, and I think provides an alternative account to the points made in this article.
ojbyrne 1y ago
It seems like another part of the fallacy might be that we only hear from people who have regrets.
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
"Reason 1: It is not a representative state" What is a representative state, exactly, and why should that be treated as categorically normative? My consciousness has changed over time as I've matured. I would never wish to regress to the ignorance and stupidity of youth. I see the world differently and more accurately than I did before, and I am more rational and measured. The illusions that youth so easily absorbs lay less of a claim on me (some people persist in this juvenile state for life, it seems). I understand the concern that in a state of distress, people can make decisions that aren't rational, but people also make irrational decisions when not in distress. Comfortable people are often attached to comfort, preventing them from pursuing what is good until some proportionate threat or discomfort dislodged them from that state. Procrastination is a way of avoiding distress or discomfort, but deadlines can work marvelously to focus an undisciplined person that would otherwise drift and dawdle. Most of us have experienced this effect. In similar fashion, the awareness of imminent death can focus the mind. Those on death row, perhaps knowing more or less the day of their deaths, are put in a position that make wishful thinking, distraction, and postponement less easy. This is why it is said that if the death penalty doesn't move someone toward remorse, then it is unlikely anything will. These are either the mentally ill or people hardened in their evil. So I would say: you cannot speak absolutely about the death bed. People enter death in different states of mind, different states of knowledge, that can vary their responses to death. It cannot categorically be said that what is said on one's death bed is true or untrue, or sound or unsound. It depends. But it is also true that death is the ultimate threat, and that remembering that it can strike at any time and without warning can remind us of the preciousness of the little time we have in this life, and in doing so keep us from dissolving into myriad aimless and senseless distractions and diversions that so tragically squander this unrecoverable, perishable privilege.
superposeur 1y ago
The problem I’ve always had with over-weighting deathbed advice is that dying people rarely think through the counterfactuals involved. What would actually be the consequence of not working so hard and relentlessly prioritizing personal relationships (as all such advice seems to recommend)? How much worse of a future would result from financial insecurity and lack of career fulfillment? Has the advice giver actually thought through the tradeoffs that lead you to work hard in the first place? Further, dying people’s worlds usually contract to personal relationships only so it makes sense this is the only aspect of life they emphasize.
- Retric 1y ago
  Part of this bias is the kind of people dying on a deathbed tend to make less risky choices. You’re underrepresenting motorcycle riders let alone BASE jumpers etc. Long hours seem like the safe option, you’ll rarely get fired for working late. However, it’s easy to be pissed how much extra time you put in when you get laid off etc. Thus, people looking back have more information to work with and where risk adverse so they likely worked more than they should.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    Working outside of normal hours is now a cause for suspicion. Especially in today's WFH environment. It's a prime time to convene with the handler who does the actual work. Or to exfiltrate proprietary information to your superiors in North Korea. Etc. Whatever it is you need to do, get it done during normal business hours. If you can't manage that, find another job.
    - saltcured 1y ago
      It's so bizarre for me to see this perspective in a tech space when my tech-adjacent academic R&D career exposed me to so many people who naturally wanted to pull periodic all-nighter efforts or just live in strange shift patterns that ranged anywhere from night owl to vampire...
      - 1y ago
hombre_fatal 1y ago
The problem is that you are mainly restricted in the present by self-limiting beliefs and comfort zones that accomplish nothing but diminishing your experience. That's why you didn't walk up and talk to her. That's why you didn't strike up more conversations. That's why you didn't buy the one-way plane ticket. That's why you didn't launch the idea. That's why you took the easy and safe and less fulfilling path. ...Or you just wandered down it in a zombie like haze. It's trivial to see through this with hindsight, hence the deathbed meme. Hopefully you don't wait until your deathbed to figure it out, though.
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago
  I have a lot of respect for past me and what he got us through. Some of my past experiences gave me a profound distrust of others. Even today, while I can intellectually admit that most folks are good and decent people, and I am perfectly safe with them, there are all sorts of unconscious temperaments and behaviors that would work wonders to keep me safe in a dangerous world, but limit my ability to connect to others. Likewise, my frugal asceticism might have helped me survive when I was living below the poverty line, but it's very much not helpful when I purposely make a 'fun money' budget today, and it either goes unspent or I feel guilty about spending it because my 'inner frugal bastard' sees money as safety. I'm seeing someone to work through these issues, but it's slow going. I can intellectually see these behaviors aren't helpful, but stopping them from being my default script is hard.
meany 1y ago
I largely agree with the post, but less because people near death don’t know what’s important, but rather because reports of these are self-help, currated to appeal to audience and get clicks. When I’ve had meaningful conversations with e friends and family memebers near death, I’ve found they have a real capacity to help you moderate your perspective and make better life decisions. Of course the specific individual personality plays a big role in this. Per the article suggestion, follow the happiness reasearch. The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia. “If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.
deadbabe 1y ago
No matter what you do you’re going to die with regrets. Some might even feel it wasn’t a good life. I’d say try to focus on the things you did right. You’re just passing through for a moment in a universe currently teeming with activity. You’ll probably regret you didn’t get to see more. Right about when you’re about to die something new and exciting that will revolutionize the future of humanity will be invented and you’ll only know about it for a few days or so.
WalterBright 1y ago
As I get older, I know that I have less time. I don't do things that have a payoff time that is past my expected passing. For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn't make much sense at my age, because there's not much time left for the payoff. Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either. When you're a kid, the returns on investing and education have much bigger payoffs over the many more decades to make use of them.
- kurikuri 1y ago
  > For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn’t make much sense at my age, because there’s not much time left for the payoff. That is tragic! Learning more about things is fulfilling in and of itself. If your only concern is about growing the number, and you limit your choice to those which are within a time horizon that you can reap the result, then getting older becomes even more bleak than it is.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    You're right that learning can be its own reward. But the point remains, doing things that won't pay off in your expected remaining life are not worth doing. For another example, I was looking at when to start receiving social security benefits. If I start them earlier, the payments are lower. But, if I invest those lower payments, then the built up portfolio will be generating investment returns. Where is the crossover point, where you're better off taking the earlier, lower payment vs the later, higher payment? For me, that point was at age 83. So I decided to take the earlier payments. The weird thing is nobody ever mentions this when discussing the option of when to start taking the payments. Except my accountant, who figured this out for himself, too. People just don't understand the time value of money.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
      If I make it to that age, if Social Security is still paying out, if I'm still a US citizen, I'll tell people that the creator of D gave me the idea. It'll be funny
morsecodist 1y ago
It's always great to see someone post about something I think about a lot. Most people want to lead a happy life but that doesn't really help you navigate these time trade offs. Assuming your job makes you unhappy and you work super hard for 40 years and then retire and are having a great retirement and are loving life for 10 years you may say the hard work was worth it because current you is now only experiencing the benefits. But was it really worth it? Conversely, if you pursued a life of hedonism and in your later years are unhealthy and feeling a lack of meaning does that invalidate the happiness you felt earlier? I am not sure there is ever a clear answer to these questions. Most people accept some degree of short term sacrifice for longer term happiness but there is always some limit to what you are willing to go through today for a better life tomorrow.
djaychela 1y ago
As someone who has a terminal cancer diagnosis (and I'm mid-way through the range of time I was told I had left, months, FTR), I don't agree with a lot of this. And I'm essentially on my deathbed (mentally), even though I'm currently not bed-bound. Yes, my state now is not a representative state of the one I was in a year ago before my health started failing. But I'm still the same person. I forgot that briefly after my terminal diagnosis, and starting doing things I thought were the right things (making sure things would be OK for my wife, tidying up a litany of messes that would be hard for her to deal with without just giving up and selling things for pennies or giving them away), but after a few weeks and speaking to the right people, I started living more normally again. Yes, my priorities have changed massively - things that I thought were important 4 months ago are truly meaningless to me now - but many things that are important to me now were so before. And they will be until I cease to exist. I'm making the most of the time I have left because it's important that my experience at this point is as good as it can be, and because I want my wife to have good memories of our last months together. I've never suffered from 'reason 2'. I've always felt I made the right decision at the time with the information I had and the person that I was at the time. So I don't have many regrets - none of significance to speak of, certainly. I know I am lucky in this respect. Reason 3 is meaningless, IMO - both generally and certainly to me. I'm 53. And I don't think many people really do think about this seriously until it's actually on the table for them. I certiainly know I didn't - even last year when I had an operation which hopefully would have removed the cancer and given me years of life, I hadn't really thought about the finality of death and what it means (or doesn't) to me. FTR I'm an Atheist, and I think that 2026 will have as much meaning/experience for me as 1969 (i.e. before I was born).
- najuloj 1y ago
  Thank you for sharing. I’m in the exact same boat as you and what you wrote matches my experience and thoughts almost to the word. These days my motto is “Make today a good day” and every day I do my best to live up to that.
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    I’m not deeply thoughtful about this stuff, but my personal philosophy could be called “positive existentialism.” I am here. It is amazing that I exist, and have an opportunity to be alive and aware. I don’t want to waste it, and so I try to say “yes” to life. And life comes to us moment by moment, day by day. I don’t want to regret things I’ve done, but I also don’t want to regret things I didn’t do. I’m not in the position that either of you are in (sorry about that btw) but in a sense we all are, and just don’t realize it yet.
eulgro 1y ago
For me I think it all revolves around the value we attribute to the past. To me, the past has little to no value. Since I can't change the past, the only thing I can do is learn from it what I haven't already learned, which is usually little. Dwelling on the past is useful as far as it provides me actionable advice for the present and the future. In reality, I often find myself thinking so little about the past that I have essentially forgotten large portions of my life. Since I don't believe there is anything after death, this makes thinking about the life I lived useless, because in a short time, I will be dead. There's is no actions I can do anymore, so there's no point in trying learning from the past at that point. Perhaps thinking about the good things I have done will be worthwhile and ease my death. But I see no point in seeking regrets. Of course I could also give advice to others on my deathbed. But it's something I try to avoid doing. On one hand, because I mostly reject the advice others give me, and thus I expect others to do the same, so I won't waste my time trying to give them advice. On the other hand, I generally find this advice either doesn't match my experience and world view, or it tends to be absolutist about the "one good way of living life", which I don't believe in. People all have different aims in life, and who I am to say which one is correct. Live your life as you see fit, I'm not advising you about what to do and what not to do, because I don't know you better than you do. Something that annoys me a lot is when people say things like "do it now, or you'll regret it later". Even worse: "do it now, anything could happen in the future, you could get sick or even die". So what if that happens? If I die, there's absolutely no judgement I will be able to make of it, since I will be dead. If I get sick and become unable to do it... so what? I will be unable to do it, but since the past has no value to me, it doesn't make it different from anything else I was already unable to do.
overfl0w 1y ago
This fallacy also assumes that free will exists (it does not) and you could have made different choices (you couldn't have). Accepting that your choices are not free and are influenced by multiple factors (such as your current state, your knowledge at the time, your emotions, your past, upbringing, genetics even, the people you interact with) makes you realize that regret is meaningless.
- deleted 1y ago
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FrustratedMonky 1y ago
Exactly. I'm not on my deathbed, but I also say all those things to myself "I should keep in touch with friends". But don't, even though I'm not dying, and tell myself too. Maybe I'm an ass? Everything takes time and energy.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  I often wonder what I get out of friendships. It's not just intangible, it's very hard to quantify. Last year I had a phase of sleeping around a lot. That was fun and I'd like to get back to it before I'm old
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renewiltord 1y ago
Famous economist story https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/regrets-of-a-dying-economist https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/regrets-of-a-dying-econo... Goes like this: My father, like me, was an economist. He was not a star, but if you work in asset pricing you probably know of his work. This past weekend, he passed away. As the end approached, he became very philosophical. At one point, I asked him if he had any regrets. He replied: "Do you remember that summer when we rented a cottage in Maine?" He was talking about a memorable family vacation. One where we spent three carefree weeks together on a lake. My kid sister took her first steps there and I learned to swim there. I told him that I did. Then, he said the following: "That summer, I had an idea for an extension of the CAPM model. But being on vacation, someone beat me to it. I regret ever taking that trip. If we stayed home, it could have been me publishing in Economica." A few hours later, he died.
brudgers 1y ago
I think the origin of life-changes-on-the-deathbed has its origin in the Christian practice of medieval kings, dukes, etc. My understanding is that the ruling class would often remain unbaptized throughout their rule so they could do the things such people tend to do, and then partake of a deathbed baptism so they could still meet the requirements for going to heaven... ...power is having your cake and eating it too.
aristofun 1y ago
TL;DR - author is doing a mediocre rhethorical (not even a philosophical one) exercise in a weak attempt to show how smart he is. Early GPT level writing and reasoning. There isn’t even a real fallacy to begin with.
andhuman 1y ago
I don’t agree with this. Too many of us rush around without stopping to think what makes us happy. At least it’s true for me. Being with friends _does_ make you happy. But for some reason it’s hard to find the time for it. In the end it seems we realize that we down prioritized things we shouldn’t have.
GuB-42 1y ago
Maybe you should look at Epicureanism. If you only had a glance at it and reduced it to "YOLO!", then take a closer look, as it is not about ignoring the consequences of your actions, in fact, it is the opposite of that. But the one thing Epicureans don't want to consider is death. Death is just an insignificant transition between existence and non-existence, and what happens after you cease to exist is irrelevant to you because, well, there is no "you" there. The deathbed at least represents some period of time, but do you really want to live your life for a short moment you won't remember? It doesn't mean you shouldn't think about future generations, and be a good person in general. Just don't do it for the deathbed, do it for the present, doing good feels good.
karaterobot 1y ago
> What I want you to take away is this: Don’t bother with the Deathbed Fallacy. Look at happiness research... Right, don't make the mistake of overindexing on what people say as they're dying, instead base your life on something accurate, reliable, and unchanging, like happiness research.
m3kw9 1y ago
You won’t be happy on your death bed no matter what, if you are not regretting then you are just gonna be sad about something else. Ain’t stopping the bad vibes when you are there
dang 1y ago
Discussed a bit at the time: The Deathbed Fallacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112241 - May 2018 (3 comments) The background to this has been discussed here over the years: Regrets of the Dying (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593302 - March 2022 (142 comments) The Top of My Todo List (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 - Aug 2021 (18 comments) The Top Of My Todo List - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613 - April 2012 (185 comments) Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379 - Feb 2012 (4 comments) Top Five Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535 - Dec 2011 (1 comment) Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886 - June 2011 (51 comments) Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239 - Aug 2010 (90 comments) If anyone finds links to other related discussions, please let me know and I'll add them!
- ghugccrghbvr 1y ago
  Is this so common you have the list ready??
  - deleted 1y ago
aaron695 1y ago
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Hunpeter 1y ago
"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And thus, our lives slip away moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
johnea 1y ago
Maybe the dismissal of the Deathbed Fallacy should be mitigated by the "What I'm doing right now can't possibly be wrong" fallacy? As usual, people who haven't yet reached the situation of others, fail to learn from those ahead of them...
bloomingeek 1y ago
When my mother-in-law was on her death bed, with tears in her eyes, she told my wife and I that she killed herself because she refused to stop smoking, even though she knew the potential consequences. It was heart breaking since neither of us were smokers. This happened just a couple of hours before she passed. Before then, everyone present did their best to comfort her with kindness and family stories. At no time did she have any timely advice, including don't smoke. I will say though, she was using the morphine candy on a stick provided by the hospice nurse.
jeffrallen 1y ago
My sister in law has a poster of a man walking uphill on a rugged mountain trail in Tibet. It says "there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way".
casey2 1y ago
I'm so very impressed by your capacity for rationalization the way you surgically dismantle this world view that no one actually proposed is very good and the way that you swipe at the poor is very. good. The way that you don't actually argue for anything is good too. The way you ramble on about imagined conversations between you and your young self, while it did nothing to clarify your point... actually it did, it let everyone know that this was just a trite exercise in performative rationalism so masquerading as philosophy so you can signal and maybe gain some social points in whatever less-wrong adjacent tribe you find yourself in. Be honest you don't want to help anybody with this you just want to string words together until you get undeserved respect. Gross and stinky. Seriously why is lesswrong dogshit so popular here? Are they all they sons of VC investors or do they just all have Theil as a surrogate father? Total crap.
antman 1y ago
I don't think like this person at all. Two major differences. First, people often prioritize what’s immediate over what’s truly important. But people who are near death don’t have the excuse of postponing what matters, because for them, the important has also become immediate. That’s why I listen to their words, which tend to be consistent across cultures and surveys. Second, the idea that someone must be high on Maslow’s hierarchy to reflect deeply or be truly happy goes against my experience. In remote villages where people weren’t stripped of their resources or caught up in consumerism, I met individuals who lived with very basic safety yet were happier by Aristotelian standards. Many successful businesspeople and political leaders I’ve met didn’t have a consistent sense of happiness. Often relying on medication, especially when their goals of artificial happiness like amusement or luxury stopped producing dopamine. When that stopped working, they tried to escalate, but eventually that too became unsustainable.
amdivia 1y ago
Also the fact that the ended up on a deathbed given the path of live they've chosen. What about those who did follow the advice, perhaps they because of such advice they couldn't live a sustainable life that would end with them being on a death bed. A form of survivor bias if you will

282 points by mefengl 1y ago

Bravo! Planning your life in order to minimize deathbed regrets has always bothered me, because the nature of humanity is to want what it hasn't got. If you assume that, on average, people make correct decisions to work hard and pursue what matters to them at the opportunity cost of not enjoying quite enough free time, then their final wishes will naturally include the time they gave up to live the life they had. If, however, they had fully indulged the desire to enjoy and maximize free time, their wishes might instead have revolved around the unfulfilled potential thereby relinquished. The problem, of course, is that the feeling of regret considers what may have been gained without reflecting on what would have been lost. Now the right way to deal with this is some sort of self-consistent closure, where present you and past you with the same values and access to the same information (which could be anything from zero to complete knowledge of then-future outcomes and downstream effects) would make the same choices including both upside and downside. But that would be too complex for motivational advice, which is primarily about creating an inspirational mood, somewhat about positive first-order consequences, and not even a little bit about recursive self-consistency.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
I doubt that the reflex to want what we don't have is in our nature. It wouldn't be selected for. That's how you kill off the herd in the spring and starve the following winter. We work to ensure that others want what they don't have because we've built systems that rely on them continuing to do so. It creates a sort of logic that defines for us what counts as rational behavior. But when that logic meets another one and they each evaluate the other as irrational, there's no reason to expect that the want-what-you-dont-have logic is somehow more valid. If it seems so, it's just that more of us are under its spell than the other.

mathgeek 1y ago

Planning for how you'll feel on your deathbed is like planning for how you'll live in retirement (not speaking of the financial aspects): it's wonderful to know you planned well if you end up in that situation, and there are certainly benefits, but don't forget that you may never get there.

readthenotes1 1y ago
And, a lot of people are really bad at predicting how they'll react in situations. Re retirement: ironically (in this context) it is apparently a reason why some people are soon on their deathbed
knallfrosch 1y ago
"but don't forget that you may never get there." Isn't that the whole genre of "I wish I had reconciled with person X?" That "you may never get there" thought is top of mind for many.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

[flagged]

roenxi 1y ago

The article is accurate but I think it also misses one other important perspective - getting advice from people who have major regrets of the form "I wish I’d" is sampling for the sort of people who made major mistakes. Just because they are dying doesn't suddenly mean they have their life sorted out. Metaphorically. Arguing with a dying person is a major faux pas but they're ultimately still just people and as fallible as ever. The people to learn from are the ones who, on their deathbed, say "that life went really well, I did X, Y and Z and it was very rewarding". Which is basically where the article was heading, although going straight to happiness research is probably better again.

Aeolun 1y ago
I think my experiences with the 4 people I’ve seen die so far all four were sad they were leaving the world (already), but also satisfied with their lives (though they definitely had regrets too). Everyone has regrets.
- fullshark 1y ago
  Having regrets mean you actually made decisions with consequences, and paid attention to their impact. They are unavoidable if you want to live with purpose and thoughtfulness.
  - esafak 1y ago
    That's not true. Maybe you simply avoided making any decisions and went with the flow. That is something you could come to regret.
- roenxi 1y ago
  Well, yeah. Regrets are cheap and plentiful. Which raises the salient point of why deathbed regrets would suddenly become a source of wisdom. But they are often a sample of things that the person thinks they were consistently miscalibrated on over their entire life so it isn't clear why they'd suddenly gain clarity into what they should have done instead. The top 5 list in the article is some really basic stuff. And a lot of people do get that wrong (most people, really) but (1) if they get told they will persist in making the same mistakes and (2) there are a lot of people in absolute sense who actually get those things about right if you look for them and practice a bit. You don't need to be dying to regret those things and the dying still probably don't actually understand what they got wrong. If they actually understood the mistakes they were making they wouldn't make them and most people keep making stupid mistakes like not expressing their feelings or working too hard instead of talking to people for entire lives of 50+ years. Expressing feelings and not working too hard are actually pretty easy things to do if you keep chipping away at it; these people probably don't really understand what they did wrong.

constantcrying 1y ago

I think the author misunderstands the argument. He argues that it is irrelevant what other people believed they should have done when they were close to death. But the argument should rather be, that you should look ahead of your life right now and consider whether what you will be doing will be something you regret in the future. It is not a fallacy at all, it is introspection about your future. That you might change your views later is essentially irrelevant to the point. The point is to take a completely different perspective on your life, one where your life is behind you.

TOGoS 1y ago
This is something I try to do every day. "What would future me like me to have gotten done right now?" Future me doesn't really care if I spent 3 hours playing Minecraft, but they would be pleased if that shelf I've been meaning to build for months were finally done. But also, my brother died recently and left behind a house that was kind of a mess, and that has added "dying me would like my friends/family to be able to easily find the important stuff among all this clutter."

bowsamic 1y ago

I totally agree and it really bothers me that people put so much weight into last regrets

plastic3169 1y ago

I’m in the middle age slump. There is more talk around me about death. Some of our parents died in their 50s and this perspective of ’this might be the last decade’ is creeping in. Yet the same person talking might have still one of their grandparent alive! I am not so interested in the short life. I am happy today so don’t know how else to prepare for that. I keep worrying about living to a 100. Not very likely, but likely enough to be a risk worth consodering. If I am still to live for 50+ years I can’t start hating everything new that is happening. I probably need to do more learning. Need new friends and cant’t solely live the family life. More sports and active life than before. Retirement is not even on the horizon in this scenario.

g4zj 1y ago

I don't know if this is so much a fallacy as it is a questionable assumption which disregards prudential reasoning.

gitroom 1y ago

Yeah I get this, always catch myself thinking about how much life is left versus how much I want to actually do. Makes me wonder what even counts as a good use of time.

deleted 1y ago

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lolinder 1y ago

I think the author fixates too much on this one construction of the idea of deathbed regrets and misses that this is just a single modern incarnation of the positively ancient and cross-cultural idea that you should plan your life around the knowledge that you will die. Marcus Aurelius wrote: You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. [1] And the Tao Te Ching: The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. [2] A relevant Buddhist concept is called Maranasati [3]. And in the Quran: And donate from what We have provided for you before death comes to one of you, and you cry, “My Lord! If only You delayed me for a short while, I would give in charity and be one of the righteous.” But Allah never delays a soul when its appointed time comes. [4] And the Bible: The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘... I will store my surplus grain. ... “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ [5] There's something fundamentally human about contemplating one's own impending death and making changes to one's life accordingly, and nitpicking the exact wording of a single manifestation of that human impulse misses the forest for the trees. [1] Meditations 2.11 https://vreeman.com/meditations/#book2 https://vreeman.com/meditations/#book2 [2] 50 https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati [4] https://quran.com/en/al-munafiqun/10-11 https://quran.com/en/al-munafiqun/10-11 [5] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A16-21&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A16-21...

zzzeek 1y ago
this is the perfect response to this post and here we see the big difference between the pure engineering /logic mindset vs. the liberal arts mindset. When I see these posts on hacker news that are all about some deep philosophical issue, but the writer seems to be approaching the issue as though it were a Google interview question to be solved in isolation of anyone else's experience or knowledge, it emphasizes what a profound blind spot exists throughout much of the tech community, and how the ever more apparent disdain for liberal arts that exists in tech is truly pernicious. Reading up on what humans around the world, across history, across disciplines, and even shudder across cultural backgrounds and gender, have to say on questions that are not actually very novel is essential if you're actually going to open up your text editor and write a blog post about it.

fullshark 1y ago

I don't really think everyone goes around optimizing for their deathbed thoughts, but uses the framing to try and understand what to optimize for with their time on this earth. The framing becomes more prominent when their current situation is lacking in some way and their subconscious is telling them so.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

Reminds me of that wordy speech, attributed to Steve Jobs (spoiler: his last words were actually “Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.”).

coolThingsFirst 1y ago
Morphine?

deleted 1y ago

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gus_massa 1y ago

Reason 4: The list is cherry picked, unless they have cameras and record everything people say close to death and then they make an statistics. So someone collected a list of items that considered interesting, but memory is flimsy so people most of the time don't have an accurate memory of the frequency of the items in the lists and the items not in the list.

nurettin 1y ago

we need a universal rule: deathbed doesn't count. Your life's work and philosophy should not depend on a single time point. It is how you live that matters.

raffael_de 1y ago

[flagged]

bombcar 1y ago

The deathbed argument is simply a rhetorical one - examine your life, determine what you really want out of it, and ask yourself the hard question if you’re doing it.

njdas 1y ago
Good point. I get a sense of conflict from the author, and his reaction to 'ignore' may be due to difficulty with this hard question. He has some good points, but they don't warrant his conclusion.
aaronbrethorst 1y ago
It’s also a useful exercise to do repeatedly throughout your life. Would I want to look back at my life and realize that I spent all of my time working on building legs for Zuck’s avatars in the metaverse or would I rather have spent more time with my son?
- massysett 1y ago
  The whole point of the post is that building legs for Zuck's avatars might be the thing that allows you to spend what time with your son that you can. Many people work very hard for miserable salaries and they couldn't spend more time with their children if they wanted to.
  - ajmurmann 1y ago
    These types of examples IMO show how good we have it now. The worst thing we can say about the job is that it feels meaningless. A subsistence farmer wouldn't have made the same argument about working the field. A 1900 miner wouldn't have made the same argument about getting dust lung in a mine. We've reached a point that we can complain that our WORK doesn't provide meaning. It's an incredible luxury and we aren't when seeing that we have it. Years ago I had a consulting gig where we ported a f2p game from iOS to Android. It was a rather tedious engagement and it was clear kids would spend their parents money on in-game crap to their parents surprise. We all felt bad about it. Meanwhile the office was kinda annoying because there was frequent fuseball and nerf battle noises. One day I looked around and realized that I was sitting in an ergonomic chair at an height-adjustable desk, drinking free water that was flown over the ocean from Italy so that I could consume it. At a similar age my grandpa fought in Stalingrad, spent time in a gulag and then became a poor subsistence farmer who worked odd jobs on the side. I was in heaven and didn't know it

hshshshshsh 1y ago

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gopherloafers 1y ago

Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise and founder of the School of Orphan Wisdom speaks a lot about this. The “wretched anxiety” he observed as head of palliative care in Canada he claims stems from fear of being forgotten. Which is tied to a particular Western failure: not honoring our elders who have died, and the amnesia of cultural memory. His book is a good read, and I think provides an alternative account to the points made in this article.

ojbyrne 1y ago

It seems like another part of the fallacy might be that we only hear from people who have regrets.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

"Reason 1: It is not a representative state" What is a representative state, exactly, and why should that be treated as categorically normative? My consciousness has changed over time as I've matured. I would never wish to regress to the ignorance and stupidity of youth. I see the world differently and more accurately than I did before, and I am more rational and measured. The illusions that youth so easily absorbs lay less of a claim on me (some people persist in this juvenile state for life, it seems). I understand the concern that in a state of distress, people can make decisions that aren't rational, but people also make irrational decisions when not in distress. Comfortable people are often attached to comfort, preventing them from pursuing what is good until some proportionate threat or discomfort dislodged them from that state. Procrastination is a way of avoiding distress or discomfort, but deadlines can work marvelously to focus an undisciplined person that would otherwise drift and dawdle. Most of us have experienced this effect. In similar fashion, the awareness of imminent death can focus the mind. Those on death row, perhaps knowing more or less the day of their deaths, are put in a position that make wishful thinking, distraction, and postponement less easy. This is why it is said that if the death penalty doesn't move someone toward remorse, then it is unlikely anything will. These are either the mentally ill or people hardened in their evil. So I would say: you cannot speak absolutely about the death bed. People enter death in different states of mind, different states of knowledge, that can vary their responses to death. It cannot categorically be said that what is said on one's death bed is true or untrue, or sound or unsound. It depends. But it is also true that death is the ultimate threat, and that remembering that it can strike at any time and without warning can remind us of the preciousness of the little time we have in this life, and in doing so keep us from dissolving into myriad aimless and senseless distractions and diversions that so tragically squander this unrecoverable, perishable privilege.

superposeur 1y ago

The problem I’ve always had with over-weighting deathbed advice is that dying people rarely think through the counterfactuals involved. What would actually be the consequence of not working so hard and relentlessly prioritizing personal relationships (as all such advice seems to recommend)? How much worse of a future would result from financial insecurity and lack of career fulfillment? Has the advice giver actually thought through the tradeoffs that lead you to work hard in the first place? Further, dying people’s worlds usually contract to personal relationships only so it makes sense this is the only aspect of life they emphasize.

Retric 1y ago
Part of this bias is the kind of people dying on a deathbed tend to make less risky choices. You’re underrepresenting motorcycle riders let alone BASE jumpers etc. Long hours seem like the safe option, you’ll rarely get fired for working late. However, it’s easy to be pissed how much extra time you put in when you get laid off etc. Thus, people looking back have more information to work with and where risk adverse so they likely worked more than they should.
- bitwize 1y ago
  Working outside of normal hours is now a cause for suspicion. Especially in today's WFH environment. It's a prime time to convene with the handler who does the actual work. Or to exfiltrate proprietary information to your superiors in North Korea. Etc. Whatever it is you need to do, get it done during normal business hours. If you can't manage that, find another job.
  - saltcured 1y ago
    It's so bizarre for me to see this perspective in a tech space when my tech-adjacent academic R&D career exposed me to so many people who naturally wanted to pull periodic all-nighter efforts or just live in strange shift patterns that ranged anywhere from night owl to vampire...
    - 1y ago

hombre_fatal 1y ago

The problem is that you are mainly restricted in the present by self-limiting beliefs and comfort zones that accomplish nothing but diminishing your experience. That's why you didn't walk up and talk to her. That's why you didn't strike up more conversations. That's why you didn't buy the one-way plane ticket. That's why you didn't launch the idea. That's why you took the easy and safe and less fulfilling path. ...Or you just wandered down it in a zombie like haze. It's trivial to see through this with hindsight, hence the deathbed meme. Hopefully you don't wait until your deathbed to figure it out, though.

wing-_-nuts 1y ago
I have a lot of respect for past me and what he got us through. Some of my past experiences gave me a profound distrust of others. Even today, while I can intellectually admit that most folks are good and decent people, and I am perfectly safe with them, there are all sorts of unconscious temperaments and behaviors that would work wonders to keep me safe in a dangerous world, but limit my ability to connect to others. Likewise, my frugal asceticism might have helped me survive when I was living below the poverty line, but it's very much not helpful when I purposely make a 'fun money' budget today, and it either goes unspent or I feel guilty about spending it because my 'inner frugal bastard' sees money as safety. I'm seeing someone to work through these issues, but it's slow going. I can intellectually see these behaviors aren't helpful, but stopping them from being my default script is hard.

meany 1y ago

I largely agree with the post, but less because people near death don’t know what’s important, but rather because reports of these are self-help, currated to appeal to audience and get clicks. When I’ve had meaningful conversations with e friends and family memebers near death, I’ve found they have a real capacity to help you moderate your perspective and make better life decisions. Of course the specific individual personality plays a big role in this. Per the article suggestion, follow the happiness reasearch. The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia. “If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.

deadbabe 1y ago

No matter what you do you’re going to die with regrets. Some might even feel it wasn’t a good life. I’d say try to focus on the things you did right. You’re just passing through for a moment in a universe currently teeming with activity. You’ll probably regret you didn’t get to see more. Right about when you’re about to die something new and exciting that will revolutionize the future of humanity will be invented and you’ll only know about it for a few days or so.

WalterBright 1y ago

As I get older, I know that I have less time. I don't do things that have a payoff time that is past my expected passing. For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn't make much sense at my age, because there's not much time left for the payoff. Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either. When you're a kid, the returns on investing and education have much bigger payoffs over the many more decades to make use of them.

kurikuri 1y ago
> For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn’t make much sense at my age, because there’s not much time left for the payoff. That is tragic! Learning more about things is fulfilling in and of itself. If your only concern is about growing the number, and you limit your choice to those which are within a time horizon that you can reap the result, then getting older becomes even more bleak than it is.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  You're right that learning can be its own reward. But the point remains, doing things that won't pay off in your expected remaining life are not worth doing. For another example, I was looking at when to start receiving social security benefits. If I start them earlier, the payments are lower. But, if I invest those lower payments, then the built up portfolio will be generating investment returns. Where is the crossover point, where you're better off taking the earlier, lower payment vs the later, higher payment? For me, that point was at age 83. So I decided to take the earlier payments. The weird thing is nobody ever mentions this when discussing the option of when to start taking the payments. Except my accountant, who figured this out for himself, too. People just don't understand the time value of money.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    If I make it to that age, if Social Security is still paying out, if I'm still a US citizen, I'll tell people that the creator of D gave me the idea. It'll be funny

morsecodist 1y ago

It's always great to see someone post about something I think about a lot. Most people want to lead a happy life but that doesn't really help you navigate these time trade offs. Assuming your job makes you unhappy and you work super hard for 40 years and then retire and are having a great retirement and are loving life for 10 years you may say the hard work was worth it because current you is now only experiencing the benefits. But was it really worth it? Conversely, if you pursued a life of hedonism and in your later years are unhealthy and feeling a lack of meaning does that invalidate the happiness you felt earlier? I am not sure there is ever a clear answer to these questions. Most people accept some degree of short term sacrifice for longer term happiness but there is always some limit to what you are willing to go through today for a better life tomorrow.

djaychela 1y ago

As someone who has a terminal cancer diagnosis (and I'm mid-way through the range of time I was told I had left, months, FTR), I don't agree with a lot of this. And I'm essentially on my deathbed (mentally), even though I'm currently not bed-bound. Yes, my state now is not a representative state of the one I was in a year ago before my health started failing. But I'm still the same person. I forgot that briefly after my terminal diagnosis, and starting doing things I thought were the right things (making sure things would be OK for my wife, tidying up a litany of messes that would be hard for her to deal with without just giving up and selling things for pennies or giving them away), but after a few weeks and speaking to the right people, I started living more normally again. Yes, my priorities have changed massively - things that I thought were important 4 months ago are truly meaningless to me now - but many things that are important to me now were so before. And they will be until I cease to exist. I'm making the most of the time I have left because it's important that my experience at this point is as good as it can be, and because I want my wife to have good memories of our last months together. I've never suffered from 'reason 2'. I've always felt I made the right decision at the time with the information I had and the person that I was at the time. So I don't have many regrets - none of significance to speak of, certainly. I know I am lucky in this respect. Reason 3 is meaningless, IMO - both generally and certainly to me. I'm 53. And I don't think many people really do think about this seriously until it's actually on the table for them. I certiainly know I didn't - even last year when I had an operation which hopefully would have removed the cancer and given me years of life, I hadn't really thought about the finality of death and what it means (or doesn't) to me. FTR I'm an Atheist, and I think that 2026 will have as much meaning/experience for me as 1969 (i.e. before I was born).

najuloj 1y ago
Thank you for sharing. I’m in the exact same boat as you and what you wrote matches my experience and thoughts almost to the word. These days my motto is “Make today a good day” and every day I do my best to live up to that.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  I’m not deeply thoughtful about this stuff, but my personal philosophy could be called “positive existentialism.” I am here. It is amazing that I exist, and have an opportunity to be alive and aware. I don’t want to waste it, and so I try to say “yes” to life. And life comes to us moment by moment, day by day. I don’t want to regret things I’ve done, but I also don’t want to regret things I didn’t do. I’m not in the position that either of you are in (sorry about that btw) but in a sense we all are, and just don’t realize it yet.

eulgro 1y ago

For me I think it all revolves around the value we attribute to the past. To me, the past has little to no value. Since I can't change the past, the only thing I can do is learn from it what I haven't already learned, which is usually little. Dwelling on the past is useful as far as it provides me actionable advice for the present and the future. In reality, I often find myself thinking so little about the past that I have essentially forgotten large portions of my life. Since I don't believe there is anything after death, this makes thinking about the life I lived useless, because in a short time, I will be dead. There's is no actions I can do anymore, so there's no point in trying learning from the past at that point. Perhaps thinking about the good things I have done will be worthwhile and ease my death. But I see no point in seeking regrets. Of course I could also give advice to others on my deathbed. But it's something I try to avoid doing. On one hand, because I mostly reject the advice others give me, and thus I expect others to do the same, so I won't waste my time trying to give them advice. On the other hand, I generally find this advice either doesn't match my experience and world view, or it tends to be absolutist about the "one good way of living life", which I don't believe in. People all have different aims in life, and who I am to say which one is correct. Live your life as you see fit, I'm not advising you about what to do and what not to do, because I don't know you better than you do. Something that annoys me a lot is when people say things like "do it now, or you'll regret it later". Even worse: "do it now, anything could happen in the future, you could get sick or even die". So what if that happens? If I die, there's absolutely no judgement I will be able to make of it, since I will be dead. If I get sick and become unable to do it... so what? I will be unable to do it, but since the past has no value to me, it doesn't make it different from anything else I was already unable to do.

overfl0w 1y ago

This fallacy also assumes that free will exists (it does not) and you could have made different choices (you couldn't have). Accepting that your choices are not free and are influenced by multiple factors (such as your current state, your knowledge at the time, your emotions, your past, upbringing, genetics even, the people you interact with) makes you realize that regret is meaningless.

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FrustratedMonky 1y ago

Exactly. I'm not on my deathbed, but I also say all those things to myself "I should keep in touch with friends". But don't, even though I'm not dying, and tell myself too. Maybe I'm an ass? Everything takes time and energy.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
I often wonder what I get out of friendships. It's not just intangible, it's very hard to quantify. Last year I had a phase of sleeping around a lot. That was fun and I'd like to get back to it before I'm old

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renewiltord 1y ago

Famous economist story https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/regrets-of-a-dying-economist https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/regrets-of-a-dying-econo... Goes like this: My father, like me, was an economist. He was not a star, but if you work in asset pricing you probably know of his work. This past weekend, he passed away. As the end approached, he became very philosophical. At one point, I asked him if he had any regrets. He replied: "Do you remember that summer when we rented a cottage in Maine?" He was talking about a memorable family vacation. One where we spent three carefree weeks together on a lake. My kid sister took her first steps there and I learned to swim there. I told him that I did. Then, he said the following: "That summer, I had an idea for an extension of the CAPM model. But being on vacation, someone beat me to it. I regret ever taking that trip. If we stayed home, it could have been me publishing in Economica." A few hours later, he died.

brudgers 1y ago

I think the origin of life-changes-on-the-deathbed has its origin in the Christian practice of medieval kings, dukes, etc. My understanding is that the ruling class would often remain unbaptized throughout their rule so they could do the things such people tend to do, and then partake of a deathbed baptism so they could still meet the requirements for going to heaven... ...power is having your cake and eating it too.

aristofun 1y ago

TL;DR - author is doing a mediocre rhethorical (not even a philosophical one) exercise in a weak attempt to show how smart he is. Early GPT level writing and reasoning. There isn’t even a real fallacy to begin with.

andhuman 1y ago

I don’t agree with this. Too many of us rush around without stopping to think what makes us happy. At least it’s true for me. Being with friends _does_ make you happy. But for some reason it’s hard to find the time for it. In the end it seems we realize that we down prioritized things we shouldn’t have.

GuB-42 1y ago

Maybe you should look at Epicureanism. If you only had a glance at it and reduced it to "YOLO!", then take a closer look, as it is not about ignoring the consequences of your actions, in fact, it is the opposite of that. But the one thing Epicureans don't want to consider is death. Death is just an insignificant transition between existence and non-existence, and what happens after you cease to exist is irrelevant to you because, well, there is no "you" there. The deathbed at least represents some period of time, but do you really want to live your life for a short moment you won't remember? It doesn't mean you shouldn't think about future generations, and be a good person in general. Just don't do it for the deathbed, do it for the present, doing good feels good.

karaterobot 1y ago

> What I want you to take away is this: Don’t bother with the Deathbed Fallacy. Look at happiness research... Right, don't make the mistake of overindexing on what people say as they're dying, instead base your life on something accurate, reliable, and unchanging, like happiness research.

m3kw9 1y ago

You won’t be happy on your death bed no matter what, if you are not regretting then you are just gonna be sad about something else. Ain’t stopping the bad vibes when you are there

dang 1y ago

Discussed a bit at the time: The Deathbed Fallacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112241 - May 2018 (3 comments) The background to this has been discussed here over the years: Regrets of the Dying (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593302 - March 2022 (142 comments) The Top of My Todo List (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 - Aug 2021 (18 comments) The Top Of My Todo List - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613 - April 2012 (185 comments) Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379 - Feb 2012 (4 comments) Top Five Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535 - Dec 2011 (1 comment) Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886 - June 2011 (51 comments) Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239 - Aug 2010 (90 comments) If anyone finds links to other related discussions, please let me know and I'll add them!

ghugccrghbvr 1y ago
Is this so common you have the list ready??
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aaron695 1y ago

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Hunpeter 1y ago

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And thus, our lives slip away moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

johnea 1y ago

Maybe the dismissal of the Deathbed Fallacy should be mitigated by the "What I'm doing right now can't possibly be wrong" fallacy? As usual, people who haven't yet reached the situation of others, fail to learn from those ahead of them...

bloomingeek 1y ago

When my mother-in-law was on her death bed, with tears in her eyes, she told my wife and I that she killed herself because she refused to stop smoking, even though she knew the potential consequences. It was heart breaking since neither of us were smokers. This happened just a couple of hours before she passed. Before then, everyone present did their best to comfort her with kindness and family stories. At no time did she have any timely advice, including don't smoke. I will say though, she was using the morphine candy on a stick provided by the hospice nurse.

jeffrallen 1y ago

My sister in law has a poster of a man walking uphill on a rugged mountain trail in Tibet. It says "there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way".

casey2 1y ago

I'm so very impressed by your capacity for rationalization the way you surgically dismantle this world view that no one actually proposed is very good and the way that you swipe at the poor is very. good. The way that you don't actually argue for anything is good too. The way you ramble on about imagined conversations between you and your young self, while it did nothing to clarify your point... actually it did, it let everyone know that this was just a trite exercise in performative rationalism so masquerading as philosophy so you can signal and maybe gain some social points in whatever less-wrong adjacent tribe you find yourself in. Be honest you don't want to help anybody with this you just want to string words together until you get undeserved respect. Gross and stinky. Seriously why is lesswrong dogshit so popular here? Are they all they sons of VC investors or do they just all have Theil as a surrogate father? Total crap.

antman 1y ago

I don't think like this person at all. Two major differences. First, people often prioritize what’s immediate over what’s truly important. But people who are near death don’t have the excuse of postponing what matters, because for them, the important has also become immediate. That’s why I listen to their words, which tend to be consistent across cultures and surveys. Second, the idea that someone must be high on Maslow’s hierarchy to reflect deeply or be truly happy goes against my experience. In remote villages where people weren’t stripped of their resources or caught up in consumerism, I met individuals who lived with very basic safety yet were happier by Aristotelian standards. Many successful businesspeople and political leaders I’ve met didn’t have a consistent sense of happiness. Often relying on medication, especially when their goals of artificial happiness like amusement or luxury stopped producing dopamine. When that stopped working, they tried to escalate, but eventually that too became unsustainable.

amdivia 1y ago

Also the fact that the ended up on a deathbed given the path of live they've chosen. What about those who did follow the advice, perhaps they because of such advice they couldn't live a sustainable life that would end with them being on a death bed. A form of survivor bias if you will