6 ms·
It's death
- fractalf 4mo agoFantastic, thanks for that!
- npl 4mo agoGreat
- avilay 4mo agoCan a kind soul write down their interpretation of the story? I didn't quite get it. [Edit]: Thanks for all the explanations!
- jckahn 4mo agoYOLO
- gerdesj 4mo agoBeautifully put, in four letters.
- ok_dad 4mo agoDon’t sweat the small stuff
- freetime2 4mo agoI'm not quite sure I got it either, but I guess this is probably the main gist: > by the time most people wind up here, they’ve got plenty of regrets. Nobody gets it all right. You’re born, and then you go through life making the choices that you think are the best given the information you have at the time, and you don’t always have all the information to make the right choices. Do yourself a favour and forgive yourself for any failings on your part, you’re only human after all
- Waterluvian 4mo agoI’m going to annoy people who actually wield this language well. I feel like there’s less of a clear point and more of an aesthetic. Like not even metaphorical or allegorical. It’s just the overall feel of wandering and pointlessness that creates a sense of calm.
- sublinear 4mo agoIt's an allegory for AI hysteria and WFH depression. Generally, anything to put a wet blanket on the nice things that have happened to tech workers in the past few years. To put salt in the wound, it's done in a style that used to delight HN. It reminded me of those cringe videos CGPGrey put out for COVID.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Yen 4mo agoI'm reminded of the lyrics from Pink Floyd's Time: "And then one day you find Ten years have got behind you no one told you when to run you missed the starting gun" The longer you live, the more tiny little mistakes you make. Things that at the time you could have done better, if you'd known, if you'd been a bit more careful. And these weigh on you, emotionally, pretty consistently. And while it's pretty absurd, in the story, such tiny mistakes having such outsized consequences, the story reminds us that such severe consequences are well within the realm of possibility. People do lose limbs off of little, careless mistakes. Doubly so with all the incredibly concentrated sources of energy we have in the modern world - power tools, automobiles, explosives. Would one really lose ten years trying to pick out a single Netflix show? No. But could one wake up one day and realize that they'd accomplished nothing of note for a decade, that all their free time was dumped into Netflix shows that weren't even that good? So, what do you do with all that? Memento Mori, I guess.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoI've accomplished nothing of note ever. Most people don't. They just live their lives, trying to get by as best they can.
- ricardobeat 4mo agoI don't know if that is true. For large swaths of the population, raising a child is their biggest accomplishment. Justifiably so. Other accomplishments of note might be: a single conversation that helped someone change. Little acts that made the world a tiny bit better. Having brought happiness to other people. I like to think that is the meaning of not wasting your time – not just measuring your life's worth with a science/capitalism lens.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoI guess I interpreted "of note" differently. Raising a child is not noteworthy, it's just normal. Millions of people do it. Nobody will be remembered for raising a child, except by the child himself. When I'm gone, I'll leave nothing "of note" behind. I haven't won any great prizes or set any records. I haven't authored any papers. I haven't invented anything that changed an industry. I haven't cured any diseases. My name won't be on any buildings or monuments. I haven't really left any kind of discernable mark on the world or civilization or even my home town.
- RetroTechie 4mo ago"A Bunch of Rocks" https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/
- hankbond 4mo agoI don't really get it, but still kind of liked it? I enjoyed the abstractness of the story and the disjointedness of the time aspects. I don't disagree with the salience of the point Death made but it kind of felt like an exposition dump in a movie. Not that I'm a good writer (or reader tbh) but I think focusing more on the first kind of writing and less on the second would have connected more with me.
- aklemm 4mo agoIt seems like a gem to me. For those who don’t “get it” just think about what it evokes and follow those thoughts. That’s all there is to it.
- _gmax0 4mo agoWinston Churchill once laid bricks as a means to outrun the black dog.
- freetime2 4mo agoThis story has a strong "life sucks then you die" vibe going for it. And the afterlife also sucks apparently (although I don't personally believe in an afterlife). Hopelessness and injustice seem to be the current zeitgeist - at least for anyone who spends a lot of time online. And I get it, there's plenty to be unhappy about. But my counter-argument is that it's possible to do things in life that you're proud of. And find happiness in the simplest of places. And most people would do better to focus the majority of their attention on those things. This story says "do yourself a favour and forgive yourself for any failings on your part, you’re only human after all" - which I agree with. But I'd go one step further and add "celebrate your successes" and try to align your life in such a way that you can have successes worthy of celebrating. It makes me wonder: with everyone seemingly so unhappy, why aren't there more people pursuing alternative lifestyles? Similar to the 60s counterculture. You don't need the whole world to go along with you - just a handful (or less) of likeminded people. Or some people even manage to go it alone. It seems a lot of people (perhaps a vocal minority?) actually enjoy being upset. Or maybe everyone is going through ups and downs but we just tend to be more vocal when we're upset.
- smnplk 4mo ago> And the afterlife also sucks apparently (although I don't personally believe in an afterlife). Why don't you believe in the experience after dying ?
- freetime2 4mo agoI think that once the power supply to my brain shuts down, that's likely the end of my conscious experience.
- BLKNSLVR 4mo agoI'm going to say it will be similar to the experience prior to birth / conception, ie. we were nothing, and to nothing we shall return. It's a scary feeling if you can grasp it. Grasping non-existence from within existence is difficult, I've consciously tried to do it and succeeded a couple of times, but it's fleeting and both times it affected my breathing and heart rate in a similar way to fear or panic or pain.
- rdtsc 4mo agoFor some reason I imagined death from The Seventh Seal by Bergman here. Very calm and matter for fact kind of a character. Maybe once in a while he may decide to visit for a game of chess...
- booleandilemma 4mo ago[dead]
- crooked-v 4mo agoReminds me of the cut number "The Hole" from the Beetlejuice stage musical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYa31LqxKc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYa31LqxKc8
- ndhbxyd 4mo agoMost people/groups are taught How to survive. Many coast on just that knowledge and die without the WHY to survive question ever coming up. But if it does come up for you at some point in life, know that different philosophies have different answers. These days you can find summaries of all of them neatly complied like a restaurant menu thanks to LLMs. People are very diffefent so you find the philosophy that fits you. Also thanks to all those differences proving one is the best is a waste of time and energy. Different ones are useful for different situations.
- matthewdgreen 4mo agoI had the experience recently of asking an LLM about the Buddhist view on reincarnation, and then hearing its views on what this means for its own existence. I'm not sure any of it left me feeling better about death, but it was a fascinating conversation.
- ndhbxyd 4mo agoIts a beautiful thing to be able to have these chats. In the past you had to spend a lot of time and resources searching for the person not just with the knowledge but the patience, time and capacity to communicate it well. Open Yale courses has great free phil courses, and then chating about that content with an LLM adds a whole lot more to depth.
- anon-3988 4mo agoThis style of writing feels like the Minecraft Parkour Civilization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pFwQiwRbcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pFwQiwRbcg There's a perfect balance of absurdity and casualness that makes almost perfect sense that you can follow the show, and yet bizarre enough that you stick to know more.
- mock-possum 4mo agoWow this is mindnumbing, it just keeps going and going and going.
- kimos 4mo agoWow! Two hours!
- jesseduffield 4mo agoThank you for sharing that video, I just watched the whole thing; such great storytelling. Its got a very similar aesthetic to mine with every action having an extremely small margin for error, with extremely grave consequences, and with a protagonist who is surprisingly accepting of that world.
- _doctor_love 4mo agoI appreciate the Australian salty outlook on life, feels very much present in this story. To my mind there is a Buddhist story hiding in here. The whole idea about an endless black void and that the protagonist considered sitting felt…allegorical? metaphorical? The end is what drove it home for me. People generally speaking would prefer not to do any internalizing about death whatsoever and will take an endless wandering over the hard work of being human.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- morpheos137 4mo agoif life didn't suck and there were not the time out of death there would be no drive to optimize the time we have.
- jadar 4mo ago“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.” - Ecclesiastes 12:13-14
- Shellban 4mo agoEcclesiastes is an interesting one. It goes chapter by chapter, trying to find meaning in life through process of elimination, trying education, hedonism, labor, and wealth. While some things (usually wisdom) bring about more joy in the interim, he declares that they all will lose their charm rather quickly. In the end, all joy from these will leave us before death. Solomon's last hope for fulfillment lies in the eternal and supernatural.
- NBJack 4mo agoSolomon seems to give a glimpse into a life of "what happens if the only challenges you have are the ones you freely pick?" He had everything one could dream of and more, including an unprecedented era of peace. Yet he struggled to pass the time. Having the equivalent of billions of [insert favorite currency here], most folks fantasize about the ideal life. We often believe all of our immediate problems go away, free to do whatever we want. Yet, at least in Solomon's case, he seemed to become incredibly fed up with these grand projects and plans of his own devise. While I certainly wouldn't mind a fraction of that wealth myself, I do recall my college weekends. Free to spend time however I pleased, with my basic needs met and no homework looming, I spent hours playing my favorite video games. And yet, no matter how good they were, I remember how dull and boring they eventually became in only a few hours.
- weregiraffe 4mo agoWhich God? Yahweh, Jesus, Allah? Brahma, Amaterasu, Ahura Mazda?
- TonyStr 4mo agoThe first three are the same, and the latter three are in no way related to the passage.
- chopete3 4mo agoThese kind of write-ups always try to bring one into their real world senses. Few interesting observations >> Ten years gone for the sake of picking a Netflix show Thats just Netflix. With kids 18 years go by just like that. >> Nobody gets it all right. You’re born, and then you go through life making the choices that you think are the best given the information This is said numerous times but can give wrong interpretation. Choices are what make the life. Life and choices are not parallel tracks.
- tclover 4mo agoIt's a funny story if you look at the end of life from a materialistic viewpoint on the origin of consciousness, but that’s not the only perspective.
- root_axis 4mo agoKafka pastiche.
- teekert 4mo agoGotta love those comments. Goes to show, you can be called out like that, and be on the HN front page at the same time. When you're young, you may not realize this. I never did when I judged my own stuff as (too) edgy.
- brador 4mo ago5 people, 4 seats in the cars. 7 hours deciding what to order on the delivery app. In the end we just walked the 4 miles and it was great.
- xg15 4mo agoThis story reads as if there should be a message or a point or at least a punchline at the end - but it just ends with nothing?