People should note that having dreams without figuring out how to get them accomplished is a sure way to have regrets. We are told that we should chase our dreams with the idea that if we wish hard enough they will come true - popular entertainment re-enforces it. I think that's why there are so many people that buy lottery tickets hoping their dreams will come true once they have the instant money of a win. But the reality is that only a few people will win the lottery. It's by design. The lottery is built with the idea that only a tiny percent will ever get the big money. This seems like it's obvious but a large number of people just believe that dreams come true by luck. So keep in mind that most dreams are achievable you just have to work towards them by setting up a life plan.
-Define dream
-Set up a plan to the goal/dream
-execute plan until achieved - but review on a set time table to make sure you are heading in the right direction.
Life goals and dreams are hard because of their innate complexity to achieve them. It's easy to state "I want to start a family" or "I want to become a business owner" or "I want to climb Everest". It's the execution which is hard because that relies on so many variables most of which you don't really control.
Social background, economic background, your health, your personality, your skills and abilities, your awareness of opportunities or lack thereof, ingrained beliefs and biases, education level, culture, current events, family dynamics, upbringing,...
The notion that you're in control of what happens in your life is a convenient belief, not a hard fact. It's only when that belief is shattered by hard reality that you start to understand that life doesn't necessarily follow the script you had in mind when you're young.
The kicker then is understanding that happiness isn't to be found only when you reach the end of the rainbow, when you finally achieve the dream. It's there along the road, between the rubble and troubles that life throws at you. It's found in what you make out of each day you're given in good health.
As a 30-something, it has recently become apparent to me that it is very easy to live a life you don't really care about. You start a job because it's the thing people expect you to do with your degree, chase some promotions because it feels nice to improve your status and win more money and without really paying attention you end up doing a job you rescent to keep living a life you dislike.
While I agree that there are a lot of factors we don't control, we can put that into perspective for evaluating how feasible a "life goal" is.
There's a culture that pushes us to "dream big" (e.g. build a unicorn startup, become a billionaire). That's usually awfully ambitious, and as feasible as winning the lottery for most of us.
We should be pragmatic about our life goals. They should be ambitious, but achieavable.
Even if we don't control a lot of factors in our lives we at least have the power to influence them, most of the time it comes in the form of "trade-offs". So you've got to be prepared to make some sacrifices in the present for making progress towards a future goal.
I also acknowledge that some of us have a head start due to our social/economical background, and we should be grateful for that.
True, it's not easy. But if you never start and try, I guarantee that it's even more unlikely to happen.
It's said that it's the journey not the goal so make the journey fun. If there are ever a set of people that can figure out how to solve a problem, HN has them. So,figure out how to solve your dream problem.
True, doing nothing is so much easier but I don't recommend it since you won't like the result.
I'm young and that's probably the reason why I'm less cynical. Hurdles can't be a reason not to run the race. For me it's like project management: you're 100% sure that nothing is going to go according to the plan, and that you'll end up far from the target, but still, planning is better than not planning. And adapting the plan along the way is best.
There's a school of thought among physicists/philosophers called "eternalism" (also goes by "block universe") that posits that all the future is already "laid out," so to speak, and that free will is an illusion. The idea is that the current state of the universe (and mind in our case) dictates the next state (deterministic or stochastic) and we really have to control over the process. Many physicists subscribe to this view (Albert Einstein is supposed to have been a proponent), and I'm increasingly becoming a believer myself. The upshot is that we should never regret/second-guess the past or worry about the future because we really have no control.
I don't think unrealistic dreams have to lead to regrets. I have a dream home, and I don't think I'll ever build it, and that's fine. I like occasionally thinking of my dream home, it makes me happy, and I don't need to actually have it become a real home.
Since it's just a dream, I don't have to worry about where to build it, or if the things I dream about are practical, and I don't have to worry about any trade-offs, since it's just a dream.
Even if I had a million dollars, and I could afford to build it, who knows if it would even work? There's a reason why real life houses don't look like my dream home, and I assume it's because of some things that I'm not thinking about when fantasising about my dream house.
So, I'm perfectly happy with having unfulfilled dreams.
You're aware that one of the most common regrets in the article is to have laboured too much? Not sure if thats your intention bit it really reads like in the face of that youre reaction is "work(labour) harder" to get fullfillment.
>People should note that having dreams without figuring out how to get them accomplished is a sure way to have regrets.
Disagree. My dream is to revolutionize my field of science. This is practically unattainable, but that doesn't I'll regret being a scientist and solving smaller problems.
I.e. It's not the destination, but the road traveled.
I buy lottery tickets because it's fun (for me) to pretend that I will win. It's playing as in "lets pretend" and "dressing up". I know that it's 1:14,000,000 against and I know how big a 1,000,000 is.
Dreaming in the longer run is good, and goals can provide meaning and structure in what is essentially a meaningless and chaotic world. Living in the moment is also good, playing is good.
Sure, but you can also direct all that time, money and energy towards something much more rewarding, with real and very probable chances of succeeding, instead of string of little failures to win for rest of your life.
For example I have a long term dream of being self-sufficient paraglider, Icarus dream and all that. I live in a country where its hard to have full course (2 weeks minimum) unless you speak fluent french, which I don't yet. I have 2 tiny little small kids. I have had some recent injuries which delay/block similar efforts. But I didn't give up, waited patiently till suddenly I had a window for the course. Did it, and now looking for spring to continue the momentum, whenever family situation allows it.
Some other activities would be much easier (and cheaper) to get into. But somehow I knew and felt that this will be very rewarding for me, combining hiking up and flying down the mountains.
I don't call them dreams - those are rather impossible situations like me free floating on ISS looking a dark space around Earth, stars, moon and milky way. Or winning lottery. Goals is much better term for me, there are clear actionable steps to get there. Compared to this dream, paragliding is peanuts to achieve.
I buy lottery tickets because I like the privilege of not being poor enough for the purchase to be a tax on me, lottery tickets are often called a tax on the stupid or a tax on the poor, both are said. why not just entertainment?
so I just like to think “l.o.l, privilege” when I buy
one of the $595 hourly rates from cpa and legal beats my lottery ticket purchases any year, shrug
I’ve traded options with a greater negative expected value than powerball
I buy lottery tickets when the prize is really large. My four best friends and I will chip in and we'll buy a few tickets. Then we'll spend the next week or two on our whatsapp group having fun about what dumb s*t each one will do with the money, what kinds of pranks we'll be able to lay on each other, etc. It's lots of fun and for about ten bucks, it's money very well spent. It wouldn't be this fun if we were just pretending to have bought tickets.
I believe a majority of people have a dream. Source: my decades in higher education working with families and students - literally everyone has a dream about their future.
> So keep in mind that most dreams are achievable you just have to work towards them by setting up a life plan.
No, no they aren't, especially if you haven't already won the birth lottery. We're coming in an era of decreasing social mobility, where the majority will drown in poverty.
These are good but it's important to keep it in perspective. You might not need to optimize every day between now and then for what you think you're going to regret then. People who aren't dying have different needs, like paying rent next month.
The million dollars question here is, if they had a chance to go back and do things differently, would that make them have no regrets on their dying bed, or they'd just end up with a different set of regrets?
I've seen my parents and my grandmother dying. Mostly they were weak, anxious, miserable and suffering. Nobody mentioned any thing they regretted. My grandmother kept telling me her life went so fast, that I should enjoy mine and do whatever made me happy. She sounded more nostalgic of her youth than regretting any past actions.
I think we like to make up stories, trying to find some drive, but if you don't believe in afterlife, life is pointless anyway.
Thinking about the regrets listed in the article. Pick this one:
"I wish I had not worked so hard."
What if this person went back in time and didn't work so hard? Are you suggesting they would, in their twilight years, express regret for not having worked harder? Perhaps regret they did not have the means to buy more stuff or travel?
Because nothing like that made the top 5 from the author's anecdotal evidence.
We have to assume either then that people rarely regret not working enough (or that the majority of us work too much and so never have the opposite regret, ha ha).
I totally can see myself regretting one day on dropping out of University. Not that I ever needed the degree really, but just for the feeling of closing what you've started.
Same with sport, I was pretty good at some point, preparing for a state competition in swimming, but fell in love and dropped out of trainings (and she dumped me some 6 months later). If I worked harder back then perhaps I'd now have a medal on my wall to boost my ego with. There're literally millions of such events in everyones' lives, some small, some big, some more important and some less, and it's just a question if you'll go back to them one day or leave them be...
I had a bit of a "what am I doing with my life" crisis a few years back when I felt addicted to working, and I made the changes to live a calmer, more enjoyable life at the expense of some income. Will I now regret not leaving more money for my daughter/wife when I go?
We're all stumbling through life to the same conclusion. No one gets to do everything they wanted to.
I get your point about different sets of regrets, but I really doubt anyone on their deathbed regrets not leaving behind more money. In this case I think you made the right call from a deathbed regrets perspective, trading money for a more enjoyable life.
Asked the right question. We don't know what choices would have lead to global optimal point even at the end of life. It is possible there are multiple global optimal points. At least this serves as a motivation for anti aging.
Mortality is something I have been greatly struggling with lately, and I am neither sick nor old. But it's just tough to grapple with. By all accounts, life and this universe makes no damn sense, and for the most part, attempts to understand it are futile. We carve out little things that are interesting, but that's about it. And all that is ignoring the fatal flaws of humanity.
What's interesting is that I already share most of these regrets, and I am not dying, at least in the traditional sense since we are all dying. I think for the most part, all one can do in life is to just do. Be yourself but stop worrying about what yourself is. Treat any done project, not matter how small, as a good project. Look for little successes like that. And the older I get, the more I realize that relationships matter.
Life only has meaning when viewed through the collective: our purpose is to help others, make great things and self actualise (learn, develop).
Life isn’t about me or you, it’s about us.
Make plans that go beyond your lifetime - with the intention of “handing off” to a suitable person, or at least leaving a description of what you’d like to see next so that someone else can pick that up.
There are so many problems to solve, ideas to explore, others to help, people to inspire. The really difficulty lies in choosing one thing to work on at a time.
If you cannot find a meaning in one lifetime, adding a finite number of (other people’s) lifetimes will still be meaningless. (It can make the ending of your own less relevant but I’d say that’s a different issue.)
> Life only has meaning when viewed through the collective...
This may be true for ants. But I've never seen how this can be an absolute truth for humans for two reasons:
1. If one life is truly meaningless (0), how does multiplying it produce meaning (0 * 8 billion = 0)?
2. If you found yourself to be the last person on the planet, would you A) realize you have no meaning and die, B) create art and put a little more beauty into the universe? Given those choices, does option A or B have more inherent "meaning"?
I want to read that book someday. If you liked the book, you will also like Mr Becker's podcast with Lex Fridman. Can you give a summary of the book? Thanks a bunch!
I see this as a call to mindfulness. A lot of adult life is spent sacrificing the current self for the benefit of the future self. For a lot of everyday activities like brushing teeth or walking to work we never really think about it, we just use it to think about what's going to happen later on.
Sorry for being wishy-washy, but we have to confront that we are living right now, and we ought to enjoy what we are doing right now! Not in the sense that we should live like there's no tomorrow -- but that we should enjoy the today we are getting.
Realistically, there is not much impact us little humans can have. The options are to donate to humanitarian organizations working there, vote for a government that's going to intervene, or volunteer as a soldier. I'm not eligible to vote, I would never be a capable soldier, but I did donate.
The idea is that even if terrible things are happening, and you are anxious for what's next, you have to look in front of you, and see what you can do different right now. To a large extent this conflict is outside our hands, and we should prepare accordingly.
My plea to you is to please donate to the red cross in Ukraine :)
Does regret on deathbed matter that much? We live 30000 days NOT on our deathbed, and 1 day on our deathbed. Even if that 1 day is horrible, as long as the 30000 days are good, it should be fine, right? Just because it's the last day doesn't make it more important than the other days.
My theory is that these regrets eat you from the inside anyways. So the deathbed event is not a hallucination of sorts, but it happens because the dying lets go of their everyday worries and other such things, so their real motivations and inclinations crop up. And if they haven't acted on them, to a level that would be satisfying to them, then it leads to regret. As if they haven't lived their lives true to themselves. Which begs the question of the point of living too, of course. To which I have no clear answer.
This is exactly my take on this (and I am family-oriented, religious guy). Majority of people will be “dying” between few weeks up to few monts, while they will be living 70-80 years. Shaping your 70 years of life so that you don’t feel (other people’s) regrets during your final few months seems stupid to me.
Haha. Assuming this isn't sarcastic—I would assume that (1) sentiments on the last day are probably similar to many of the days before it, and (2) you should weight the wisdom of those days higher than days early in life, because they have more experience.
It was not sarcastic. I meant it. I believe that every day is equally valuable.
Life is not an optimization problem, where we maximize happiness. I prefer to just let life flow in its natural waves, sometimes correcting course to achieve my goals.
Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too many to mention…..
I think ones goal should be to live an optimal life, integrating good over time.
Reviewing the wisdom of those who have done more than us (lived long and are facing death) seems smart.
While I don't want to live my life in fear of regret, I often use a mental model for decisions - "if this is wrong how much would I regret it," to weigh the choices.
I personally don't want to be on my deathbed and say I wish after 35 I had spent more time with my loved ones - I want to be able to say that I spent a good amount of time with my loved ones and enjoyed it.
I don't find his arguments any good. Basically "my wife is also a nurse and she haven't heard many" and "they're no good anyway".
> Ms. Ware said regrets are expressed “when questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently”; my wife isn’t thrilled about this as a care technique.
Or:
> Deathbed folks are usually far from their analytical peak – they are often in great pain, and rather muddle-headed. So why would we think their comments especially insightful?
It also gets comically reductionistic:
> Added 9a: Stephen Smith suggests these regrets are the predictable result of opiate pain medication.
But I think it's more about the author trying to force his opinion, when it's not really needed, insightful, or that useful.
I think "my wife is a hospice worker who has provided care to over 5000 patients and hasn't heard these regrets" is a pretty decent argument. I'm not saying Hanson is right, but I wouldn't dismiss his wife's experience.
Readit News
-Define dream
-Set up a plan to the goal/dream
-execute plan until achieved - but review on a set time table to make sure you are heading in the right direction.
Start, life really is short.
Life goals and dreams are hard because of their innate complexity to achieve them. It's easy to state "I want to start a family" or "I want to become a business owner" or "I want to climb Everest". It's the execution which is hard because that relies on so many variables most of which you don't really control.
Social background, economic background, your health, your personality, your skills and abilities, your awareness of opportunities or lack thereof, ingrained beliefs and biases, education level, culture, current events, family dynamics, upbringing,...
The notion that you're in control of what happens in your life is a convenient belief, not a hard fact. It's only when that belief is shattered by hard reality that you start to understand that life doesn't necessarily follow the script you had in mind when you're young.
The kicker then is understanding that happiness isn't to be found only when you reach the end of the rainbow, when you finally achieve the dream. It's there along the road, between the rubble and troubles that life throws at you. It's found in what you make out of each day you're given in good health.
As a 30-something, it has recently become apparent to me that it is very easy to live a life you don't really care about. You start a job because it's the thing people expect you to do with your degree, chase some promotions because it feels nice to improve your status and win more money and without really paying attention you end up doing a job you rescent to keep living a life you dislike.
There's a culture that pushes us to "dream big" (e.g. build a unicorn startup, become a billionaire). That's usually awfully ambitious, and as feasible as winning the lottery for most of us.
We should be pragmatic about our life goals. They should be ambitious, but achieavable.
Even if we don't control a lot of factors in our lives we at least have the power to influence them, most of the time it comes in the form of "trade-offs". So you've got to be prepared to make some sacrifices in the present for making progress towards a future goal.
I also acknowledge that some of us have a head start due to our social/economical background, and we should be grateful for that.
It's said that it's the journey not the goal so make the journey fun. If there are ever a set of people that can figure out how to solve a problem, HN has them. So,figure out how to solve your dream problem.
True, doing nothing is so much easier but I don't recommend it since you won't like the result.
You control how you play the hand
And you control at how you take joy in the game.
Since it's just a dream, I don't have to worry about where to build it, or if the things I dream about are practical, and I don't have to worry about any trade-offs, since it's just a dream.
Even if I had a million dollars, and I could afford to build it, who knows if it would even work? There's a reason why real life houses don't look like my dream home, and I assume it's because of some things that I'm not thinking about when fantasising about my dream house.
So, I'm perfectly happy with having unfulfilled dreams.
Disagree. My dream is to revolutionize my field of science. This is practically unattainable, but that doesn't I'll regret being a scientist and solving smaller problems.
I.e. It's not the destination, but the road traveled.
Dreaming in the longer run is good, and goals can provide meaning and structure in what is essentially a meaningless and chaotic world. Living in the moment is also good, playing is good.
Can't you pretend you will win without buying the tickets?
For example I have a long term dream of being self-sufficient paraglider, Icarus dream and all that. I live in a country where its hard to have full course (2 weeks minimum) unless you speak fluent french, which I don't yet. I have 2 tiny little small kids. I have had some recent injuries which delay/block similar efforts. But I didn't give up, waited patiently till suddenly I had a window for the course. Did it, and now looking for spring to continue the momentum, whenever family situation allows it.
Some other activities would be much easier (and cheaper) to get into. But somehow I knew and felt that this will be very rewarding for me, combining hiking up and flying down the mountains.
I don't call them dreams - those are rather impossible situations like me free floating on ISS looking a dark space around Earth, stars, moon and milky way. Or winning lottery. Goals is much better term for me, there are clear actionable steps to get there. Compared to this dream, paragliding is peanuts to achieve.
so I just like to think “l.o.l, privilege” when I buy
one of the $595 hourly rates from cpa and legal beats my lottery ticket purchases any year, shrug
I’ve traded options with a greater negative expected value than powerball
I believe a majority of people have a dream. Source: my decades in higher education working with families and students - literally everyone has a dream about their future.
What they don't have is a plan.
Dead Comment
No, no they aren't, especially if you haven't already won the birth lottery. We're coming in an era of decreasing social mobility, where the majority will drown in poverty.
Dont not have capital
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ZnfCmTJMY
The Top of My Todo List (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 - Aug 2021 (18 comments)
Top five regrets of the dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689907 - June 2015 (5 comments)
The Top Of My Todo List - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613 - April 2012 (185 comments)
Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379 - Feb 2012 (4 comments)
Top five regrets of the dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3542280 - Feb 2012 (1 comment)
Top Five Regrets of the Dying - 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 - June 2011 (51 comments)
Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239 - Aug 2010 (90 comments)
Deleted Comment
I guess that there are always going to be regrets.
Deleted Comment
I've seen my parents and my grandmother dying. Mostly they were weak, anxious, miserable and suffering. Nobody mentioned any thing they regretted. My grandmother kept telling me her life went so fast, that I should enjoy mine and do whatever made me happy. She sounded more nostalgic of her youth than regretting any past actions.
I think we like to make up stories, trying to find some drive, but if you don't believe in afterlife, life is pointless anyway.
"I wish I had not worked so hard."
What if this person went back in time and didn't work so hard? Are you suggesting they would, in their twilight years, express regret for not having worked harder? Perhaps regret they did not have the means to buy more stuff or travel?
Because nothing like that made the top 5 from the author's anecdotal evidence.
We have to assume either then that people rarely regret not working enough (or that the majority of us work too much and so never have the opposite regret, ha ha).
Same with sport, I was pretty good at some point, preparing for a state competition in swimming, but fell in love and dropped out of trainings (and she dumped me some 6 months later). If I worked harder back then perhaps I'd now have a medal on my wall to boost my ego with. There're literally millions of such events in everyones' lives, some small, some big, some more important and some less, and it's just a question if you'll go back to them one day or leave them be...
I had a bit of a "what am I doing with my life" crisis a few years back when I felt addicted to working, and I made the changes to live a calmer, more enjoyable life at the expense of some income. Will I now regret not leaving more money for my daughter/wife when I go?
We're all stumbling through life to the same conclusion. No one gets to do everything they wanted to.
Deleted Comment
What's interesting is that I already share most of these regrets, and I am not dying, at least in the traditional sense since we are all dying. I think for the most part, all one can do in life is to just do. Be yourself but stop worrying about what yourself is. Treat any done project, not matter how small, as a good project. Look for little successes like that. And the older I get, the more I realize that relationships matter.
If you cannot find a meaning in one lifetime, adding a finite number of (other people’s) lifetimes will still be meaningless. (It can make the ending of your own less relevant but I’d say that’s a different issue.)
This may be true for ants. But I've never seen how this can be an absolute truth for humans for two reasons:
1. If one life is truly meaningless (0), how does multiplying it produce meaning (0 * 8 billion = 0)?
2. If you found yourself to be the last person on the planet, would you A) realize you have no meaning and die, B) create art and put a little more beauty into the universe? Given those choices, does option A or B have more inherent "meaning"?
I see this as a call to mindfulness. A lot of adult life is spent sacrificing the current self for the benefit of the future self. For a lot of everyday activities like brushing teeth or walking to work we never really think about it, we just use it to think about what's going to happen later on.
Sorry for being wishy-washy, but we have to confront that we are living right now, and we ought to enjoy what we are doing right now! Not in the sense that we should live like there's no tomorrow -- but that we should enjoy the today we are getting.
insert spongebob meme where he points out all the hidden diapers have you watched the news lately?
The idea is that even if terrible things are happening, and you are anxious for what's next, you have to look in front of you, and see what you can do different right now. To a large extent this conflict is outside our hands, and we should prepare accordingly.
My plea to you is to please donate to the red cross in Ukraine :)
If that was sarcastic... you got me.
Life is not an optimization problem, where we maximize happiness. I prefer to just let life flow in its natural waves, sometimes correcting course to achieve my goals.
Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too many to mention…..
I think ones goal should be to live an optimal life, integrating good over time.
Reviewing the wisdom of those who have done more than us (lived long and are facing death) seems smart.
While I don't want to live my life in fear of regret, I often use a mental model for decisions - "if this is wrong how much would I regret it," to weigh the choices.
I personally don't want to be on my deathbed and say I wish after 35 I had spent more time with my loved ones - I want to be able to say that I spent a good amount of time with my loved ones and enjoyed it.
> Ms. Ware said regrets are expressed “when questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently”; my wife isn’t thrilled about this as a care technique.
Or:
> Deathbed folks are usually far from their analytical peak – they are often in great pain, and rather muddle-headed. So why would we think their comments especially insightful?
It also gets comically reductionistic:
> Added 9a: Stephen Smith suggests these regrets are the predictable result of opiate pain medication.
But I think it's more about the author trying to force his opinion, when it's not really needed, insightful, or that useful.