When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?
Put another way, if you have an extra hour tomorrow with nothing planned, what could you do with yourself to later say: I’m glad I did that? What if you have an unplanned day? Or a week? Does how you use that time change? Would the choice of how to use that time be more or less deliberate, depending on how long you have? Does that choice define you as a person?
Stayed honest and followed my nose into whatever actually lit me up and really did things fully.
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I would consider my life “well-lived” if I die with no regrets.
I used to think that. Now I know that regrets are inevitable. And I think they make life interesting. I’d rather have regrets than boredom.
All of the things I’m going to do. I hope I have time to do them.
I hope you do, too.
Probably play the trumpet or play the bass guitar, I’m a giga musican nerd
Music makes life awesome.
Fuck yeah it does!
lasting contributions to open-source software
Definitely a worthwhile thing to do, but software is so ephemeral that it’s hard to say “lasting.” If I died tomorrow, all my projects would likely be irrelevant and forgotten within a few years. Though some projects have stronger lasting power than others. Now I’m curious what the oldest line of code in the FreeBSD kernel is.
Sorry, not trying to be negative on your accomplishments. Just been thinking about this lately.
How to make lasting contributions that will stand the test of time:
- Create a new project from scratch that would have wide-ranged-but-niche applications (i.e. some app, firmware, or library that fills an important-but-unrecognized niche)
- Design the code to be intuitive to you and you alone, prioritize functionality over readability, forgo documentation, and abstract as much as possible. You can be the only contributor during the developmental stage
- Go public and get as many people as possible to adopt your project
- Continue maintaining until you die
- Now companies and people that have unknowingly become heavily reliant on this are going to scramble to continue maintaining it, but will only be willing to create surface-level bandaid patches and will avoid making any more fundamental changes for fear of breaking literally everything everywhere because now the stakes are too high to take a fuck-it-we-ball approach. This is why it’s important to be niche: it reduces the chances of an actual tech wizard coming in and reverse-engineering the whole thing.
- Voila, your contributions shall remain for all time, like some sort of mystical wizard’s tome on whose magic the world continues to spin
Yeah I maintain a 30 year old legacy codebase how could you tell
Living a life well-lived vs feeling like you’ve lived a life well-lived are two different things. The first… be a good person, treat others and yourself with kindness, try to leave the world a little better than it would have been without you.
Feeling like you’ve lived a life well-lived though, that’s different for everyone. In the Sims games there are Lifetime Wishes. One wish to accomplish over that Sim’s entire life. I think real life is similar - everyone has a lifetime wish that once accomplished will fill a hole and help them be more at peace with dying. I got lucky, mine was easy. I wanted to help someone in a way that positively impacted the rest of their life. When I discovered that I had accidentally done that for a friend, the effect was amazing. I felt spiritually whole and like I was done doing what I was put on this earth for. I’m not religious, btw. I’m still living so I’m going to keep doing my best… but now I feel like my life has been well lived.
I don’t think the answer is so clear for everyone. My spouse doesn’t know their “lifetime wish”. Maybe it’ll be revealed with time or maybe they’ll never consciously know. I don’t think it’s something you get to choose, either. If you ask yourself what’s the one thing you absolutely need to do to be at peace before you die then you may figure it out eventually.
To crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women.
Ah, ambitions of conquest.
When I was 26, I looked at my career and realized I would wake up old one day having accomplished nothing – largely due to government spending cuts in my original area of expertise (biology / forestry). Oh well, no hard feelings. Governments need to do that sometimes.
So I quit, sold all my possessions, immigrated to Vietnam, and spent literally every dime to my name setting up a company (I had the equivalent of $0.025 left). Then I cram-studied software and electrical engineering every spare moment for 3 years (meanwhile I survived on low-value, high effort contracts that no one else wanted). I also met my wonderful wife at an engineering club while doing this.
Looking back, it was an unreasonable, absurd, dangerous journey. Maybe there is something about those qualities that define actions I value? I used to wonder if I was entirely sane at the time, until I had the chance to visit my home country recently. I saw the economy hadn’t changed, and I would still be in the same dead-end job at 40 if I was lucky. Is accepting drudgery really more sane than taking a risk?
Maybe there is no sanity, only the ways we are mad together, and the ways we are mad alone. I don’t know which is better.
When I have spare time, I create things. Music boxes of exotic wood, robots, particle detectors. Lamps that shine in colors that are hard to identify (via optical illusion). Artificial plants that quiver in anticipation of rain. Nightlights designed to last forty thousand nights. A Lemmy bot that does I-Ching divination with a hardware TRNG. Machines that try to detect if the Universe is a simulation. Those musical greeting cards that no one likes. Anything, so long as it is strange and new!
I never regret time spent this way, and all my days are unplanned at some fundamental level.
I hope that every word of this is true. I loved reading it.
Oddly enough!
If you want to read about stuff I work with, I post some of it to [email protected] from time to time.
Also you can use the I Ching implementation by sending your query to [email protected] (the bot will communicate with the machine on my desk using a little Lemmy-MQTT bridge I wrote). Internally, that machine uses an el-cheapo version of the simulated-universe-detector – using a circuit that is hard (but not provably impossible) to simulate that is based on diode breakdown in 2N3904 transistors.
I’ll connect up the fancier version eventually. I’ve built it before, but the original design used export-controlled parts and could be construed as nuclear technology (it’s a very sensitive particle detector), so I don’t really want to carry it across borders. I live in Vietnam, my luggage gets searched 100% of the time as-is, and someone at CERN published a neat design I can adapt that relies only on unregulated parts (https://github.com/ozel/DIY_particle_detector)! So I’ll get to that in a few months or whatever.
I could also use a Geiger tube but that feels sort of boring.
Please tell me you have a blog?
If you drop by my instance ([email protected]) I do some long form posts on some of the stuff I make, with photos. Lemmy is a weird thing to use as a blog, but I’m chronically short on time so whatever :D
…not everything is there though. I have this weird habit sometimes of publishing things under different names, then throwing away the accounts. Truth be told, even I’m not entirely sure what I’ve done over the years. Some ideas belong only to themselves, I guess.
Right now (professionally) I’m trying to pull together some kits for a STEM program – STEM programs are generally worthless marketing fluff here designed to help rich parents show off on Facebook while teaching kids exactly nothing. Also it’s like the cheapest kit from USA or China depending on the affluence of their target audience. A client mentioned that they want to set up a STEM school, so I’m going to pitch them a vertically integrated business so I can optimize for quality at all levels (kit engineering - curricula - marketing). It’s also way cheaper to manufacture good robots locally off my own IP than to buy them across the world :D
Besides that, I’m working on doing audio analysis on the Attiny10. It’s got 32 bytes of RAM, 1k words of program space, and 4 I/O. So that’s being challenging. The screen with graphics works right now, but I wrecked the last chip when I overclocked the ADC that does the audio sampling by too much. Luckily they are like 30 cents each. The final goal is being able to do beat detection so I can make little animated companions with face graphics that sing along with you e.g. at karaoke. I actually hate karaoke, but the idea demands to be born, so I have little choice in the matter. I can always choose not to sell it, I guess :P
Live
That hour would need to be filled with whatever my conscience dictated. And if I never had yours like that, my conscience would dictate that I rearrange things until it did.
I hope that at the end of my life I can look back and say that I followed my conscience.
What’s the point? In 100 years, everyone here now will be dead. Nothing we do really matters. Life is pointless.
The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life. Rabindranath Tagore
Do you think this makes any sense? If not, why not?
That is the point. Do whatever you want because no one’s gonna remember it anyway. Once I realised that, life because a bit more bearable.
Had the same realization here. But still, that was not enough to placate my feeling of the world being inadequate to my needs and desires. So I joined a progressive political party, partake in biweekly local party meetings, working groups and other odd gatherings. I also help with local projects like having cars banned from an inner city street for a day to repurpose the gained space into a children’s playground with outdoor toys and stuff.
In short: take your anger of the world’s senselessness and inadequacies and direct it into positive action. It really works (for me) to assuage the helplessness about my and humanity’s situation in general as I actually am making a difference in the world by coordinating with likeminded people. It really gives you a very palpable and natural feeling of one’s identity finally and actually making or having a some kind of “sense”. For me it really was an epiphany on the level of like “this feels an order of magnitude more natural than all of my previous life experiences in school, uni, or work life.” I feel like getting into local politics is more akin to discovering a whole new circle of friends who share the same goals as you, than it is just about making do with the work groups and desired outcomes you get assinged for in uni or at work.
What a great thing to do! I think it’s why a lot of people volunteer for causes and give their time and money to charity. Such a great way to directly see the positive impact you’re having on the world.
If I had an unexpected extra free hour tomorrow I’d continue painting the mini I’m currently working on. It’s hard to say how many regrets I’ll have in my old age but I like to take the time to do the things I enjoy.
I like making things. Painting makes me feel fulfilled because I always give it a fair shake, and there’s always effort put into it. Maybe some day someone else will enjoy the results, but for me, I enjoy the making process. If you’re curious, I’ve posted some here, should be able to see them on my profile.
Whoa, some amazing paint jobs! The detail is insane
Thank you!
I really like your answer.
Thank you
I would sit in a chair in my back yard, listen to the wind chimes and birds, and watch all of the wildlife just living their life. In essence, I’d spend the hour in mindfulness.
I love it.
I will think it was all worth it because I lived in each moment making it the best and not fretting about how I’ll look back on it when I’m about to die
