Your real biological clock is you’re going to die (2018)

I had first kids in my 20s. Now 59 and in another marriage and my younger kids are almost 6 and almost 2. I live them to bits and every day I look at what I do and think how will they remember me if I die tonight. Morbid maybe but helps with choices. More emails or cuddling the 2yo and reading a book. Learning something esoteric about operating systems or doing the day’s wordle with 6yo.<p>Momento Mori the Stoics way to remember we all die so make best use of time. The Hagakure tells us to always depart from others as we wish to be remembered.<p>FTR I run a lot now knowing that it improves quality of life and stats show time running is returned in more time alive. I value those extra hours with those whom I love.<p>I don’t care if I have to work until the day I die to support my kids but I do care that I have as many seconds with them that I can manage. And leave them knowing their dad ‘lived for them’.

I think we’re approaching a point in human evolution where we should all be obsessed with death. Like, spending R&amp;R time on biology.<p>100 years ago, it would be unhealthy - it was certainly an unavoidable outcome. I had this view going through high school and college - biology&#x2F;anatomy classes never interested me. They were fairly hocus pocus in my eyes - like we were scratching the surface of a world we barely understood and wouldn’t master for dozens of generations. As if a Neanderthal discovered a computer and attempted to understand how it worked - they’d get there, but the original Neanderthal would be long dead before any real answers surfaced.<p>This changed recently. The hockey stick of progress is clearly forming in biology. With technology like CRISPR, we are starting to get the tools to reverse engineer and bend life to our will. Death doesn’t seem inevitable for my children anymore; our generation might actually be able to partially solve it - at least enough to buy the next generation enough time to fully solve it.

I don’t really like this view of the world. I think they are correct about the lack of certainty and doing things while you can, but often big goals, like having a child, professional success, monetary success, etc. can cause us to miss life, too. Everything is a trade off. There’s always opportunity cost and you can always look back and see what you may have sacrificed to get where you are.<p>It’s needlessly depressing to wallow in this mindset. I personally value being a good person and my connections with people. Sure I could focus this energy on one human I bring into the world, but that’s not objectively better than anyone else I affect positively.<p>And I know having a child is a transformative experience. I’m lucky enough to have lots of little cousins and Have volunteered with programs for kids for years. Kids are amazing and bring magic to the world as you grow older. I just think that wrapping all of your identity and self worth up in a single goal is asking for disappointment. It’s not fair to you or the child.<p>Try to appreciate your real impact on the world. Did you improve someone’s day today? Did you restore someone’s faith in humanity? Is someone comforted right now by their trust in you? That’s the good stuff. Make that happen any way you can.<p>If you do want a child, go for it. Time IS ticking, but if you can’t or didn’t or are considering bring one into a bad situation or relationship to quell an existential fear, don’t worry. It’s fine. You can still find meaning and have an impact through your connections with others.

This is a topic that completely changed how I think about my life. Many people think it&#x27;s morbid, but I&#x27;ve found that contemplating my death frequently allows me to make much better decisions about how I&#x27;m spending my finite time.<p>This inspired me to make an android wallpaper that displays the percentage of my life that&#x27;s already elapsed, so every time I look at my phone I&#x27;m reminded to think &quot;is this really what I want to be doing right now?&quot;.<p>App: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.machinerychorus.lifeprogresswallpaper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.machineryc...</a><p>Source code: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ethanmdavidson&#x2F;DeathProgress" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ethanmdavidson&#x2F;DeathProgress</a>

Child arrived just the other day<p>Came into the world in the usual way<p>But there were planes to catch and bills to pay...

I have to say I like this somewhat poetic way of writing, especially the sentences with which the author ends paragraphs. Very rich.<p>On a different note, no. Let&#x27;s fight death. Fuck aging. We can fight it. We don&#x27;t have to suffer like cattle under it. We can beat it.<p>There are plenty of longevity focused startups and academic research groups, and yet we&#x27;re not spending nearly enough effort and money on this problem. It affects every human on earth, and the immense benefits of adding even one year of healthy lifespan to 7 billion people make it a moral imperative to act upon.<p>Fighting death should be a multi-national effort that we focus on with all our might, _right now_. You shouldn&#x27;t have to die.<p>Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=cZYNADOHhVY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=cZYNADOHhVY</a>

I had my kids young. I’m an empty nester at 45, and I happen to be dipping my toe into the dating pool for the first time in a very long time. Looking through online dating profiles, I’m genuinely surprised how many folks want to have children into their late 40s.<p>Ignoring the medical risks, this throws the timing of everything off. A former coworker is paying off his kids’ student loans in retirement.<p>My grandmother was 47 when she had my mother. I saw my mother struggle to care for her aging mother while at the same time raising children.

This is a beautiful article, but I feel that it should be read as a chronicle of the author&#x27;s life experience rather than an analysis on when to have your children. The age at which couples are having their children is Indeed increasing; this isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing. As the author pointed out, parents are more likely to have time to spend with their children if they&#x27;ve already established a career&#x2F;source of income. They&#x27;ll automatically also have better resources to care for them (babysitter&#x2F;schooling&#x2F;literally everything else). On top of all that, they&#x27;ll have more life experience, which should help in the education of their offspring. Besides, what are the alternatives ? Having your children at a young age has the only major benefit of being young. And if your remain healthy throughout your life, I believe the benefit of being young remains irrelevant.

Well... there goes my Friday.<p>Well-written article but extremely heavy on the existential dread and questioning whether I am spending my time wisely.

There&#x27;s a reason why the classic &quot;midlife crisis&quot; comes between 40-50. A lot of people reach this point halfway through their lives, often at the peak of their careers, and think &quot;my time is limited… is this all there is?&quot;<p>As someone in this age range, I don&#x27;t find it depressing, I find it clarifying. There are so many things I could say &quot;yes&quot; to, so many branches in my career I could chase. Reminding myself that my time is limited helps me to say &quot;no&quot; and maintain focus on the things that truly matter.

Apologies for veering slightly off-topic here, but if we&#x27;re talking about living well, this feels semi-relevant. My continual struggle is trying to find a balance between:<p>* ensuring my kid knows he is loved by his parents<p>* doing interesting work as a software dev, with some career progression<p>* taking care of myself adequately<p>The current setup feels extremely tight from a time perspective, causing the latter point to get cut consistently. This ends up wearing me out over time, making me worse at all the above slowly. So I feel the strain of time already.<p>Fellow parents on HN, how do you make all of this happen?

I am a tremendous Beatles fan and I often depress myself by looking back at their 1960’s Beatlemania concerts and think that most of those screaming teenagers are probably dead by now. Happy Friday.

Former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone had a child (his first son) at 90.<p>As a guy I am not that interested in having babies, we have reached a point where we are not facing underpopulation anymore and will not face it any time soon.<p>But for Ecclestone having a baby at 90...that&#x27;s his POE (Proof of Erection), I tip my hat to that.

This is exactly what I needed to read after a ridiculous job interview! Faith in humanity restored

Yes, you have finite time and it&#x27;s just simply so easy to squander them, playing games, social media, clicking around on youtube, etc. I&#x27;m sure many of us do it more than we would like and taking back that control is hard because &quot;wasting&quot; time is just so easy.<p>For me, visualising this has helped me put things in context and made me make better decisions but that&#x27;s not to say I don&#x27;t fall down the whole now and again. I wrote <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thismuchlonger.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thismuchlonger.com&#x2F;</a> many years ago and have it as a pinned tab in my browser.

This is a good point to reflect on the value of life. Not just human, either. The world definitely abounds in examples of life not being respected or valued. Just this morning we’re seeing satellite photos of mass graves outside Mariupol, Ukraine, for instance. Todays also earth day.<p>So yes, life’s end aka death is certain. I think that’s reason enough for life to be valued, cherished, and protected more than it is. And all those things which deteriorate life’s habitat should be mitigated and sought to be reversed. The cold unfeeling universe doesn’t have to win sooner than later.

&gt; If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.<p>Well it&#x27;s both really. &quot;Too young&quot; varies from person to person, though. I know some people that really had their lives together in their 20s, and I know people in their 40s that are still too young to have kids.<p>We talk about age because it&#x27;s easily measured, but we should also care about maturity.

One of my favourite quotes (no idea who made it) is that in all of human history, the death rate is exactly 100%. Outside of people&#x27;s religious beliefs (Jesus, Lazarus, etc) and fiction (vampires, sci-fi, etc), we&#x27;d all agree that no-one has escaped death.<p>The death rate is 100%, no-one gets out alive. So we should get as much out of this life as we can. What that means for you can differ from others, but to me that&#x27;s a central question as we enter middle-age.

We had our first and only at 40. (My wife is two days younger than me.) I retired a year ago, and our daughter is approaching a quarter of a century old. That was a miracle in itself as she almost didn&#x27;t make it past hour one.<p>I loved this essay, saved it even. It&#x27;s how I&#x27;ve lived my life for all of the days since our daughter&#x27;s birth. I&#x27;m reluctant to say it&#x27;s how I lived all of the years before that, as I wasn&#x27;t as aware of time and of my mortality. That said, I had a sense my average life would be 75 years, and privately celebrated my 37.5 year birthday.<p>Paul Graham has at least two essays related to this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;vb.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;vb.html</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;kids.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;kids.html</a><p>For me, I consider my life as a book. There&#x27;s a chapter where I would read the Wizard of Oz books to our daughter most nights. We went through the set of 15 books three times, and then it stopped. There&#x27;s a chapter where I was doing fashion photography as a hobby for eight years. Me?! Yes! I even had two fashion shoots in Manhattan. There are many chapters of me working as a mathemagician, working on air traffic control R&amp;D projects, one where I had to simulate stratospheric balloon trajectories and balloon control and navigation logic. I also had to learn a lot about stratospheric weather, which our in-house meteorologists had almost no experience.<p>I take essays like this and the two PG essays, and realize I have the chance to live a little more. This afternoon I&#x27;ll be at the library while our daughter is working from home. I&#x27;ll be continuing the writing of a story, may work on the migration from Freemind to Freeplane so that I can return to my personal work on the Traveling Salesman Problem. I&#x27;ll grill dinner tonight for the family, will attend an in-person luncheon on Saturday, have an on-line chat with some folks in Berkeley Sunday night (I&#x27;m outside DC.)<p>The clock is ticking, the sand is flowing through the sandglass (I love that from Tom Scocca&#x27;s essay!). The meaning of life is what we produce and what we create in the limited time we have. It&#x27;s our mortality that establishes the context for meaning; it&#x27;s what we do that is the actual meaning.

I’ve done this math many times.<p>My grandfather on my father’s side was born in 1906. He was 35 when my father was born in 1941.<p>My father was 38 when I entered this world in 1979.<p>I was 41 in 2020 when my son was born. Fortunately we were able to have some semblance of an 80th birthday for his grandfather last year in the midst of this pandemic.<p>If my son has a child as late in life as I have, there’s no telling if I’ll get to meet them, simply because of life expectancy.

My youngest daughter learned to ride a bike recently. It&#x27;s another peak experience moment for me! The glint of pride and accomplishment in her eyes. The wide grin on her face. The joy in my heart. And... the sadness that this is the last time I will ever experience this feeling in my life, because she is my youngest, and I don&#x27;t plan on having more kids.

A Fun Perspective:<p>The Queen turned 96. This may very well be her last year. Her life was and still is full of royalty. Her legacy will be a permanent part of history.<p>Ozzy is 20 years younger, and has a lifetime of drugs, alcohol, recovery, and is still kicking hard enough to make music.<p>If they both died today, which life do you think was a richer experience? Who will be remembered longer? Are you sure?

I hate articles like these. We all know we&#x27;re going to die and that life moves too fast. In a practical sense it adds absolutely nothing of any positive value to remind people of this fact. Nobody is going to change the way they live their lives because of an article like this, all it does is make the reader&#x27;s day a little more depressing.

For me at least, articles like this make it much easier to have that flash of sonder when thinking about the millions of people moving in and out of life as you move your frame of reference around in time. It can be truly disorienting.

Ah yes, life advice and perspective form an overly priveleged nobody. It is easy to do these kind of lazy life pholosophy takes when you have your life sorted. Unfortunately, for the most of &quot;this&quot; generation, this life was screwed by your fathers generation beyond measure. Out of control global warming, house prices that require life long mortgage that you cannot even commit to because of student loans. Consider yourself lucky if you are perfectly healthy (for now). So yeah, shut up about living &quot;now&quot;.

Oof, that gave me instant depression.

oooof, thanks :(

I should quit my job and go all in on gambling with digital assets.