Life Has Several Exits

I see it in another way, a bit nihilistic though. Sure, there are plenty of exits. But we will all have to make the final exit at some point. Either now or 10 years or 50 years. We will all have to go. And statistically, the chance that you would be someone who is remembered 100 years from now is kind of slim. And 100 years is, in the grand scheme of things, a blink of an eye.<p>Even 1000 years would be inconsequential. So why fret about it? Life is yours. It is the only thing that is truly yours. Deal with it as you see fit. Including not wanting to deal with it anymore. It is all your choice and, in the end, we are all the same.

The typo in &quot;your name will be engraved into the anals of history&quot; really distracted me from the gravitas of the article.

I tend to read obituaries of everyday people (as opposed to the long form for famous people) when I see them. They are almost always a cruel distillation of what was certainly a far more complicated life. I think the tradition has evolved so they are written so that the people who knew them best can fill in their own memories. Especially when I don’t know the person they feel callous and lacking.

A good thing to know is there are exits from bad things too. Exit from a vicious cycle, exit from a mental rut etc. While it&#x27;s best not enter, almost everyone ends up in bad places somewhere along the road.

I want to take the granularity down a notch.<p>For everything you do, there is a last time you do it:<p>ride a bike, make a new friend, visit Italy, hike a mountain, write code, see the sea, watch Shakespeare, see your mother, post to HN, play tennis, hug your grandchild, eat tiramisu, listen to Miles, have sex, walk without pain, remember your first love, drink a beer, take a breath.<p>Some are already in your past, you may not know which ones.<p>The rest are in your future of unknown duration.<p>They will each pass without fanfare, mostly without you noticing. Like crossing the event horizon of a large black hole: there is no going back, but you may not know it at the time.<p>I suspect, for me, the last two on my list will be quite close together.

&gt; <i>Upon your exit, your contributions, actions, decisions, opinions and presence most likely will have affected the trajectories of the people and the world around you, in obvious and less obvious ways.</i><p>Oh I wouldn&#x27;t be too sure. The company that had acquired us some years earlier for millions of dollars then proceeded to can our entire division, sunset our product, and laid, more or less, everyone involved off. I cannot fathom what the point of the acquisition was: our wings were clipped before we even had a chance to fail; to date our acquisition is the largest unforced financial error I have seen made in my career, and it will be quite hard to top. We left no mark on the industry, the IP, if it still exists, will collect dust for all eternity. The company is no longer in the market, and I doubt ever will be again.<p>I was fond of the product, and while the tech had the inevitable layers of PM-driven tech debt layered upon it, it wasn&#x27;t the worst? The only lesson I can learn there is that caring will bring nothing but disappointment, and that&#x27;s continued to be driven in by subsequent employers. Today&#x27;s corporate zeitgeist does not want nor produce, IMO, history-changing labor². (I think the ones listed are products of earlier zeitgeists that <i>could</i> produce such.) Employers do not value retention, so experience is not built within the company. The PMs driven desperate desire to push new features out and bugfix never do not make good products. The inability of today&#x27;s &quot;agile&quot; to handle uncertainty¹ and dependencies means little to no planning is done (and bad tools like JIRA do not help here).<p>As for getting my name carved into the annals of history … screw that? Unless that&#x27;s life&#x27;s secret to joy and happiness (and I rather doubt it), I think the advice I was once given is sound here: walk around a graveyard and note what is written upon the stones: &quot;loving mother&quot; &quot;caring father&quot; — what you don&#x27;t see is &quot;excellent &lt;occupation&gt;&quot;.<p>I have a nephew, and I&#x27;ve probably left a larger mark on him and his life (I hope for the better) than anything I&#x27;ve done in my career, despite my career being longer than his life.<p>¹Yes, I&#x27;ve read the manifesto, yes, I feel the irony in this statement.<p>²To some extent, at least two companies in FAANG I know do things that <i>do</i> make for a good atmosphere … I partly think this is <i>why</i> they became part of &quot;FAANG&quot;. I wish we could emulate some of their less boneheaded decisions (and ignore the boneheaded ones). Perhaps that would someday snowball into another letter in that acronym.

“ you should be grateful if your loved ones keep you in their thoughts for those ensuing decades.” I wonder how exactly anyone can be grateful after their exit from life, far as we know that don’t matter after to that person

FYI: (Based on the title) I thought this was an article about how people die, not about prosaic endings like graduating high school and retiring from your job.

A big one for me is exiting one city and entering another (i.e. moving) especially when the new city is in another state. I&#x27;ve switched cities 7 times in the last 9 years and 6 states.

It&#x27;s all about to whom you choose to live with, to work with, to play with.

So, 1,000 years from now, who will still be a household name from our era?

memento mori -- remember the death.<p>life only has one true exit.

Some of these exits are not like the others.

I am thirteen and this is deep