Yes, my state now is not a representative state of the one I was in a year ago before my health started failing. But I'm still the same person. I forgot that briefly after my terminal diagnosis, and starting doing things I thought were the right things (making sure things would be OK for my wife, tidying up a litany of messes that would be hard for her to deal with without just giving up and selling things for pennies or giving them away), but after a few weeks and speaking to the right people, I started living more normally again.

Yes, my priorities have changed massively - things that I thought were important 4 months ago are truly meaningless to me now - but many things that are important to me now were so before. And they will be until I cease to exist. I'm making the most of the time I have left because it's important that my experience at this point is as good as it can be, and because I want my wife to have good memories of our last months together.

I've never suffered from 'reason 2'. I've always felt I made the right decision at the time with the information I had and the person that I was at the time. So I don't have many regrets - none of significance to speak of, certainly. I know I am lucky in this respect.

Reason 3 is meaningless, IMO - both generally and certainly to me. I'm 53.

And I don't think many people really do think about this seriously until it's actually on the table for them. I certiainly know I didn't - even last year when I had an operation which hopefully would have removed the cancer and given me years of life, I hadn't really thought about the finality of death and what it means (or doesn't) to me. FTR I'm an Atheist, and I think that 2026 will have as much meaning/experience for me as 1969 (i.e. before I was born).

Marcus Aurelius wrote: You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. [1]

And the Tao Te Ching: The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. [2]

A relevant Buddhist concept is called Maranasati [3].

And in the Quran: And donate from what We have provided for you before death comes to one of you, and you cry, “My Lord! If only You delayed me for a short while, I would give in charity and be one of the righteous.” But Allah never delays a soul when its appointed time comes. [4]

And the Bible: The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘... I will store my surplus grain. ... “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ [5]

There's something fundamentally human about contemplating one's own impending death and making changes to one's life accordingly, and nitpicking the exact wording of a single manifestation of that human impulse misses the forest for the trees.

[1] Meditations 2.11 https://vreeman.com/meditations/#book2

[2] 50 https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati

[4] https://quran.com/en/al-munafiqun/10-11

[5] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A16-21...

First, people often prioritize what’s immediate over what’s truly important. But people who are near death don’t have the excuse of postponing what matters, because for them, the important has also become immediate. That’s why I listen to their words, which tend to be consistent across cultures and surveys.

Second, the idea that someone must be high on Maslow’s hierarchy to reflect deeply or be truly happy goes against my experience. In remote villages where people weren’t stripped of their resources or caught up in consumerism, I met individuals who lived with very basic safety yet were happier by Aristotelian standards. Many successful businesspeople and political leaders I’ve met didn’t have a consistent sense of happiness. Often relying on medication, especially when their goals of artificial happiness like amusement or luxury stopped producing dopamine. When that stopped working, they tried to escalate, but eventually that too became unsustainable.

The people to learn from are the ones who, on their deathbed, say "that life went really well, I did X, Y and Z and it was very rewarding". Which is basically where the article was heading, although going straight to happiness research is probably better again.

That's why you didn't walk up and talk to her. That's why you didn't strike up more conversations. That's why you didn't buy the one-way plane ticket. That's why you didn't launch the idea. That's why you took the easy and safe and less fulfilling path. ...Or you just wandered down it in a zombie like haze.

It's trivial to see through this with hindsight, hence the deathbed meme. Hopefully you don't wait until your deathbed to figure it out, though.

The list is cherry picked, unless they have cameras and record everything people say close to death and then they make an statistics. So someone collected a list of items that considered interesting, but memory is flimsy so people most of the time don't have an accurate memory of the frequency of the items in the lists and the items not in the list.

Right, don't make the mistake of overindexing on what people say as they're dying, instead base your life on something accurate, reliable, and unchanging, like happiness research.

The Deathbed Fallacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112241 - May 2018 (3 comments)

The background to this has been discussed here over the years:

Regrets of the Dying (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593302 - March 2022 (142 comments)

The Top of My Todo List (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 - Aug 2021 (18 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=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)

If anyone finds links to other related discussions, please let me know and I'll add them!

This happened just a couple of hours before she passed. Before then, everyone present did their best to comfort her with kindness and family stories. At no time did she have any timely advice, including don't smoke. I will say though, she was using the morphine candy on a stick provided by the hospice nurse.

Death is just an insignificant transition between existence and non-existence, and what happens after you cease to exist is irrelevant to you because, well, there is no "you" there. The deathbed at least represents some period of time, but do you really want to live your life for a short moment you won't remember?

It doesn't mean you shouldn't think about future generations, and be a good person in general. Just don't do it for the deathbed, do it for the present, doing good feels good.

The problem, of course, is that the feeling of regret considers what may have been gained without reflecting on what would have been lost.

Now the right way to deal with this is some sort of self-consistent closure, where present you and past you with the same values and access to the same information (which could be anything from zero to complete knowledge of then-future outcomes and downstream effects) would make the same choices including both upside and downside. But that would be too complex for motivational advice, which is primarily about creating an inspirational mood, somewhat about positive first-order consequences, and not even a little bit about recursive self-consistency.

Per the article suggestion, follow the happiness reasearch.

The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia. “If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.

Goes like this:

My father, like me, was an economist. He was not a star, but if you work in asset pricing you probably know of his work. This past weekend, he passed away.

As the end approached, he became very philosophical. At one point, I asked him if he had any regrets. He replied:

"Do you remember that summer when we rented a cottage in Maine?"

He was talking about a memorable family vacation. One where we spent three carefree weeks together on a lake. My kid sister took her first steps there and I learned to swim there.

I told him that I did. Then, he said the following:

"That summer, I had an idea for an extension of the CAPM model. But being on vacation, someone beat me to it. I regret ever taking that trip. If we stayed home, it could have been me publishing in Economica."

A few hours later, he died.

I am not so interested in the short life. I am happy today so don’t know how else to prepare for that. I keep worrying about living to a 100. Not very likely, but likely enough to be a risk worth consodering. If I am still to live for 50+ years I can’t start hating everything new that is happening. I probably need to do more learning. Need new friends and cant’t solely live the family life. More sports and active life than before. Retirement is not even on the horizon in this scenario.

For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn't make much sense at my age, because there's not much time left for the payoff.

Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either.

When you're a kid, the returns on investing and education have much bigger payoffs over the many more decades to make use of them.

But the argument should rather be, that you should look ahead of your life right now and consider whether what you will be doing will be something you regret in the future. It is not a fallacy at all, it is introspection about your future. That you might change your views later is essentially irrelevant to the point. The point is to take a completely different perspective on your life, one where your life is behind you.

Seriously why is lesswrong dogshit so popular here? Are they all they sons of VC investors or do they just all have Theil as a surrogate father? Total crap.

I'm not on my deathbed, but I also say all those things to myself "I should keep in touch with friends". But don't, even though I'm not dying, and tell myself too. Maybe I'm an ass? Everything takes time and energy.

My understanding is that the ruling class would often remain unbaptized throughout their rule so they could do the things such people tend to do, and then partake of a deathbed baptism so they could still meet the requirements for going to heaven...

...power is having your cake and eating it too.

As usual, people who haven't yet reached the situation of others, fail to learn from those ahead of them...

What is a representative state, exactly, and why should that be treated as categorically normative? My consciousness has changed over time as I've matured. I would never wish to regress to the ignorance and stupidity of youth. I see the world differently and more accurately than I did before, and I am more rational and measured. The illusions that youth so easily absorbs lay less of a claim on me (some people persist in this juvenile state for life, it seems).

I understand the concern that in a state of distress, people can make decisions that aren't rational, but people also make irrational decisions when not in distress. Comfortable people are often attached to comfort, preventing them from pursuing what is good until some proportionate threat or discomfort dislodged them from that state. Procrastination is a way of avoiding distress or discomfort, but deadlines can work marvelously to focus an undisciplined person that would otherwise drift and dawdle. Most of us have experienced this effect.

In similar fashion, the awareness of imminent death can focus the mind. Those on death row, perhaps knowing more or less the day of their deaths, are put in a position that make wishful thinking, distraction, and postponement less easy. This is why it is said that if the death penalty doesn't move someone toward remorse, then it is unlikely anything will. These are either the mentally ill or people hardened in their evil.

So I would say: you cannot speak absolutely about the death bed. People enter death in different states of mind, different states of knowledge, that can vary their responses to death. It cannot categorically be said that what is said on one's death bed is true or untrue, or sound or unsound. It depends. But it is also true that death is the ultimate threat, and that remembering that it can strike at any time and without warning can remind us of the preciousness of the little time we have in this life, and in doing so keep us from dissolving into myriad aimless and senseless distractions and diversions that so tragically squander this unrecoverable, perishable privilege.

Since I don't believe there is anything after death, this makes thinking about the life I lived useless, because in a short time, I will be dead. There's is no actions I can do anymore, so there's no point in trying learning from the past at that point. Perhaps thinking about the good things I have done will be worthwhile and ease my death. But I see no point in seeking regrets.

Of course I could also give advice to others on my deathbed. But it's something I try to avoid doing. On one hand, because I mostly reject the advice others give me, and thus I expect others to do the same, so I won't waste my time trying to give them advice. On the other hand, I generally find this advice either doesn't match my experience and world view, or it tends to be absolutist about the "one good way of living life", which I don't believe in. People all have different aims in life, and who I am to say which one is correct. Live your life as you see fit, I'm not advising you about what to do and what not to do, because I don't know you better than you do.

Something that annoys me a lot is when people say things like "do it now, or you'll regret it later". Even worse: "do it now, anything could happen in the future, you could get sick or even die". So what if that happens? If I die, there's absolutely no judgement I will be able to make of it, since I will be dead. If I get sick and become unable to do it... so what? I will be unable to do it, but since the past has no value to me, it doesn't make it different from anything else I was already unable to do.

There isn’t even a real fallacy to begin with.