Something society always neglects is that everyone goes through the same thoughts time and time again. We all make mistakes and we learn our own way, but when someone's 90, they really have done a lot of it all before. Even if we think everything is different, human's really are very similar. We all have emotions, we all have desires and we are all deep down social creatures. So I would only encourage more people to step out and try to make an honest, deep, friendship with someone a lot older than you. It can really help give you guidance and perspective.
Not even just done it before, but done it multiple times. This is where experience is forged into wisdom.
That is not guaranteed, though. There are many experienced yet unwise people, and sometimes viceversa.
I agree with the sentiment of listening to older people, but age alone is not a good criteria to determine whether they're worth paying attention to. Old people can be as ignorant and unwise as young people, sometimes even more so.
While it can be very tempting to say 'we tried that before and it didn't work' - the key is people who can understand why it didn't work, or who can encourage you to make your own mistakes and be there to guide you back when needed.
Younger generations live emotionally richer lives. Or maybe thats not the best description, but something along that. I can't talk about deeper emotions even with my parents, the generational gap is absolutely huge. They never talk about theirs, and trying to start the talk ends the talk, they simply are not wired for such introspection. Both proper university educated which is a small miracle given how they and their parents were viewed as potential enemies of communist state.
They lived their whole lives under soviet oppression, never left Europe, don't understand modern world and technologies, they lived their whole lives in single monolithic culture. Critical thinking outward and especially inward is not in their runbook. I live past 20 years away from my home country, travelled the world that changed me (for the better) permanently. i tried psychedelic drugs a bit in the past, also a profound and probably permanent change they never had a chance to go through. I was/still am doing a number of potentially dangerous mountain sports that expose you to fear of death regularly, and one has to overcome that fear and move on, over and over - definitely a personality-changing experience. And so on.
Its hard to find people to talk about ie backpacking travelling to exotic undeveloped remote places even within my peers, who did that. I gathered more life experience living in 3 countries, dating ladies from various cultures, raising my kids in a foreign culture than they ever could. I understand psychology and people way better than them.
The roles reversed some time ago - I am helping them, however I can. As long as they are actually willing to listen, not every topic is like that. I can't talk politics to them, russians did a very good job in subverting public opinions of large portions of population into absolutely illogical self-harming position, and just stating truth leads nowhere.
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
One can paraphrase the Summary of the Law (Luke 10:25-37) as, Seek the truth; face the facts; seek the best for others as for your self.
I personally would prefer other formulations, because while I agree with the core, I think this idea should just reduce frustration if you don't succeed, while I am afraid it can be used as an excuse for not trying.
Yes, you need luck, but if you never get out of your room/street/neighborhood/city/country, you might have less opportunities for luck than otherwise.
In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected over a large enough sample (that's why they say you can't prove something is due to skill over chance until you've collected a sample of 10,000 - 100,000 played hands of poker - at least if you're playing online).
You could also be a very good poker player and have bad luck on one important occasion (say in the finals of the WSOP), where the outcome hinges purely on luck. Similarly, you could be a subpar player and "luck out" and strike it big purely because of the right sequence of cards at a big event. But generally, most people who succeed at Poker are not there purely based on luck; you can be lucky once or twice, but you're unlikely to make it through a whole Poker career just by being lucky.
I think similarly in life - you have a certain hand you're dealt, and if you play it to the best of your ability (and make opportunities for yourself), you increase your odds of winning the hand / the tournament / life; but ultimately even with your best efforts the outcome could still be decided by luck.
There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
It’s the narrative of least resistance.
That seems overly dismissive of the contribution of our ancestors, fighting against entropy, who paid it forward to their offspring, creating the civilization we now inherit.
It's just that silly ideas get to live around for a long time, and simply proving them false has little to no effect.
Philosopher John Rawls made this a key point for this thinking:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_egalitarianism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls#A_Theory_of_Justice
When I see this line of reasoning, it leads me down the road of determinism instead. Who is to say what determines the quality of choices people make? Does one's upbringing, circumstance, and genetics not determine the quality of one's mind and therefore whether or not they will make good choices in life? I don't understand how we can meaningfully distinguish between "things that happen to you" and "things you do" if the set of "things that happen to you" includes things like being born to specific people in a specific time and place. Surely every decision you make happens in your brain and your brain is shaped by things beyond your control.
Maybe this is an unprovable position, but it does lead me to think that for any individual, making a poor choice isn't really "their" fault in any strong sense.
You get to take swings every day and luck plays a role there. So keep moving forwards, flipping the coin in life.
It's easy to assume it would be in our control, but if you're just tired all day every day because, say, your hormone balance is off and no one can tell you why, you might statistically accomplish less than others.
“Chance favors the prepared mind”
- Jean-Luc PicardI know that quote is reductive, but I do find it is relevant to my life and what I observe in others. The opportunity part is what we usually call luck. Preparation is another matter, though. Many people just aren't prepared to take advantage of situations which present to them.
Lots of people pass or aren't prepared to do what is neccessary when opportunity presents itself. The people who are, are called "lucky"
I was born from two parents that cared about me. Luck
In a country where most people have a decent shot at life. Luck
I'm lazy, but I was granted a body that never failed me, and was pushed by people around me to try stuff. Luck
I'm lazy, but my laziness is somehow useful in this computer driven world. Luck
All this luck compounds, and thanks to the activities I was pushed to do, the schools I was pushed to go to, I was lucky to meet great friends, an amazing girlfriend, and have a cushy job, a nice house in a beautiful place. Luck. Luck. Luck. Luck
I have no ambition, I was never prepared for anything, but all I've had was luck.
That's what you call luck, and a lot of people try to convince themselves everything good that happens to them is because they somehow deserve it. Because they were "ambitious" and "prepared", and an "opportunity" struck at the right time, and obviously they seized it, and everyone that didn't just didn't deserve it as much as them.
Obviously some people weren't as lucky as me, and actually had to work hard, and managed to seize an actual opportunity that wasn't gifted to them. But that's not all luck, only a little part is. And those people are quite rare.
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
It doesn't guarantee anything, you can still be smart and fucked. But you can _try_ to change things.
And how do you become that? Exactly, by being lucky.
But take, for example, smoking. You're flipping where the best outcome is zero, and the worst is cancer. Minimize the number of those flips.
We are doing a disservice to our fellow man by not telling them this truth.
I'm not denying our moral agency, but it is often constrained by environment. Some people are lucky enough that virtuous choices are easier for them.
Based on what, exactly? I think you have cause and effect inverted.
It's obviously always possible to make the best of bad circumstances (and make the worst of good circumstances!) but it's easier to "win" when you're dealt a good hand.
Jimmy Maher wrote about them recently https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/
"Today, it’s all too easy to see all of the limitations and infelicities of The Cave of Time and its successors: a book of 115 pages that had, as it proudly trumpeted on the cover, 40 possible endings meant that the sum total of any given adventure wasn’t likely to span more than about three choices if you were lucky. But to a lonely, hyper-imaginative eight-year-old, none of that mattered. I was well and truly smitten, not so much by what the book was as by what I wished it to be, by what I was able to turn it into in my mind by the sheer intensity of that wish."
The parallels with modern video games are obvious.
Choose Your Own Adventure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337450 - Sept 2025 (80 comments)
When I read something like this now, I ask if the person writing it lived that way most of their lives, or lived some other way and now are looking back wishing they had lived another (untested) way. I've heard too many old people tell me things like, "appreciate your family" when they were always gone working and built up an amazing life for their families. When my mother told it to me, I believed it because that's the way she lived.
Survivor bias, is what it comes down to. Beware successful people that tell you platitudes!
And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall.
Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed.
Ok, that’s a lot of "witty remark I could make regarding" the text (and avoid doing instead). So, let’s take a bit of these advices in practice. Thank you Edward Packard for sharing with us some final reflections on life after a long one, displaying humility while presenting a vibrantly human figure.
Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in the world
Better to be born a Human and live 100 years - it's the best chance at getting out of this trap. Being born a dirty would mean several hundred thousand millennia of divine life - thats going to manifest forgetting, by the end the next rebirth is almost always lower.
Animals have thousands of births per form.
Only a human can be born an ignorant savage animal person and in less than 100 years become a Buddha and transcend existence.
That's a lot of the fish analogies in early Christianity and earlier - we all get out, but it takes forever for some of us, God is always looking for the next one of us that's grown big enough to become "a big fish" - "chosen easily from all the rest"
> It follows, I think, that the luckier you’ve been, the more humility and generous spiritedness you need, and the unluckier you’ve been, the more compassion for yourself you need, and unfair as it may seem, the more you need irrepressible resolve.
I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.
Psychologists are what's the actual social construct myth of modern times.
>You cannot be happy all the time
That's not what "happiness as default state" implies though. It's about happiness being the disposition you opt for, as opposed to wallowing in misery and seeing fault in everything as your baseline.
"Default state" precisely conveys that it's not about "all the time". Just what you should strive to start from and return to.
We are splitting hairs here but since happiness is considered the ultimate goal and state (what's beyond that if its not the end?), I would say aim for being content with your life as a baseline, jump to an actual happiness when stars align and revert back.
Its cool enough place to be and definitely more maintainable long term, and as mentioned a seldom dip to misery is a very valuable correction and reminder to all how fleeting this all is.
While I find that joy is a fickle and fleeting thing, I feel that I am happy most of the time, satisfied that things are as they must be, or at least close enough that the state of affairs does not poorly reflect on my efforts.
Sadness or grief make their appearance, but need not make life a poverty of happiness.
I think probably many people think that happiness and joy are the same thing, thus robbing themselves of happiness in an eternal pursuit of joy. If joy were constant, it wouldn’t be the joyful treasure that it is.
Each time you go through a cycle of honest self-reflection, you grow emotionally stronger. When a similar situation arises again, it will not affect you as deeply as it did the first time. After enough cycles, you may reach a point where your default state remains largely unaffected by such events. This equanimity, that comes with a deep inner calm, allows a naturally happy default state to emerge.
In my experience, this is largely a force of habit -- I one day found my default reaction to almost any event was to chastise myself, for example. If you can break this habit and return to a more tranquil medium, I think that's as close to being "always happy" as it's possible to get.
But how we handle raw emotions, within interpretation processes, is what makes all the difference.
Actually, an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly conceivable.
I don't think it's that rare.
Fortunately, the opposite is also true.
That statement is someone's way to describe what they found out to be best for them. Not an axiom for everyone.
And default doesn't mean always, it means that one's general state is happiness. For me, for that statement to make sense, the word "happiness" would be replaced with something like "being glad" (gladness?), as I always feel glad of myself/my life but I see happiness as something more active, like being sad. While I see this gladness as a passive state. But again, that's my personal take.
So content is basically the baseline when no needs are impacting your state-of-mind, and happy would be the consequence of a positive event or result.
If others can not feel joy from that in person, you're doing it wrong.
Never forget what it feels like when fate smiles on you, even when it's almost never.
I think feeling happy is my default. I still get mad, hurt, sad, bored, etc. But when those feelings wear away, I return to a general state of happy contentment.
Being real is perhaps healthier and more honest than completely avoiding anything that isn't pure bliss or joy.
Sometimes I joke about the simple concept that we are all the descendants of a chain of ascendants that manage to successfully reproduce and have children without interruption, through all the evolutionary stages, from homo sapiens to hominids, monkeys, mammals until reaching the first life organisms. And I am not going to be the one stopping that long evolutionary chain ;)
I don't feel that's true? I am currently in a massive turmoil at work because my line-manager is breaking all ethics rules, with higher leadership caring little. Because I try to follow my values I've spoken up numerous times and all I got for that is a mountain of stress. Turns out I am not emotionally invulnerable.
Another way of interpreting what you've shared is that what you are stressed about is actually _not quite the value you think you have_, otherwise you would have walked away, self-assuredly, emotionally certain in the rightness of removing yourself. But you haven't. So it isn't a set value. Obviously another value like, "I have to eat" preempts this ethical value being broken at work. I'm not saying this is wrong or not, just trying to help you navigate your stressful environment.
Change jobs.
The first thought that popped into my head here was, "well I have no kids, so yeah if forced to choose between job and morality I'd just bounce and figure it out later". But if I DID have dependents it's harder.
I will say if the choice is between being imoral and _personally_ poor ... I'd like to think I'd rather just be poor.
edit. Then again this is also on us as people to anticipate and prepare for these dilemmas and not let ourselves be trapped in toxic situations. I suck at this and don't do any real forward planning like having a lot of savings or having a backup plan to getting out of a bad job. But that's on me.
Hope it works out alright for you!
I would like to offer a different perspective for you.
I’ve never been shouted at in my work life. And I also know a few people who complain about being shouted at, at all places of work they’ve had — and it’s difficult for me to empathize with them.
At some point I understood that I never allowed my coworkers or managers to shout at me, and in the rare occasions when their voice was raised, I had made myself very clear, and I quit on the spot had the situation ever happened again. As a result, I’ve always had very pleasant and respectful working conditions, with self-respecting people who I know will quit if abused, so I treat them with respect as well.
On the other hand, people who endure humiliation by imagining contrived moral dilemmas about why it’s good and right for them to continue suffering — suffer for decades wherever they are employed, as they seem to filter out and stick to workplaces where this is acceptable.
Are there really no jobs for your talent where you can be moral, or you’re prepared to endure immorality (and to be faithful employee to such businesses) until you’re old and frail?
Personally I find myself often considering how other people might feel too much and end up being a people pleaser, so I need to work on that aspect of my social skills
That sounds simple but the self-constitution part takes years of serious searching and work; some things (good therapists, good meditation teachers, good books, consistent practice, etc.) help the journey along, but there is no quick route.
Being focused on how people might think of you is shallow and tastes like narcissism. Even if in your own mind you are “thinking about others” too much you are really only thinking about yourself through their eyes.
Being present in the moment with someone and their feelings involves getting out of your own narrative.
But maybe im an asshole, I genuinely have no idea.
Reminds me of "Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations" from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", just with more quotations.
These are very difficult topics to properly talk about and correctly express all the nuance in the feeling that you try to convey, and many authors are quoted because they nailed a particular description, evocative of the feeling an author is trying to express and that he feels he can’t do a better job at explaining.
Similarly to how you can narrate a story through a sequence of pictures you can narrate an idea through a sequence of raw concepts, encapsulated in quotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
Meanwhile, I communicate exclusively in Star Trek references.
>>> That I’d survived thus far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit, determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck.
Would things have been different if he’d lived by his own advice earlier? Maybe. But it’s impossible to know. Pushing back a little: don't underestimate luck. It can be deeply unfair, and it can distort our sense of what is deserved or earned.
This is not to say that principles, effort, wisdom don't matter. But so does the randomness of where, when, and under what conditions we live and act.
Being self-reliant (being able to find happiness even when alone); being self-aware; being aware of others (including others' feelings, motives, perspectives); focusing on the journey; acknowledging that 'luck' has a non-negligible role in one's life; preparing our minds for inevitable death with calm acceptance; so many things the author's view resounded with in my opinion and experience.
I could put the nine bullets into 2 broad buckets.
1) and 6) pertain to being in the ego - but one that is principled, seeking clarity of cognition and be willing to correct self-deception. truth and intellect.
2), 3), 4), 5), 7), 8) and 9) pertain to awareness, being in the here and now, dissolving of the ego, universal consciousness, truth and happiness.
The first bucket posits an ego but one that is principled, and the second bucket seeks to dissolve the ego and attempt to tune into the cosmic energies. yin and yang.
I find it incredibly challenging to come to these ideas without having walked a path which consistently challenges someone who strives to succeed through challenge, without a mentor. Ofc this is just my opinion.
Being able to experience this through practicnng vipassana, after spending a long time being self-centered for a long time, I can speak to the fact that there are a few things to truly come to this level of metaphysical realization
1. A bit of Luck(in finding/stumbling upon these) and psychological safety to try something that can change your mind on abandoning the ego and embracing these values.
2. One cannot be convinced of abandoning the ego(I, me, mine, ours) by merely intellectual explanation of these things(Psychology and Neroscience have yet to be able to explain with evidence why even after experiencing profound things the ego centric view sticks on).
I feel everything follows the Midwit meme progression [1]: at first you use crude, obvious methods because you don’t know better. Later, complexity is alluring, you drown yourself in optimisations and finding the bestest tools and methods. In the end you come back to the same conclusion: simplicity was the most reliable tool the whole time.
[1]: https://medium.com/@obandoandrew8/bell-curve-meme-avoiding-t...
There's a lot of nihilism in the world, and this is the way beyond it, whatever flavour your salvation happens to come in.
That seems like a shallow interpretation. Rather, contemplating death ahead of the event refocuses you on your life at the present and hopefully causes you pause to consider if what you are doing right now is meaningful.
> “But no matter how hard we try to prevent bad things from happening to us, some will happen anyway. Seneca therefore points to a second reason for contemplating the bad things that can happen to us. If we think about these things, we will lessen their impact on us when, despite our efforts at prevention, they happen: “He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.” Misfortune weighs most heavily, he says, on those who “expect nothing but good fortune.” Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that “all things everywhere are perishable.” If we fail to recognize this and instead go around assuming that we will always be able to enjoy the things we value, we will likely find ourselves subject to considerable distress when the things we value are taken from us.”
A third argument put forward by the Stoics is that the use of negative visualizations makes you realize what is truly valuable to you and appreciate it:
> They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.
And a fourth argument is the one you highlight, that thinking about death makes us realize how precious life is:
> Why, then, do the Stoics want us to contemplate our own death? Because doing so can dramatically enhance our enjoyment of life.”
(All quotations are from the book “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – William B. Irvine”, which comes highly recommended.)
I think both ideas can be true at the same time.
The greatest gift my counselor taught me was helping me realize the extent to which I could bullshit myself. I'm not sure I'm necessarily much better at stopping it, but instead now realize that my urge to adapt to a situation can be maladaptive, and my brain will happily retcon a million reasons why it has to be that way rather than chance the ego dying in the face of something unknown.
As someone in their 30s with children, work and a generally busy life, I wonder if anyone can recommend some pieces with more direct application - that is, in this vein, but perhaps an operational / how-to guide. Sometimes, it's hard to translate principles to action.
As an aside, the Internet-driven grindset that everything, even a hobby, should have a point is one to resist with all your might. Think of the times you laughed loudest playing with your kids; I doubt you all were trying to achieve a goal beyond being together having fun.
He liked the Encyclopedia Brown books & Two Minute Mystery books I bought him so I thought he'd like the CYOA books as well since I cherished them as a kid but alas, he never got into them like I did.
I'm hoping he likes Infocom text adventures better when I introduce those to him later.
All in all, I find "advice" and "what I've learned" tomes by *older* people to be unhelpful. When someone has spent much other their life living contrary to the advice they are now dishing out, I question it. I prefer advice from someone currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now... not at the end when it doesn't matter.
He spent time to think about what he's learned and decided to put it in writing at 94 years old. He seems to still be avid reader at his age. He still thinks about ideas of living a fulfilling life. It seems to me he's still currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now. There may even be a lesson there to having a long life: It always matters. What do you consider the end?
i understand he has no obligation to give any good reason for his advice, he just felt like giving it, and that’s nice of him. i would just suggest younger people not to waste too much time listening to “successful people” (whatever that means) on advice because it’s usually not applicable anymore or at all and is just entertainment with no real value
These learnings are as helpful as life advice based on the positions of stars.
This is such an immensely important point. Seeing my current reality, bad and good, have been one of the most essential elements in taking the right decisions and steps.
The point is that if these lessons come off too "woo woo," spiritual, and rooted in philosophy to you, know that the science of the brain (and thus, the mind) supports all of these conclusions, as well. Specifically, the lessons laid out herein are requisite for long-term and sustaining contentment from a scientific perspective, as well.
I am working on software to deliver this knowledge to people along with tools to effectively implement habits that can help them live better (i.e., more content and purpose-driven) lives.
Lastly, if this read sparked something in your mind and you want to read more, I suggest reading "Something to do with Paying Attention" by David Foster Wallace. It's an incredible novella that, as the title may suggest, deals exclusively with Packard's notion "to keep aware and awake."
Nihilism is the devil and we must defeat him.
Anyone know what direction i should look at?
Wisdom is frustrating since to be able to fully absorb it you need to have lived experiences that cements it, it can't be generally taught.
Are there other similar things out there on the web? Anyone can share?
(Wish there are more posts like this on HN)
The easiest way to a happy life is to follow the motto "live and let live".
Live - your life to the fullest. Use your liberty to build your own life. Don't sleepwalk into anything.
Let live - don't hurt or interfere with other's liberties. How others live is none of your business.
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GV-yxI4sBS5gg4belO6hXuFvSFW...
:(
This made me smile:
> Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard
It sounds like a honorific title to outline that this person teaches at Harvard, but it's in fact the opposite. It needs to be said she's from Harvard because most people have never heard of her. "Königsberg teacher Immanuel Kant" would be funny.
He quotes Spinoza: "A man strong in character hates no one, is angry with no one... is indignant with no one, scorns no one..." What I'm reading is that Spinoza never met a Donald Trump, even though I know very well he encountered even worse in his life. I'd need to be not just a buddha, but the capital-B Buddha himself, to find relevance in this advice. If I somehow managed to do so, and if everyone else followed my enlightened example in a Kantian sense, things would really suck.
Sometimes we need to hate. Otherwise we wouldn't have the capacity.
Honesty begins with and includes being honest with yourself. There are a great many people who expend great cognitive dissonance mental gymnastics entrenching themselves into and lashing their identity to a particular group or side of an issue, e.g., climate change denial. The only people they are fooling are fools including themselves.
Thanks for sharing this <3
There is no luck; there is only free will interacting with destiny in some context.