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Comment by moises_silva | Hacker News Reader

> Death comes for us all, sooner or later, one way or another. That's one of the few truisms in life.

I'm genuinely making an effort to understand how this is relevant to someone with a cancer diagnosis. Sure, dead comes sooner or later, and that's the whole point of why one would feel it sucks and that we're losing, because often cancer means for you, dead came way too early. I have not known anyone with cancer, but I can't help but feel somewhat related as I have a loved one with a mental condition. Although there are techniques such as 'radical acceptance', it's easier said than done, and when it comes from an external party advising you to accept it, it feels invalidating, because they don't know how it feels (even for others with cancer or mental conditions, each person experiences it differently).

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>I'm genuinely making an effort to understand how this is relevant to someone with a cancer diagnosis.

Not having faced such yet, I can't say for sure. But I've noticed among a few friends I've lost to illnesses that some felt 'singled out' while others didn't. Passing seemed generally harder on the former.

Perhaps the 'it's gonna happen to us all' perspective mitigates feelings of being unfairly 'chosen' to some degree.

Yes, something like that.

I spent a year at death's door. When I stopped hallucinating conversations with the grim reaper, I knew I would live.

I've made my peace with my mortality.

And that's a private matter and we all get there -- or not -- in our own way. But total strangers who haven't made their peace with this will have big feels about our mortality in ways that can be problematic for the person who has accepted their death (in the face of a terrible illness).

Death is the ultimate joke. We spend so much time worrying about it. Avoiding it. Writing poetry and books about it. Maybe, If your a Religious being, even shaping our entire life around it because of the “ultimate judgement” in the end.

Death is a construction to make sense of our physical reality.

What could you possibly mean by that last sentence?

I don't know what he or she meant, but I wrote a comment elsewhere on the thread about a Buddhist perspective that touches on this. Ctrl+f Buddhism.

The tldr is that all our experiences are constructions of our mind. It's our mind that assigns meaning to stuff. Being alive or dead isn't a pre-existing concept, it's something we constructed.

An exercise is to imagine some beings very different from ourselves looking at Earth and not recognizing life. Perhaps because they exist in a different timescale, or they structure data differently. They wouldn't be able to see we dying.

Another perspective is that we're like an ML model that takes tons of raw data and extract features from it, and infer stuff like "x is alive" and "y is dying". We insist that the features we extracted are the real thing, instead of a summarization that enables us to understand the world.

that the physical reality around you that you perceive through your mind might not be the end-all-be-all and death is just a small part of it all. I don’t know. You’ll find out sometime.

Death is a construction to make sense of our physical reality.

That's certainly true from an evolutionary point of view.

It's relevant to anyone who's facing their own death, which is all of us. Knowing that everyone goes through the same thing is comforting.

Is not the same dying at 80 from 'natural causes' than at 35 due to cancer after a grueling experience fighting it. Which is why I don't see how I'd find that comforting if I were diagnosed cancer when still 'young'. That's just me though.

Fair point.

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