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Comment by superposeur | Hacker News Reader

The problem I’ve always had with over-weighting deathbed advice is that dying people rarely think through the counterfactuals involved. What would actually be the consequence of not working so hard and relentlessly prioritizing personal relationships (as all such advice seems to recommend)? How much worse of a future would result from financial insecurity and lack of career fulfillment? Has the advice giver actually thought through the tradeoffs that lead you to work hard in the first place? Further, dying people’s worlds usually contract to personal relationships only so it makes sense this is the only aspect of life they emphasize.

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"Star Trek: The Next Generation" captured this so well with the "Tapestry" episode. It showed that if you do life differently, you will indeed get a different life - but maybe not the life you thought you wanted!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...

Great ep.

This is a good point. You have to strike a balance between immediate and delayed gratification.

I try and conduct myself in a way that future me could look back on present me and say "past me took advantage of life experiences that were only available at the time" (think: youthful adventures, travel, friendships, etc.) but also "past me did a good job of setting present me up for happiness and fulfillment" (think working reasonably hard, being conscientious, financial responsibility, etc.)

Part of this bias is the kind of people dying on a deathbed tend to make less risky choices. You’re underrepresenting motorcycle riders let alone BASE jumpers etc. Long hours seem like the safe option, you’ll rarely get fired for working late. However, it’s easy to be pissed how much extra time you put in when you get laid off etc.

Thus, people looking back have more information to work with and where risk adverse so they likely worked more than they should.

Working outside of normal hours is now a cause for suspicion. Especially in today's WFH environment. It's a prime time to convene with the handler who does the actual work. Or to exfiltrate proprietary information to your superiors in North Korea. Etc.

Whatever it is you need to do, get it done during normal business hours. If you can't manage that, find another job.

It's so bizarre for me to see this perspective in a tech space when my tech-adjacent academic R&D career exposed me to so many people who naturally wanted to pull periodic all-nighter efforts or just live in strange shift patterns that ranged anywhere from night owl to vampire...

I've been asked unpleasant questions about working into the night, and I've seen working outside regular hours listed as a red flag on "how to detect employee fraud" guides. So however bizarre you may think it is, it's real, and companies are well within their rights to behave this way. Remember, in the USA your employer has the right to fire you for any reason except the ones specifically enumerated in the Civil Rights Act, or if it violates your employment contract.

Most people working in "tech" are implementing business functions and processes, and are answerable to people on the business side of things. Academic R&D is a whole different animal.

It's also that you might have a better idea of events that couldn't have been foreseen at the time. Maybe working hard didn't pay off because you lost much of the savings in a bad investment or a bad divorce anyways. Maybe you could have done with fewer savings because of a larger than expected instance or stock reward. Or maybe the fruits of some efforts never materialized anyways. With the information available at the time the decisions might still have been the correct ones.

How do you know whether dying people think through the counterfactuals?

Of all the people I can think of, my future self would absolutely be on the short list for who I would like advice from.

My older self can definitely advice my younger self to not work so much and so hard, without meaning that I should "relentlessly prioritize relationships". (Edit: I already prioritize relationships, but not relentlessly)

In my eyes, this is nothing controversial at all. In this thread I am surprised that the concept of "deathbed advice" provokes so many people.

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