Paul Graham: Life Is Short
2016 Jan 16
See all posts
Paul Graham: Life Is Short @ Satoshi Nakamoto
- Author
-
Paul Graham
- Email
-
satoshinakamotonetwork@proton.me
- Site
-
https://satoshinakamoto.network
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder
about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about
its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we
lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped
wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the
question, and the answer is that life actually is short.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time,
into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old.
If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch
your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what
is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot
of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books
to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter
what your lifespan was.
Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know
that?
It has for me. It means arguments of the form "Life is too short for
x" have great force. It's not just a figure of speech to say that life
is too short for something. It's not just a synonym for annoying. If you
find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should
try to eliminate it if you can.
When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word
that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is somewhat
tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that it's the stuff
that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does have a distinctive
character. There's something fake about it. It's the junk food of
experience. [1]
If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you
probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless
disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes,
traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
There are two ways this kind of thing gets into your life: it's
either forced on you, or it tricks you. To some extent you have to put
up with the bullshit forced on you by circumstances. You need to make
money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Indeed, the law of
supply and demand ensures that: the more rewarding some kind of work is,
the cheaper people will do it. It may be that less bullshit is forced on
you than you think, though. There has always been a stream of people who
opt out of the default grind and go live somewhere where opportunities
are fewer in the conventional sense, but life feels more authentic. This
could become more common.
You can do it on a smaller scale without moving. The amount of time
you have to spend on bullshit varies between employers. Most large
organizations (and many small ones) are steeped in it. But if you
consciously prioritize bullshit avoidance over other factors like money
and prestige, you can probably find employers that will waste less of
your time.
If you're a freelancer or a small company, you can do this at the
level of individual customers. If you fire or avoid toxic customers, you
can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more than you
decrease your income.
But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the
bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's fault
but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder to eliminate
than the bullshit that's forced on you. Things that lure you into
wasting your time have to be really good at tricking you. An example
that will be familiar to a lot of people is arguing online. When someone
contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty
overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a
lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in.
Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend
yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life. [2]
Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. There are more
dangerous things than that. As I've written before, one byproduct of
technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which
means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid
addictions — to stand outside ourselves and ask "is this how I want to
be spending my time?"
As well as avoiding bullshit, one should actively seek out things
that matter. But different things matter to different people, and most
have to learn what matters to them. A few are lucky and realize early on
that they love math or taking care of animals or writing, and then
figure out a way to spend a lot of time doing it. But most people start
out with a life that's a mix of things that matter and things that
don't, and only gradually learn to distinguish between them.
For the young especially, much of this confusion is induced by the
artificial situations they find themselves in. In middle school and high
school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important thing
in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age,
nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them.
One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask
yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that
matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it
tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into
your consciousness like a pin.
The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people would call
"important." Having coffee with a friend matters. You won't feel later
like that was a waste of time.
One great thing about having small children is that they make you
spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're
staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And odds are that
is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.
If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by
surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for
granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write that
book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the
window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die.
Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more
time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical
quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think
a lot of people make the same mistake I did.
The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be
consciously aware of it. Back when life was more precarious, people used
to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem a bit morbid. I'm
not sure why, but it doesn't seem the right answer to be constantly
reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering at everyone's shoulder.
Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end.
Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do.
Don't wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or
visiting your mother. You don't need to be constantly reminding yourself
why you shouldn't wait. Just don't wait.
I can think of two more things one does when one doesn't have much of
something: try to get more of it, and savor what one has. Both make
sense here.
How you live affects how long you live. Most people could do better.
Me among them.
But you can probably get even more effect by paying closer attention
to the time you have. It's easy to let the days rush by. The "flow" that
imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you
from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms.
One of the most striking things I've read was not in a book, but the
title of one: James Salter's Burning the Days.
It is possible to slow time somewhat. I've gotten better at it. Kids
help. When you have small children, there are a lot of moments so
perfect that you can't help noticing.
It does help too to feel that you've squeezed everything out of some
experience. The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just that I miss
her but that I think of all the things we could have done that we
didn't. My oldest son will be 7 soon. And while I miss the 3 year old
version of him, I at least don't have any regrets over what might have
been. We had the best time a daddy and a 3 year old ever had.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and
savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.
Notes
[1] At first I didn't like it that the word that came to mind was one
that had other meanings. But then I realized the other meanings are
fairly closely related. Bullshit in the sense of things you waste your
time on is a lot like intellectual bullshit.
[2] I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get
attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I
have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human
inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"
Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for
reading drafts of this.
Paul Graham: Life Is Short
2016 Jan 16 See all postsPaul Graham
satoshinakamotonetwork@proton.me
https://satoshinakamoto.network
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?
It has for me. It means arguments of the form "Life is too short for x" have great force. It's not just a figure of speech to say that life is too short for something. It's not just a synonym for annoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should try to eliminate it if you can.
When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it. It's the junk food of experience. [1]
If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
There are two ways this kind of thing gets into your life: it's either forced on you, or it tricks you. To some extent you have to put up with the bullshit forced on you by circumstances. You need to make money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Indeed, the law of supply and demand ensures that: the more rewarding some kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it. It may be that less bullshit is forced on you than you think, though. There has always been a stream of people who opt out of the default grind and go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional sense, but life feels more authentic. This could become more common.
You can do it on a smaller scale without moving. The amount of time you have to spend on bullshit varies between employers. Most large organizations (and many small ones) are steeped in it. But if you consciously prioritize bullshit avoidance over other factors like money and prestige, you can probably find employers that will waste less of your time.
If you're a freelancer or a small company, you can do this at the level of individual customers. If you fire or avoid toxic customers, you can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more than you decrease your income.
But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's fault but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder to eliminate than the bullshit that's forced on you. Things that lure you into wasting your time have to be really good at tricking you. An example that will be familiar to a lot of people is arguing online. When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life. [2]
Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. There are more dangerous things than that. As I've written before, one byproduct of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions — to stand outside ourselves and ask "is this how I want to be spending my time?"
As well as avoiding bullshit, one should actively seek out things that matter. But different things matter to different people, and most have to learn what matters to them. A few are lucky and realize early on that they love math or taking care of animals or writing, and then figure out a way to spend a lot of time doing it. But most people start out with a life that's a mix of things that matter and things that don't, and only gradually learn to distinguish between them.
For the young especially, much of this confusion is induced by the artificial situations they find themselves in. In middle school and high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important thing in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them.
One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin.
The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people would call "important." Having coffee with a friend matters. You won't feel later like that was a waste of time.
One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.
If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did.
The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it. Back when life was more precarious, people used to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem a bit morbid. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't seem the right answer to be constantly reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering at everyone's shoulder. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end. Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don't wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don't need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. Just don't wait.
I can think of two more things one does when one doesn't have much of something: try to get more of it, and savor what one has. Both make sense here.
How you live affects how long you live. Most people could do better. Me among them.
But you can probably get even more effect by paying closer attention to the time you have. It's easy to let the days rush by. The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms. One of the most striking things I've read was not in a book, but the title of one: James Salter's Burning the Days.
It is possible to slow time somewhat. I've gotten better at it. Kids help. When you have small children, there are a lot of moments so perfect that you can't help noticing.
It does help too to feel that you've squeezed everything out of some experience. The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just that I miss her but that I think of all the things we could have done that we didn't. My oldest son will be 7 soon. And while I miss the 3 year old version of him, I at least don't have any regrets over what might have been. We had the best time a daddy and a 3 year old ever had.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.
Notes
[1] At first I didn't like it that the word that came to mind was one that had other meanings. But then I realized the other meanings are fairly closely related. Bullshit in the sense of things you waste your time on is a lot like intellectual bullshit.
[2] I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"
Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.