Comment by neilk
15 years ago
Sometimes I think that I might be one of the few people who will be on my deathbed, regretting not working harder.
When I look back on my life, it's mostly been unfinished projects, or good ideas that didn't get far.
I've always been told how much potential I have, and I even feel this in myself. But so far, there's not a lot to show for it. Sometimes I've spent years not doing much of anything except looking at sunsets, walking in parks, reading books, and being creative, and all the things that are supposed to make life wonderful. These idle years weren't all a bowl of cherries (mostly it was due to depression) but it still wasn't so different from the slow sort of lifestyle exalted above. And I still find it lacking.
We only have a limited time here, and in our age, individuals have extraordinary leverage. Isn't that also a reason to try as hard as we can to make some kind of dent in the universe? If I forgo a few sunsets, but make a thousand people's lives better, did I really do it wrong?
When it comes to regrets, the literary image that stays with me comes from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This part is usually omitted from popularizations and films. Marley's ghost has delivered the warning about the three spirits, but also shows him a vision of spirits wandering the earth:
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Well said, neilk. I always have mixed feelings when reading about the wisdom of people who are dying. I don't doubt that they feel the way they say they feel at that point, but are their judgments relevant to how they WOULD HAVE felt for years, not weeks, back when they still had years to live? On their deathbeds, when they value family so much more than career, they wish they'd spent more time on the former, less on the latter. But if they had actually lived that way for decades, would they have been any happier? Can we know for sure? They might be romanticizing the time they could have spent with family, but didn't, and underestimating the discouragment of living with the professional consequences of "spending less time at the office," while successful coworkers were spending more.
I suspect that the real key to success in life over all is to carefully identify your priorities and to deliberately, passionately, and courageously pursue them, rather than being governed by accident, convenience, fear, and inertia.
Well, I wasn't talking about a career. I was talking about working harder, and having achievements you could be proud of. That's not the same thing.
I think it's been established beyond doubt that a successful career doesn't make you happy. Plenty of researchers have looked into the correlation of income to happiness, and above the poverty line it's pretty flat.
Reminds me of the BBC Radio 4 'Desert Island Discs' interview with Sir Tom Blundell. It was several years ago, and I don't have a transcript, so this is a vaguely remembered paraphrase ...
He was researching protein structure in an X-ray crystallography lab and was working long evenings and nights. Eventually his wife gave him the ultimatum to make a choice between his work and her. He chose work and got a divorce. He said he was incredibly relieved to be free of the guilt he felt neglecting her while he worked at the lab, and threw himself into the research with a new-found energy and determination. Shortly afterwards he he discovered the structure of insulin.
There are billions of mediocre marriages in the world, but structure of insulin is only discovered once.
In retrospect, he sounded like he thought he made the right decision to spend less time with his family.
Yes, and I wasn't talking about one's income, but success at one's "work". The "achievements you can be proud of" will mostly be in the area of what you "do" since most achievements you can be proud of take a great deal of time and, as you say, "working harder", or they wouldn't be a source of much pride. What you spend a great deal of time working hard at is, for the most part, your "work", what you "do" at that stage in your life.
>"I think it's been established beyond doubt that a successful career doesn't make you happy...[very limited] correlation of income to happiness...."
Dan Gilbert's work, applies to "achievements you can be proud of" in general, not just one's income, so if you think it's relevant, then you can stop worrying about working harder. It won't permanently raise your "baseline happiness". But Gilbert's work, and the work he cites, is only "established beyond doubt" in the popular press, not in cog sci, where there is still a lot of wiggle room left and a lot of debate going on.
I like Gilbert's work overall, though, and it is one of the reasons I am expressing skepticism about the validity of the deathbed wish for "less time at the office". It might depend on how narrowly one thinks of "career" or "at the office" or "working" (I mean it more broadly), but if Gilbert has shown anything, it is that we seldom know how a given change really would make (or have made) us feel after a while--we just think we know.
Having a successful career doesn't necessarily have to correlate with monotonically increasing income (although that's how most people perceive the phrase).
>Sometimes I think that I might be one of the few people who will be on my deathbed, regretting not working harder.
The saying goes that on the deathbed no one regrets not spending more time in the office. I take that to mean "donating more of their time to some company", not spending time working/creating. That's how it will be with me. I'll wish that I wouldn't have had to waste so much time solving boring solved problems for money instead of doing the things I was interested in doing. Things that actually had a chance of a real impact, even if small.
What is causing your feeling of wasted potential? Why do you feel your potential needs to be fulfilled anymore than anyone else's? Why make yourself so unhappy because you haven't achieved greatness? One of the crazy things about the age we live in is that you're no longer just competing against the most successful person in your little neck of the wood. Because of how incredible our ability for mass communication is, we now compare ourselves to the luckiest, most beautiful and most gifted people of our age. It's almost like the media is quickening the pace of social evolution...and it's causing more social anxiety than you can poke a stick at.
Hey it doesn't matter that you're not Steve Jobs or Bob Dylan or Mahatma Gandhi...Those guys lived the jackpot of the human lottery (in terms of making a difference to the rest of us).
something I've learn't over the years is that you rarely make headway against a problem by struggling against it, in the way that you will be engulfed in quicksand the more you thrash. Generally acceptance and relaxation will bring quicker resolution...a lesson that is at odds with the modern hollywood fairy tale of one person struggling against improbable odds.
The universe is massive, we are microscopic...our achievements are ephemeral and our lifetimes are over in the blink of an eye. There are thousands of forgotten civilisations, vanished into the fog of history, taking with them the endeavours of their citizens...Happiness and inspiration come when you're not looking for them. They are not the sole domain of Hollywood or silicon valley. They really are found in everyday moments, that if you're always focusing too far in the future, or on things you don't currently have, you walk right past them.
Also, surely the image of the phantoms wandering the earth, chained to their safes is meant to convey a similar message to the article??
I didn't say that I was miserable!
My life is pretty great right now. To some extent I already have the life I want. I can use my skills appropriately, it does have a big impact, and my workplace is totally understanding about reshuffling work hours for a better quality of life.
My regrets are mostly about what I did or haven't done in the past. I'm in my late 30s now, and I am having to face the fact that I don't have the energy I did in my 20s. Instead my youth was wasted on wrestling with depression in various forms, causes that didn't deserve it, or companies that ultimately flushed my work product down the toilet.
Perhaps my "dent in the universe" comment makes you think I want to be Steve Jobs... not really. Actually I am convinced that if you become famous, your success is probably of the wrong kind.
My take is that the sunsets would be a replacement for the less-fruitful things one does in life - watch mindless TV, spend a lot of time on hygiene, [enter time-wasting task], etc. I don't think it's a replacement for actually accomplishing dreams.
It sounds like if you actually have passions to accomplish things, then by all means do whatever you can to bring yourself to act now. You're in the minority here and should be thankful. I say act before you become TOO comfortable.
My guess is that once you do start accomplishing your goals, that feeling of "there's not a lot to show for my life" will decrease immensely. At that point I'd be curious if you'd have the same outlook.