Last letters of those executed by firing squad. You could read them or write your own. It could be a story or not. You could begin drafting it. Unbelievably it will happen to you also. When you think of it, you change, you are thinking of a true and important thing, does that mean you change for the better? Heidegger of course, but not just him.
Find the other notes on this if possible: I realised the reason people take the wisdom and wishes of old people seriously is not (just) because they’re wise or whatever, but because they are making decisions on the margin. They have the clearest view of what the stakes actually are, holding all your other actions constant, of choosing to do or not to any given thing at any prior point in your life. That’s why their regrets really matter. Young philosophers, old philosophersAlgorithms to live by notes
- This got pushback. Maybe because I accidentally framed it as ‘they know the counterfactuals of each choice’, which is obviously wrong, since actions have complex causal relations. How else could I frame it though? Ask Claude ig.
Begin drafting your own I mean. It could be very long. Your entire journal could be the letter. What would be included, what excluded? Is this the point of having a website now? Is this what you will think about?
This links to what do old people know of course, these are the test cases for being close to death (not having lived a lot) mattering
when we are young we want to be old, when we are old we want to be young. it seems like there should be a point in the middle where we want to be the age we are, but it never seems to arrive. Why? You can imagine your life like a journey up the border of an ellipse, or the shape formed by two circles intersecting obliquely. As you move up, you are not quite aiming where you are going, but to a point on the other side of the ellipse that lies on the line between you and the centre of the ellipse. The longer it is the more discontent you are. Maybe it’s like a prism, so the centre warps the beam of light/imagination/regret.