> what an outsized role is played by luck
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
Since he might not be known to most (especially a younger audience), the author is a writer best known for many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were hugely successful in the 80s.
Jimmy Maher wrote about them recently https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/
I dunno. I'm on the older end, but nowhere near 90, and I've read a lot of these takes, and heard similar from a lot of older people in my lives. While there are good thoughts, often they come from people who didn't do that in their lives and achieved great things because they weren't chasing peace, but chasing success, status, adventure, and the such.
When I read something like this now, I ask if the person writing it lived that way most of their lives, or lived some other way and now are looking back wishing they had lived another (untested) way. I've heard too many old people tell me things like, "appreciate your family" when they were always gone working and built up an amazing life for their families. When my mother told it to me, I believed it because that's the way she lived.
Survivor bias, is what it comes down to. Beware successful people that tell you platitudes!
>“It’s not so difficult to be a buddha,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “Just keep your awakening alive all day long.”
And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall.
Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed.
Ok, that’s a lot of "witty remark I could make regarding" the text (and avoid doing instead). So, let’s take a bit of these advices in practice. Thank you Edward Packard for sharing with us some final reflections on life after a long one, displaying humility while presenting a vibrantly human figure.
Love these. This quote stuck out to me:
> It follows, I think, that the luckier you’ve been, the more humility and generous spiritedness you need, and the unluckier you’ve been, the more compassion for yourself you need, and unfair as it may seem, the more you need irrepressible resolve.
> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind."
I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.
It is the simple things that is the hardest. If anything, having children revealed many of the mentioned. To me, having children is enlightenment
>Once you’ve achieved that — once you are virtuously selfconstituted — you will be self-assured and have reason to be so. You will be emotionally invulnerable to being pushed around.
I don't feel that's true? I am currently in a massive turmoil at work because my line-manager is breaking all ethics rules, with higher leadership caring little. Because I try to follow my values I've spoken up numerous times and all I got for that is a mountain of stress. Turns out I am not emotionally invulnerable.
> 3) to consider what others may be thinking and feeling
Personally I find myself often considering how other people might feel too much and end up being a people pleaser, so I need to work on that aspect of my social skills
HN comments are atom-shredding, trite and exhausting. Isn't it wonderful?
Well.
Reminds me of "Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations" from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", just with more quotations.
I was hoping for more of the author’s own perspective over those ninety years. Instead, it read more like a stitching project of other people's ideas. In particular the barrage of quote fragments disrupted the flow and made it harder for me to engage with the main point of each section.
This is wonderful. I humbly believe discovering and applying a similar set of ideas is what got me through the slump of mid-life crisis and in a much more peaceful place now in all aspects of life.
From a really quick read, good advice and a great read — though, as he admits in the introduction, luck played its role in how things turned out:
>>> That I’d survived thus far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit, determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck.
Would things have been different if he’d lived by his own advice earlier? Maybe. But it’s impossible to know. Pushing back a little: don't underestimate luck. It can be deeply unfair, and it can distort our sense of what is deserved or earned.
This is not to say that principles, effort, wisdom don't matter. But so does the randomness of where, when, and under what conditions we live and act.
I'm approaching mid-forties. As a former Buddhist (up to like the age of 13) turned atheist, I find all the points the author shared in this PDF agreeable.
Being self-reliant (being able to find happiness even when alone); being self-aware; being aware of others (including others' feelings, motives, perspectives); focusing on the journey; acknowledging that 'luck' has a non-negligible role in one's life; preparing our minds for inevitable death with calm acceptance; so many things the author's view resounded with in my opinion and experience.
I thoroughly enjoyed this read, and affirm many of these observations.
I find it incredibly challenging to come to these ideas without having walked a path which consistently challenges someone who strives to succeed through challenge, without a mentor. Ofc this is just my opinion.
It feels reassuring that none of these surprised me, and I strive towards a lot of these views/learnings already. Hopefully a good sign! Packard's writings help give me a little more clarity too, especially when written in such a thoughtful way. Very cool <3
Lived-experiences, this is what is important to understand #3-5.
Being able to experience this through practicnng vipassana, after spending a long time being self-centered for a long time, I can speak to the fact that there are a few things to truly come to this level of metaphysical realization
1. A bit of Luck(in finding/stumbling upon these) and psychological safety to try something that can change your mind on abandoning the ego and embracing these values.
2. One cannot be convinced of abandoning the ego(I, me, mine, ours) by merely intellectual explanation of these things(Psychology and Neroscience have yet to be able to explain with evidence why even after experiencing profound things the ego centric view sticks on).
In my late 20s, I felt disillusioned with this kind of wisdom. Found it too simplistic and not enough to cope with the fact that existence is absurd. I am 32 now, and I can't help think that simplicity is all that there is: curate a happy state of mind, meaningful relationships, active lifestyle, and maybe some audacious goal to keep yourself busy. Thinking that there's some higher state of mind (via spirituality, for eg) is delusion at best.
I feel everything follows the Midwit meme progression [1]: at first you use crude, obvious methods because you don’t know better. Later, complexity is alluring, you drown yourself in optimisations and finding the bestest tools and methods. In the end you come back to the same conclusion: simplicity was the most reliable tool the whole time.
[1]: https://medium.com/@obandoandrew8/bell-curve-meme-avoiding-t...
"seek an eternal perspective" is such a beautifully open way to posit that concept.
There's a lot of nihilism in the world, and this is the way beyond it, whatever flavour your salvation happens to come in.
> The ancient Greek and Roman Stoics believed that it’s wise to contemplate death well ahead of the event. I suppose their idea was that it’s desirable to contemplate death’s inevitability so as not to be shocked when it’s staring you in the face.
That seems like a shallow interpretation. Rather, contemplating death ahead of the event refocuses you on your life at the present and hopefully causes you pause to consider if what you are doing right now is meaningful.
Wear sunscreen?
> to guard against self-deception
The greatest gift my counselor taught me was helping me realize the extent to which I could bullshit myself. I'm not sure I'm necessarily much better at stopping it, but instead now realize that my urge to adapt to a situation can be maladaptive, and my brain will happily retcon a million reasons why it has to be that way rather than chance the ego dying in the face of something unknown.
I enjoyed this piece, including references to the Stoics and Spinoza. It preaches serenity, goodwill, composure, etc.
As someone in their 30s with children, work and a generally busy life, I wonder if anyone can recommend some pieces with more direct application - that is, in this vein, but perhaps an operational / how-to guide. Sometimes, it's hard to translate principles to action.
It's unsettling how often we think we’re in control when we’re really just chasing impulses or clinging to stories we’ve told ourselves. The bit about sleepwalking through life resonated... Reminds me of how easy it is to let years slip by on autopilot, especially in high-functioning careers
I still have my first edition Cave of Time. I don't think it's a first printing though but still, when they came out it was simply awesome. I got the first 6 books in a pack for my birthday, I shared them later on with my children and they loved them too when they were young.
Thank you, Kevin, for sharing this, and thank you for your insights, Edward. As a young man without a father anymore, it's always a pleasure learning about people's life experiences to help me be my best self without years of trial and error
One of the effects I value most from cannabis is that it makes me "awake and aware" the first 1 or 2 hours. I haven't been able to sustain that state sober, but it's good to know that I sleepwalk at least.
Funnily enough, I first came across Thich Nhat Hanh last week while listening to the new Djo (Joe Keery) album. One of the songs on it is a tribute to him; it's quite pretty: https://open.spotify.com/track/6HqSlNhH83iWRU2nTZkiUj
If a person in the west is thoughtful enough and lives long enough, they will eventually either discover Buddhism, or accidentally re-invent it. (See: Stoicism, Post-modernism). Usually the thing that's left out is Buddhism's ethical foundation. Happy to see that Edward Packard went straight to the source.
EP did not say he achieved #1; about #2, "I spent much of my life in this state, and I know all about it."; "I first considered what seemed to be in my best interest, or, more often, gave no thought to the matter at all." is his take on #3; "my normal slouch" in #4; he makes no claim to have gained an eternal perspective, merely quoting others in #5; that "cloud of uncertainty" gives little confidence in #6; being 90, he had little to say about #7 sadly; the reader has to guess whether he was lucky or not in #8; and finally #9 is likewise devoid of actual personal recounting of what he has.
All in all, I find "advice" and "what I've learned" tomes by *older* people to be unhelpful. When someone has spent much other their life living contrary to the advice they are now dishing out, I question it. I prefer advice from someone currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now... not at the end when it doesn't matter.
Wow, I didn't realize at first this is Edward Packard - of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series fame. CYOA were the first real series of books that I got into and devoured, probably around age 9 or 10. Great to see that he is still writing.
> To guard against self-deception – recognize biases, avoid wishful thinking, and question entrenched beliefs
This is such an immensely important point. Seeing my current reality, bad and good, have been one of the most essential elements in taking the right decisions and steps.
There's an increasing amount of neuroscience and psychology research that supports all of these conclusions. In short, our brains haven't evolved as quickly as the environment around us, and our nervous system (e.g., amygdala) tends to react agnostically to sensory, environmental, contextual, etc. inputs. If we are not aware of those reactions and don't redirect them toward "good" weights (taking the definition of "good" and "bad" as Packard describes in Lesson #1), then our brain's neural net just reinforces the weights in a "bad" direction.
The point is that if these lessons come off too "woo woo," spiritual, and rooted in philosophy to you, know that the science of the brain (and thus, the mind) supports all of these conclusions, as well. Specifically, the lessons laid out herein are requisite for long-term and sustaining contentment from a scientific perspective, as well.
I am working on software to deliver this knowledge to people along with tools to effectively implement habits that can help them live better (i.e., more content and purpose-driven) lives.
Lastly, if this read sparked something in your mind and you want to read more, I suggest reading "Something to do with Paying Attention" by David Foster Wallace. It's an incredible novella that, as the title may suggest, deals exclusively with Packard's notion "to keep aware and awake."
Nihilism is the devil and we must defeat him.
Loved it. I am printing this as a booklet and placing it in my bookshelf. We should all try and listen to more experienced people more often. Even a small story from someones life can be eye opening.
Luck favors the bold. One acts boldly because one feels lucky.
a completely different topic & question on this post. how is his blog made? I like the style (simple yet clear and beautiful).
Anyone know what direction i should look at?
I am happy that in my 60 years of life to have achieved most of this, but would have been glad and better off having read it in my early 30s.
I love reading wisdom and insights like this.
Are there other similar things out there on the web? Anyone can share?
(Wish there are more posts like this on HN)
Hot take but something I learned over many years - for anyone who wants to hear it:
The easiest way to a happy life is to follow the motto "live and let live".
Live - your life to the fullest. Use your liberty to build your own life. Don't sleepwalk into anything.
Let live - don't hurt or interfere with other's liberties. How others live is none of your business.
What a beautiful writing. I can't resist the urge to typeset it: https://typst.app/project/p5Ivi8TSuNmFpkoSfoJ06r
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GV-yxI4sBS5gg4belO6hXuFvSFW...
Nothing earth-shattering but quite true nonetheless (or it may be the reason all this is common knowledge is because it's true).
This made me smile:
> Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard
It sounds like a honorific title to outline that this person teaches at Harvard, but it's in fact the opposite. It needs to be said she's from Harvard because most people have never heard of her. "Königsberg teacher Immanuel Kant" would be funny.
I'm impressed that a 94 year-old has had the mental agility to (seemingly) embrace then reject Facebook.
Coderintherye - I really like that, first I've seen it, well done!
Read the article and Was looking for the why, ofc that was to bold of me.
A bit of a contrarian take: the effect of many of the aphorisms and much of the wisdom in this document is to empower bad people and allow bad things to happen unimpeded. All at the expense of the greater good, or at least your own.
He quotes Spinoza: "A man strong in character hates no one, is angry with no one... is indignant with no one, scorns no one..." What I'm reading is that Spinoza never met a Donald Trump, even though I know very well he encountered even worse in his life. I'd need to be not just a buddha, but the capital-B Buddha himself, to find relevance in this advice. If I somehow managed to do so, and if everyone else followed my enlightened example in a Kantian sense, things would really suck.
Sometimes we need to hate. Otherwise we wouldn't have the capacity.
Of all these items I feel like mortality is overrated.
10) Cultivate maximally useful, effective purpose(s) and reason(s) for living soon, but preferably, here and now. People without purpose tend to skew sad, chaotic, self-absorbed, and/or dangerous.
Beautiful. Thanks!
> 6) to guard against self-deception
Honesty begins with and includes being honest with yourself. There are a great many people who expend great cognitive dissonance mental gymnastics entrenching themselves into and lashing their identity to a particular group or side of an issue, e.g., climate change denial. The only people they are fooling are fools including themselves.
these took 90 years?
...and use LaTeX
Thanks for sharing this <3
> what an outsized role is played by luck
There is no luck; there is only free will interacting with destiny in some context.
I really love reading the wisdom of older people. Society really dismisses everyone over 80, but I find myself having deep interesting connections with a few people much older than myself (38).
Something society always neglects is that everyone goes through the same thoughts time and time again. We all make mistakes and we learn our own way, but when someone's 90, they really have done a lot of it all before. Even if we think everything is different, human's really are very similar. We all have emotions, we all have desires and we are all deep down social creatures. So I would only encourage more people to step out and try to make an honest, deep, friendship with someone a lot older than you. It can really help give you guidance and perspective.