How Do I Know if I Lived a Good Life?

In this thought-provoking discussion, we explore different perspectives on what constitutes a life well lived. We discuss flawed metrics like funeral attendance, dying with money, and social status games that don't matter after death.

We argue the only real metric is whether your kids carry on and build upon your values and worldview. We see ourselves as intergenerational entities, so extending values systems matters more than contiguous personal experience. We also touch on coming to terms with mortality, the psychology of life extensionists, and modernity's existential dread of death.

Overall, an insightful look at how to live in a way that creates meaningful impact beyond one's lifespan. We aim to set up the next generation, not maximize our own transient pleasure.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I think the, the, the core things where people like really f**k up how they're optimizing their lives is they optimize it around competing in a specific social dynamic or a specific social community that is like, you know, it could be that they organize themselves based on how, how alpha they are, for example.

And that doesn't really matter when you're dead. Like, that's not

Simone Collins: the thing is, I think that like our final. The theme here might be that the bigger issue is that it's not like people are optimizing around dumb reasons for a life to well lived, like we alluded to in the beginning, which we don't agree with, you know, like how many people show up at the funeral pot, but they don't, there's, there is literally nothing, you know, like I'll just spend all my money, I will just like max out everything, nothing matters after I die.

No, I

Malcolm Collins: don't want to see this. I think that's true, but I think a different way to word that is they're optimizing around norm, like, like, living the cultural ideal set out like the aesthetic cultural ideal set out by a specific community that they identify with. And one of the key problems of this is this [00:01:00] often leads to an obsession.

With like, being okay with yourself and being okay with your identity. In a way that can become all consuming because it's so circular. It's only you who judges whether or not you're okay with who you are. And so when you live a life to be okay with who you are, you will never really be okay with who you are.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, you know how we were told multiple times by someone that like the way, you know, you've lived your life Well is by the number of people at your funeral So if you have a ton of people at your funeral, obviously that means you nailed it, right?

Yeah Well, I just like heard of the greatest hack for this someone for their funeral had a raffle for giving away their car. And I'm like, well, this is it. You just like, you make, you, you pre plan it, you pay it. You have a public announcement when you die and you list all the assets you're going to raffle off to anyone who comes.

Everyone shows up to your funeral, like done, you know, you hacked it. Now you've apparently lived a good life and all this happens after you die, of course, but apparently a lot of people care about [00:02:00] stuff like that. So for those who do, you're welcome.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and there's a lot of cultures similar to that where you can buy grievers.

You know, we've talked about this in other episodes, like in Korea, you can buy people to come and grieve at your funeral. If not enough people are going to come. Well,

Simone Collins: and I mean, this goes back to ancient Egypt where they were professional mourners, right? Who would, you know, wail and whatnot.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and Rome did this as well with the processions after people would die.

You know, it's, it's... What is up with people? Why

Simone Collins: do they care? Like, what is, what is this, this weird desire for people to be really sad that you died? I mean, I guess it means that, like, you were necessary to them. It implies that you provided a lot of resources, because I think the real reason why people would lose their s**t if you died is they were also losing their house and their food and their job and, like, I think it's

Malcolm Collins: a popularity thing.

They see, they see life is about accumulating, I guess I'd call it emotional debt from other people. And they want the maximum number of other people to [00:03:00] feel bad about the fact that they had died.

Simone Collins: Like they want to go out like Princess Diana, like she, I feel like in all human history probably had the best, like, everyone mourning for her very dramatically thing, you know, where like it was traumatic for everyone, right?

I

Malcolm Collins: always remember her as the one with the expensive beanie baby made for the, yeah, you

Simone Collins: know, you've made it. When you die and they make a commemorative, trendy, collectible for you, whatever that may be, you know,

YEah, stupid reasons. Well, like, stupid measurements for a life well lived. So what are, what are good measurements for a life well lived? Well, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: I, I think that this varies across cultures, but I think it's important to talk about from the perspective of our own cultural group.

Yeah. What is a good measurement? Okay. And I would say there is only one measurement that really matters to me. And that is, what do my kids think of my life? Oh, what? Interesting. I'll explain. So there's a lot. Like I've said, I [00:04:00] think a good life lived is an individual who makes the world a better place for the next generation.

Yeah. But I think it's more than that. Okay. I get to teach my kids. Value system. Mm-Hmm. . nOw two things here. If that value system isn't good, if they don't believe that in my life it reflected in a, a good life, like in the way I treat you, et cetera, then they will leave that value system. They will go to another value system, and they will judge me by that other value system, which is presumably better than the value system I taught them.

Because they turned away from it, right? Correct. Yeah. Okay. So in that case, they would judge me negatively or, or, or just whatever through the, either this other value system, but

Simone Collins: well, another way of looking at it though, is even if your kids choose to go another way.

That may be thanks to you and that other way is way, way better. And you just didn't have enough information in your lifetime to know it. You actually do them a huge favor by giving them the information they need combined with their, you know, real world world experience to choose a better option. So, okay.

[00:05:00] What Philip of Macedon or Philip of Macedonia, like, was an okay ruler, right? But like, Alexander the Great may have disagreed with him. He didn't exactly carry on exactly what Philip did. He also didn't carry on exactly what his mother encouraged him to do. But instead he achieved really, really great things.

I don't think he would have achieved exactly what he would have achieved had he not. been exposed to his parents and seeing what they do well and what they didn't do well. And he did learn a lot from Philip for sure. But he, he remixed it. I don't even think that like having your kids choose something different is a bad sign.

I think having kids who are efficacious is the ultimate sign. And as long as you set them up for that, I think it's great. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, but hold on, so I'll keep going. So that's one potentiality. They choose a different tradition because based on what you have given them as sort of the tools, and then through the eyes of that different tradition, which is in the way that we view the world axiomatically better than ours because they chose it over ours a better mechanism for judging whether or not [00:06:00] we have lived a good life.

Or they stay within my tradition, right? Within the value set that I teach them. And then they judge me by the values that I taught them. And if I can't live up to that value system, if I cannot be a good person from the framework that I am providing my kids for what is defined as a good person, then I am not a good person.

Simone Collins: Yeah. If they're judging you by your own framework, but I rarely see children do that. I see children. typically go to like, you know, public schools or modern universities, be inculcated with a very different value set and then judge their parents negatively, even though their parents live with high fidelity and dedication to their values.

Now this

Malcolm Collins: is a, if my kids do that, then I have failed as a parent. See, so my life doesn't deserve to be valued highly. If they are able to be brainwashed by a nefarious force, like the [00:07:00] existing urban monoculture. And through that brainwashing, they end up hating me. Well, then I should hate myself because I failed at a core task of being human, which is giving my kids a good platform to go out into the world.

If they, end up converting into a culture which is so non efficacious, so unaligned with our value set, that I have failed because, not, not because they have chosen something better than me, but because they have chosen something so obviously stupid. Which is sad. But I, I, I still think that it is a good measure of whether or not I have lived a good life.

Hmm. And then there's the question of, you know, Oh, you were gonna say something?

Simone Collins: Well, so, it's just to recap, it's not that they like you, it's not that they miss you, it's not that anyone even notices your absence, it's whether or not they carry on your values.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, [00:08:00] they evolve the value system that I gave them, or move to a value system that they find more efficacious, but that is aligned broadly with our goals for the future of the species.

And then they use that to judge me. So there are many ways that they could judge me as a good parent. So two, just within that one, they basically stay with our value system, but evolve it in some core ways. Okay. So you, you, you're cool with

Simone Collins: remixing.

Malcolm Collins: No, I think it's important that they remix. If they are just a clone of me, one, I think that that's going to be a fragile culture, so it will eventually die out, so it's largely pointless.

Agreed. And two even our value system would tell them that like we would be disappointed in them if they were just clones of our value system like this is something we raise our kids believing if you cannot come up with any evolution of our ideas, then you likely.

Like, what was the point? What was the point of you being the next generation if you can't do better than us, right? But I know my kids can [00:09:00] do better than me, and I know they'll see flaws in my logic, and I know that they'll build upon this and create something better. But what's interesting is, as they build something better, the question is, is Is the way I'm living my life, does it account for the ways that the value system may evolve?

Like when they look back on my life today, are they able to say even in the ways our value system evolved, I still think that he lived a good life. like an honorable life, right? So that's one way I could do well, or they could convert to a different tradition. Like, I don't know, they convert to Judaism, right?

But by this like orthodox framework of Judaism's value set, they still think that we lived a good life.

Simone Collins: Interesting. Okay. So they're also like a lot of what you're looking at is, do your children think that you were a hypocrite? In other words, do they, do they think that you did not live your values?

Malcolm Collins: Well, that could be how they judge my value system, but they could judge it through a different mechanism. Do you see what I mean? And, and, so for example, they [00:10:00] convert to Orthodox Judaism, and they convert to like traditional Catholicism or something like that. They may even believe that we had lived a good life.

Insofar as we paved the way and created an environment where they could convert to this radically different culture. However I, I, I would be, you know, personally with my value system, I'd be disappointed in that. I think would be like a refutation that anything that we have built has value. But I still think that it means that I lived a good life because I set them up to do knowing everything we know about the world and being smart and having the education that we granted them.

They decided that this other tradition was just axiomatically better than everything we had built for them. And that's fine.

Simone Collins: Right? Yeah. Yeah. That checks out. It's interesting to me, like how much your evaluation depends on the, the opinions of your children, because I feel like there are many [00:11:00] people who I see as like great, great signs of success and, and testaments to.

thEir, their parents upbringing, who don't really respect their parents even though in, in many ways, like at least I think in the ways that count, they're really carrying on some of the core values that their parents would have hoped them to carry on.

Malcolm Collins: I have seen that. Actually, I, I haven't seen that.

Typically when people hate their parents it's because they've been converted into a completely different cultural framework that, and typically when a cult or a tradition is converting you and they're not one of the like conservative healthy ones, just like one of the newer progressive ones or something like that.

So it's basically

Simone Collins: just a soft culture in other words.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the, the, the key way that cults convert people is they separate them from their family. Like they try to create walls between them and their family, and so they'll induce memories of trauma and [00:12:00] stuff like that to prevent the individual from having a support network to go back to.

aNd so that's why, like, typically when I see somebody, like, think that their parents were just like the worst, either they, they're, they've been converted into one of these usually very inefficacious cults, or. They were abused by their parents. Like genuinely their parents did like a terrible job raising them, were narcissistic, something like that.

Now, when I see people convert into harder religious traditions, I don't often see this divide with the parents as much. Like, like, like older, harder religious traditions. So you think

Simone Collins: when people like go hardline from soft, softer cultures, they still somewhat respect their parents?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I haven't seen that often somebody, typically because the people who convert into these harder religious traditions just have more mental maturity than the people who are seduced by promises of ketanism and doing whatever they want whenever they want, you [00:13:00] know.

 But, there's another thing here which is important, like I think An interesting thing about our deaths, when contrasted with the deaths of our parents is that if you look at where AI technology is going, and what it can already do in terms of simulating people, and you look at the volume of content that we have produced on YouTube, With our faces, us talking, you and me as separate people.

Now, this wasn't true when we had just written the books, but it's, it's certainly true now, given, you know, 30 to 45 minutes every weekday, if we keep this up for a few years it will be very easy to train a very detailed AI on us to look like us, to talk like us likely to even exist within a, a 3d virtual environment.

So we will be summonable to our kids, to our grandkids, whenever they want, if they see any utility in interacting with us, our desk just isn't that meaningful in terms of a loss of a source of information or mentorship or perspective to our kids, because they will [00:14:00] still have access to all of those things, even after we die.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. Would that make our lives

Malcolm Collins: better lived? Well, I mean, I imagine it depends on how much the kids value our opinion and how much the grandkids value our opinion, how much anything we do more

Simone Collins: is like a KPI of whether or not they respect what we have done. Then you see it as like itself an outcome that's desired, but if you have done a good job, they will want to interact with the AI version of

Malcolm Collins: you more.

I don't know if that's true. I can see us doing a good job and them just being like, yeah, but intergenerational. I have improved so much over my parents that they just don't have much useful information to share with me. Probably not. An example of this would be like My dad, right? He, I think, did a great job as a dad in so far as I really like how I turned out as a person.

And I feel like he worked hard to make the world a better place. You know, he built up institutions like the Santa [00:15:00] Fe Institute, which ended up having a really big impact on like the way people think and culture and stuff like that. Right. You know, so he's a, a, he, he lived a good life by my value set.

But he is philosophically so behind me just in terms of his philosophical, metaphysical, like, understanding of the world, or, or sophistication, that there's very little I would ask him and expect, like, useful, novel information.

Simone Collins: Mm, yeah, so you, you respect him insofar as he raised you well, and he set you in the right direction, but also, like, you've now car you've taken the torch, and you will carry it forward, and you hope that our children do the same, and therefore they may not consult you much, because, They will have hopefully surpassed you.

And I think that to me is what's more interesting. And that's maybe why you heard me like immediately go to like, Oh, kids who were different from you were better. Because I, I mean, the whole point of having kids and having an impact in your, through your kids and our cultural interest involving in a good life involving a good life [00:16:00] being what your kids outcomes are is that.

We don't want stagnation. We don't want ourselves to live forever. We don't want ourselves to persist forever. We want to be a part of a meaningful chain of evolution. Yeah. So, the chain of good. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and in a way, it is a testament to just how good my dad did that I wouldn't want to constantly summon an AI of him to ask him for advice.

Right,

Simone Collins: because he should have made someone better than him, and he did.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, which is really interesting and I, and so, so even though I think our kids won't have to deal with, and I hear in this video, I certify if you do make an AI of me from these videos, you just treat anything it says, as if I had said it, I don't have any problem with that, I don't have any problem with somebody could be like, well, the AI is just sort of hijacking his memory to, yeah, what

Simone Collins: do you think your brain is doing right now?

Right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. My, my brain is hijacking a memory. It has of Who I am and like a [00:17:00] self conception and then. selling it to you guys. So yeah, it's, it's, it's just the same thing. And it may have different opinions than I have right now, but so future me might have different opinions than I'd have right now.

This is also why was this AI technology living forever as a stagnant entity is so pointless. Why does it help that I'm living forever when an AI recreation of me could live forever? Like, why is that useful?

Simone Collins: I think there's this intuition that people want to experience. All of it themselves, when they don't realize just how non contiguous one's self is,

Malcolm Collins: even one's experience.

Yeah, and this is also important when you think about deaths from us, like non contiguousness and everything like that. So, we genuinely, and I think really deeply, believe ourselves to be intergenerational entities. Mm hmm. aNd by that what I mean is, I am half my dad, half my mom, and the culture... Of my ancestors and 2%, 3 percent something else, you know, but most is just a continuation of my parents and they were half their dad, half their mom, [00:18:00] the culture that they came from in a dash of maybe something else where I think most people think that they're mostly something else.

And so, from my perspective. I am, and my kids are, like my mom who died recently, I am her experiencing the world in a slightly different body. I, my kids are her, fractionally speaking, of course, experiencing the world in a slightly different body. One that was not burdened with Her prejudices or her, and by that what I mean is we all have prejudices like I could just live forever as a single individual like that would kind of suck because as you live your life, you build up prejudices and biases and sunk cost fallacies and when I have a kid, I can sort of tell them, okay, here's like everything I think about the world and then they get to filter that and say, okay, here's what's probably true.

And here's what's probably not true. And that's just so much better than me. Yeah. Continuing on into the future with all of these biases, you know, this, this sort of a hard [00:19:00] reset we get every 100 years or so as a species or less than that, you know, 30, 40 years of the species, it's a really unique and high utility system for for living.

And so I don't really believe I die as long as my relatives live and my relatives are a very big network. So, I just don't think unless all of humanity dies. That I have meaningfully died. And do you feel the same way or?

Simone Collins: yEah, I absolutely feel the same way. And I also, I mean, we've said, we've talked about this in other like discussions, but the, the idea that you even are your, yourself for the same person or the you that you are, is experiencing life now is going to be, it will not last.

It will not last longer than a couple of weeks, a couple of years, like you, you even yourself within your life are not the same person, not the same consciousness, not the same biological body, not the same cluster of [00:20:00] cells. So it's really weird to think that. Even you are an unbroken consciousness. So I think once you view life through that lens, it becomes so much easier to have the view that we have where like our kids are versions of us a little bit remixed, a little bit improved.

Experiencing life. But I think it's really hard to have that view if you truly believe that you are not a ship of Theseus, but rather this thing that will never change that is experiencing an unending line of consciousness, which is

Malcolm Collins: a really interesting perspective that you have that I'd love you to talk about is sort of this idea that even in between moments, you are a different person.

You tomorrow is absolutely meaningfully a different person than you are today.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I think the easiest way for people to experience this or realize this would involve writing letters to yourself in six months, in three years[00:21:00] you know, about what you're thinking about what you're doing, what you think of the future, what you worry about, what you obsess over, because when you receive those letters and you try to think back to that time, you'll remember things about it.

That you really can't get back in the head of that person and you realize that you are receiving a letter from a different person, someone that you're related to and you can feel for them and care for their plight, but you really are feeling for someone else's plight. So,

Malcolm Collins: and you structure the wording of these letters that way you're like, yes, future Simone.

Yes. Past Simone, stuff like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but you know, I think a lot of people do that intuitively, you know, they're like, I could make my bed, but that's a problem for future Janet, you know, like people, people do this all the time by screwing over their future selves by not planning for the future. The fact that the majority of Americans are living in the majority is some huge proportion of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

People aren't saving. People are not making financial decisions for the future. Shows a lack of [00:22:00] empathy for their future selves and also a lack of identification with their future selves. Yeah. So, I mean, I think actually life extensionists are somewhat the exception that they, they don't think normally because the average person and most importantly through actions and not words is demonstrating that they don't identify with their future selves and they don't identify with their past

Malcolm Collins: selves.

Yeah. Well, so an interesting thing is, is, is. I think that you're partially right here, but I think that life extensionists are not so interested in living forever as they are afraid of death, because their sense of identity is only the contiguous self and they believe that their purpose is Happiness, basically or, or something like that, right?

Like something hedonistic, something about their qualia or experience of the world. So they attempt to maximize this and the longer they can live, the less they need to think about how trivial all those things are, because they're all going to be dust soon. And I think that [00:23:00] when you internalize your mortality

Simone Collins: Wait, so wait, I just want to make sure I understand you correctly.

So you think it's basically nihilism? That makes life extensionists afraid of death. Is that correct? Yes. That's interesting because I think you and I don't want to die. 100 percent don't want to die. But it's not because we are afraid of death. In fact, death is going to be kind of a relief. Instead, we are afraid of not setting up our kids well enough.

That our kids will not be well taken care of. That our kids will not yet be independent. That our kids will not yet have, you know, the resources from us that they need to thrive. Once our kids are set, I mean, we're probably going to get really interested in our grandkids and try to help them as much as we can, because, you know, it's, it's, our kids are going to have less bandwidth to invest.

Disproportionately in their own kids while they're at their peak earning years, et cetera. But yeah, I think that's the only thing. So we're actually not afraid of death. We're kind of like

Malcolm Collins: super excited about it. [00:24:00] The way I'd word it for people who struggle to understand this concept, because I think people who are brought up in the mainstream culture of society today, this can seem like a really weird mental framework, is it's sort of like we have a to do list.

When the to do list is done, Death is great, like, because we've accomplished all that we were meant to accomplish, all that we decided that we were meant to accomplish, all that we needed to accomplish in the world. And once we've accomplished all those things, it's like, congrats! Everything's done!

Simone Collins: You get to die, congrats.

Death is the reward. Death is the treat.

Malcolm Collins: But it's, and I think that this... Leads to this, like, real lack of an existential fear. There's an existential fear that I don't get the things done that I want to get done. 100%. That really scares me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I leave my kids a, a world or a framework and, and tools that don't set them up to...

Do the things that they need to do with their lives before they intergenerationally improve before they move to the next generation. That worries me. But other than that, and I [00:25:00] think that this, you know, when somebody was asking us, like, why would you try to make the world a better place if you're not going to get to experience it?

This. The question just seems so odd if you see time and reality the way we do, where we're like, I don't get to experience tomorrow, you know, I get to experience today as who I am today, but if I lived life as somebody just constantly maxing the moment, then I, you know, paycheck to paycheck, I think, and, and I think that our biologies aren't really adapted to that.

So when you do hedonistic In the moment maxing. I think that it actually ends up sort of destroying your brain and everything begins to feel sad and on we and and terrible. And I, and I think that when I look at people who do this I actually think that this is where. Anti natalists come from like when we look at the anti natalists, they all seem like really deeply unhappy people usually bought far into the urban monoculture.

Of like, I should do whatever I want, [00:26:00] whenever I want in an attempt to be as happy as possible. And when you do this, like when you're just constantly chasing happiness for its own sake and hedonism for its own sake, which you realize. Is that you're no longer happy when you get those things anymore and you begin to realize that happiness never really had any value to begin with, and then you develop this negative utilitarian framework, whereas to us.

Not at all. Like, we are like happiness doesn't matter. Of course happiness doesn't matter, you know, it's, it's something that we get in the background when we're doing more purposeful things than, than things designed to achieve happiness. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Here's the thing also, like, do you think a lot of this could, like, I, I also feel like this existential fear of death is, is relatively new because when you look at like the Victorian era.

Back then, you people would witness each other's deaths and your neighbors would come over and watch you die. And there were all sorts of momentum, Maury, that people would carry around with them. Like you would cut off locks of hair from people who died and you [00:27:00] would weave them into necklaces and jewelry and wear them.

You would wear dead people's hair and, and talk about death a lot. And like, I feel like back then. Maybe a lot of it was just the understanding like more widespread that oh, we're going to go to heaven and be reunited there. What do you think happened? Because I do think that there was an interesting break.

it throughout the 1900s that has led us to where we are

Malcolm Collins: now. I think the, the urban monoculture is the key culprit here. It, when I look at different hard cultural traditions, like religions, you could say people who are in softer iterations of those that are closer to the urban monoculture, you know, that the law supposed to their traditions, they're the ones that seem to be hit most by death.

And the ones that are in harder cultural traditions typically just aren't, and most harder cultural traditions are, are these older ways of doing things. These older, more cohesive cultural traditions that differ from the urban monoculture. They're not as affected by death. Because their lives, you [00:28:00] know, have purpose and they know the metrics by which things are measured, so they don't worry about it as much.

So yeah I'm, I'm just going to say, I think. that you are right about that. And what's really interesting is I actually think that you can sort of see the moment when society first started to care about death and be afraid of death, which was in the 1920s, 1930s spiritual medium fad, when like everyone got like really obsessed with spiritual mediums, you

Simone Collins: know, that's very interesting.

Yeah. So when it stopped being. We witness death. We are around death. We talk about death to like, let's try to hold on to the people we've lost. Yeah. So

Malcolm Collins: if you look at traditional Calvinist culture, right? Like one of the things mentioned in the Albion Seed is that they would have kids stand over graveyards with, with dead.

People just like, look at it, you're going to die one day, except that. And I, you know, I've mentioned this in another video, I've worked with lots of dead people. I worked at a [00:29:00] medical examiner, you know, moving their brains for dissection. And so I got to read their file because, you know, I needed, we needed to.

Collect the right brains. And so I got to really see who they were as a person, see everything they were talking to their psychologist about, see their body, see how they died. And over and over and over and over again. And that might've played a big role in desensitizing me to death to just be like, Oh yeah, death is like a really normal thing.

And it's, it's not something to fear. The only thing to fear is what I do not accomplish before I die. And the, the people that my death. Ends up hurting because I didn't provide them with the tools necessary. But by doing things like these videos that couldn't be turned into an AI iteration of myself.

That is one thing that my kids, when one of the many things that I won't be depriving my kids of, I won't be depriving them of a source of potentially orthogonal advice.

Simone Collins: You think your encounters with cadavers tangibly changed the way that you look at death [00:30:00] and your own death.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, seeing lots of dead people over and over and over again, and then working at the Smithsonian with all of those bodies in that department that Bones takes place in.

I think we've talked about this in other things. Yeah I, I think, you know, just it. It normalized it. And I think this is something that people used to have. I mean, if you think about the normal person today, I can talk to the normal person and they've never seen a dead body in person before. Like that's wild.

We live in a society where I've never seen a

Simone Collins: dead body in person for sure.

Malcolm Collins: That like, yeah, dead people happen all the time. If you're in a major city, there's people dying every day. Dozens of them. And, and you haven't seen them because our world sees death as something wrong that's not supposed to happen ever, ever, ever, and must be hidden the moment it happens.

Well, and

Simone Collins: again, see that's why I think it's not just a matter of soft culture. I think it's also a matter of medical breakthroughs that have made it easier to keep people alive than ever before. And combined with the Hippocratic Oath, which we just haven't let [00:31:00] go of, which I think is pretty toxic of like, no matter what.

Even if they're not really alive, you know, even if they're in more pain, even if they're suffering, even if they're never going to leave the hospital again, even if their family can't afford it, blah, blah, blah. Right. Like, even if they are a vegetable, we will keep them alive at all costs, making inadvertently death, like a thing that has gone terribly wrong, even when it's totally someone's time.

Right. Like, yeah, they're very old. They're not, there's nothing left ahead of them, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that, that, that's, you know, that's not just soft culture. That is an entire industry economically driven but also weirdly regulatorily and ideologically driven through the way that doctors are trained that has told us that death was a mistake.

It could have been prevented with the right medical care. You know what I mean? Yeah. So that's, you know, not just culture, also like a weird, like bad combination of like the just the perfect storm of technology and [00:32:00] an outdated. Method, which is funny because the Hippocratic Oath like just totally didn't work at all for like most of medical history, right?

Like most doctors who are treating people like throughout the Middle Ages throughout like even like, you know The mid to late 1800s were like quite often killing people like making it worse further compromising people killing new babies and pregnant women by like You know working with like sick cadavers and then delivering babies without washing their hands, you know, like it's it's really It's weird, but anyway, just side, probably not really relevant, but I still think that that matters, but I'm curious to hear from people in the comments, what they think a life well lived is you know, aside from like how many people show up at your funeral, I'm actually not sure.

What people are going for? Are there other common things that i'm missing here?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah I I think he didn't what I would say is is a lot of people today They'll maximize like really dumb stuff like the number of people they sleep with or like how alpha they are Oh, so

Simone Collins: just like how many like how much money they're dying with [00:33:00] you think?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I think that that's actually pretty rare these days. I think the, the, the core things where people like really f**k up how they're optimizing their lives is they optimize it around competing in a specific social dynamic or a specific social community that is like, you know, it could be that they organize themselves based on how, how alpha they are, for example.

And that doesn't really matter when you're dead. Like, that's not

Simone Collins: the thing is, I think that like our final. The theme here might be that the bigger issue is that it's not like people are optimizing around dumb reasons for a life to well lived, like we alluded to in the beginning, which we don't agree with, you know, like how many people show up at the funeral pot, but they don't, there's, there is literally nothing, you know, like I'll just spend all my money, I will just like max out everything, nothing matters after I die.

No, I

Malcolm Collins: don't want to see this. I think that's true, but I think a different way to word that is they're optimizing around norm, like, like, living the cultural ideal set out like the aesthetic cultural [00:34:00] ideal set out by a specific community that they identify with. And one of the key problems of this is this often leads to an obsession.

With like, being okay with yourself and being okay with your identity. In a way that can become all consuming because it's so circular. It's only you who judges whether or not you're okay with who you are. And so when you live a life to be okay with who you are, you will never really be okay with who you are.

And that's kind of, one, a silly thing to live one's life around, I think. But two it's really sad that that has become so popular as a way to live.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I'm trying to think of instances in, in like the news where like a famous person died and we're like, yeah, they died. Well, are there any of those recently where like people have said someone died?

Well, do we just like kind of sweep it under the rug? Like there, there is no. People don't talk about dying well, living well, et cetera. I think they'd have people talk about like legacies left behind.

Malcolm Collins: Like, Oh, you and I do when somebody dies in our life, we're always like, okay, did they [00:35:00] live a good life or a bad life?

And this is like a family tradition that we want to have our kids do is when somebody dies, the way that they process that is we, as a family talk through, did they live a good life or a bad life? And we, we live in a society today where people can't say somebody lived a bad life, but our family, you know, we're like, okay, what was their value system?

Did they achieve what they wanted to achieve? What is our value system? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything meaningful by that? And, and, and using these two metrics, you know, if they lived a good life, then so what if they died? Like, great, they did it, you know?

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. If they, if they would be

Malcolm Collins: satisfied. No point, nothing to be sad about.

If they lived a bad life, then focus on where their life went off the rails and learn from that so that it doesn't happen to you. And I think it's often really clear where this happened. Either the person never developed really a good internal model for why they were alive or they, you know, tried methamphetamines or they, you know, married somebody who was just a horrible spouse to them.

Like there, there are obviously identifiable things and these can [00:36:00] be. A really clear way to like hit this home for our kids in thinking about another person's life and the quality of their life after they died in terms of how they categorize that person in their mental history. I

Simone Collins: appreciate that because I think there's this, this theme after people die of like, you can only say nice things about them.

I know this is not universal and people have written books like. About how they're glad their mom's dead, et cetera. But, you know, in general, people like this, though, you know, they're blameless. Oh, she was, he was great. She was amazing. You know,

Malcolm Collins: not great. Well, I love you, Simone. And, and please don't die anytime soon.

Cause I really need you to do a lot of things. Like, we have so

Simone Collins: much to do. We have so much to do. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But I believe we can do most of it in about 20 years. So if we live for 20 years, I think that we will have achieved most of the tasks we want to achieve and less

Simone Collins: disagree because. if we're successful in having the number of kids that we want to have you know, we need at least like 30 years to get our, [00:37:00] our youngest kid to I mean, I agree that like the risk goes down of a premature death because one can hope.

That older siblings would adopt and take in younger siblings. And we should probably set up trust incentives to do that. We're like, they'd be incentivized to come in and raise their youngest siblings as adults, but still we, we have a long way to go. And I'm not, I'm not ready at

Malcolm Collins: all. If we die, not like as a default plan.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Anyway, I love you. Don't die. Be safe. Okay.

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