How Will I Measure My Life?

Related: Paul Graham's “The Top of My Todo List” http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html

“A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. […]

“I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands

“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”

The book, "How Will You Measure Your Life," by Clayton Christensen is easily on my list of Top 5 Most Important books, I cannot recommend it enough.

Interestingly, Kent seems to have focused in on hygiene-motivation factors more than anything else, while the large takeaway I brought from the book is more about relationships than money/freetime options. While it is important to be locally maximizing the balance of those two, I found the message of the book to be about focusing outward, more away from one's self and career, and more towards others in ways that you can positively effect them.

Not saying at all that the content is wrong (because it's not, it's a fun engineering way of looking at it), but for those curious it also represents a subset of the book.

This man is quantifying his life into two things, money and freetime, nothing about quantifying the quality of your time at work, nothing about happiness, and nothing about being an ethical person. What's the point of having all the money, and all the free time in the world if you're an unhappy jackass who hates his job?

For those unaware, the author (and HN submitter apparently) is Kent Beck [0] who wrote Extreme Programming Explained and was one of the original signatories of the "Agile Manifesto."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck

I measure my life in a very abstract way. How much my existence is positive or negative to the world and to the people around me. Can I make people around me happier / have better lifes? How much of an environmental footprint am I creating? These are all impossible things to measure and I know that I might even contradict myself in how a feel about some of the things that I do but for me it's good enough for me to know what direction I would like to be heading.

When I look at the things that I am most grateful to have experienced in my life, none of the decisions that would have been motivated by optimization processes would have led to them coming about.

So what, then, is the point of optimization criteria, if they wouldn't actually enable any possible decision making that accomplishes the "goal"?

Sorry to be so down on this, Kent, but this line of reasoning is such a fail on so many levels. Once in a while--maybe often!--we should just turn off the optimizer and let life unfold.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned "financial independence" yet. Check out the subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence, and the blog called Mr. Money Mustache: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

Many software engineers get paid a lot of money, so it's not too difficult to retire at 35 if you can keep your expenses down.

There are a few metrics other people have considered that he seems to have overlooked; daylights, sunsets, midnights, and cups of coffee are all highly quantitative.

Qualitative measures are probably to be preferred though, e.g. Love.

I believe the purpose of life is joy. It comes from growth (ie learning, developing abilities, raising a happy family etc), and service to others (helping them grow or have happier lives), and from knowing one's life is pleasing to God (which can be personally known, it's not all that complicated nor needs to be argumentative). The things you'd want someone to talk about at your funeral. This belief is connected to a strong belief that life has a background, a purpose, is eternal, and growth can also be eternal (I'm a Mormon). I think much about maturity models for the various aspects of life, and how to use/share them. I have written some things about that (more to be added later I hope, just haven't got to posting it), somewhere buried under the features descriptions at http://onemodel.org . This life is hard, but very good, and the best is yet to come.

Good summary, thanks. I'd come to a less clear version of the same tradeoffs, thinking in terms of commitment level and capacity over time. Eg. 70hr week might be okay once a year but not 60hr for several weeks in a row due to draining personal reinvestment, which stunts the capacity growth that also would happen with the reinvestment time. "Vetting (commitment)" is the title of my freestyle lecture on YT. Your post is much more to the point; thanks again.

Something I still have bookmarked to likely get is a "Your Life in Weeks" poster (https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html). This would not be so much for planning as for keeping a sense of scope and proportion.

You will need a unit of life. If you have figured out what it is then you can measure life.

Could unit of life be

money? time? number of pizza's u ate? number of babies u had?

Or are they binary in nature?

Happy or Unhappy, Satisfied or Unsatisfied, Enjoyed or Not Enjoyed. Fulfilled or Unfulfilled?

What could it be?

Everyone measures and compares oneself to others all the time, why spend even more energy and time on that? Just try to not make stupid moves and all the rest should be fine

I think I would measure my life by how many people come to my funeral because they will miss me due to the positive impact I have had on their lives.

"many of the things that make life worth living aren’t measurable at all, or if they are measurable then they aren’t comparable. How many dinners with family equal one random act of kindness?"

I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable, incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement. It may be difficult to reason about the value of family dinners or acts of kindness, and more difficult still to calculate or approximate some kind of dinners-per-kindness measurement, but that's a different thing entirely from claiming there is not and cannot be such a measurement.

For example, you could adopt the axes from the rest of the article, and ask questions like "how much of my money and/or free time would I give up for a family dinner?" "how much would I give up for a random act of kindness?" "is there a minimum amount of money and/or free time I need to be able to afford family dinners or acts of kindness?" "if I only had enough to afford one of the two, which would I choose?"

Saying "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them" is the start of a series of interesting questions that ultimately yields a better understanding of yourself. Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.

Worse, the entire foundation of the premise is rotten. Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?

Yes you can. And the sooner you stop thinking that significance demands ignorance, the sooner you can start understanding and improving the things that are most important to you.

His chart is Freetime vs Money Options.. How about a more generic name: Time vs Money.

It's all measured in the total instagram likes and reddit tips..

Why would you want to measure your life?

You will only end up comparing your life to others, (which is not a particularly good thing to do in my opinion).

why did he post on fb lol

JavaScript free version: https://mbasic.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/how-will-i-measu...

I shudder to think about all the data Facebook manages to suck up when you give it the ability.

Tock tock Who's there? Facebook cryptocurrency.