On passion and regret.

I wanted to write down some thoughts about a couple of threads that I've been pulling on recently.

At some level, the best people I have known weigh their personal utility function against their own mortality. Humans have a lot of different ways of coping with death. The practice of death meditation is something that the stoics advocated for as a core tenet of leading a virtuous life. Christians have a concept of memento mori, which the title of this blog post is derived from. A related religious practice is the Maraṇasati, one of the Buddhist Five Rememberances, which has grown to encompass a variety of practical exercises for clarifying the reality of your own mortality to yourself.

I've had the pleasure to work with and get to know some amazingly intelligent, driven people, and have watched a lot of different life paths unfold. Great engineers see ambiguity and tradeoffs in most things, they care about getting to the essence of problems, and they are frustrated when people don't think about the world in the same way. One of my favorite YouTube videos about this... read more