> These people who live a vigorous life to 70, 80, 90 years of age—when I look at what those people “do,” almost all of it is what I classify as play. It’s not meaningful work. They’re riding motorcycles; they’re hiking. Which can all have value—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.
I'm never really to sure which to find more shocking about these kind of public intellectuals, their hubris in thinking they can define what makes a life meaningful for someone-- everyone--else or that they are often given positions of actual influence.
Then again, maybe things makes more sense if the people running the world think the only thing giving other peoples lives meaning is work.
> > These people who live a vigorous life to 70, 80, 90 years of age—when I look at what those people “do,” almost all of it is what I classify as play. It’s not meaningful work. They’re riding motorcycles; they’re hiking. Which can all have value—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.
Made me think about a few Frankl's quote
> For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion, “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
The funny thing is that people shitting on other's "meaningless hobbies" are very often in the second category he talks about:
> Moreover, there are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money.
Seems they think that those lives serve no utility for others, thus they are not meaningful. Forgetting that a life is most meaningful for the person whose it is. Would have expected more stringency from an intellectual.
It would be sad if it wasn't infuriating. If they had only influence over their own lives then this would only a sad story. Idiots like John Lee decide the cancerous policy that configures our society. They as well be demons because their entire lives seem to be dedicated to torturing human beings by contorting their lives into an unnatural and subordinate lives as if it's the only thing that gives them pleasure.
I'd like to agree and note that assuming we get to post-scarcity conditioning quality of life on work will be a bad definition.
On the other hand I recall, as a PhD student, David Cox lightly napping in the audience of a conference (he'd have been about 90), only to wake up for the questions and fire off some insights. So there is certainly some merit in the theory of a nexus between 'meaningful work' and living a long and engaged life, at least for some people.
Imo, society needs more of this, and these ideas are not in any way new to philosophy. We live in an age of widespread hedonism and much of the way people live is unhealthy on an individual and societal basis. I fully reject the "be yourself, do what makes you happy" mindset of today because the ideal day for a young person now is sleeping in, eating sugar for breakfast, smoking weed, playing video games and watching porn all day. Most people don't take it to that extreme, but too many people, in my opinion, go in that direction instead of the direction of moral productive work and rearing children that actually advances the human race and improves their life outside of momentary feelings of pleasure.
Delayed childrearing is also sometimes a desire to have intense and high-effort experiences: living in new countries, learning new languages, acquiring skills, climbing mountains, etc. The idea is once you have a committed partner your life is mostly over, and once you have a kid it's completely over, so you'd better have lived fully by then. To be honest, the messaging from my own parents was not too far off of that.
Some friends are theoretically open to committed partners, but only if they can be long-distance for the first few years while completing their adventures around the world. There's a big push against compromising even your travel agenda, let alone your career, to be with someone.
This is a really bizarre comment, to me at least. The central point of travel in your post, particularly, as some sort of universal, valuable goal is an unfamiliar concept to me. Travel, along with what I'm guess most of what you consider as "intense and high-effort experiences" to do before "your life is over" after getting married and having kids I would probably categorize as the self-destructive and ultimately pointless pleasure seeking I'm advocating against. My point is the fact that you and most people consider this "desirable" is not good. If you think you should seek a great deal of pleasure before "ending" your life by becoming a responsible adult, my advice is to get addicted to heroin, as it will offer a far more intense pleasure than travel, or whatever else you mean.
I have a hard time with the idea that there is anything moral or immoral about work or leisure. In 50 years time, it's very unlikely anything 'work' I have done will matter.
Leisure activities are only immoral if they hurt yourself or others. If your activities lead you to become an overweight shut-in in poor health with few friends, sure. You could make the argument they are immoral.
I think you can be a retired dabbler and dilettante and absolutely live a 'good life'. At the end of the day, all that matters is that we live lives true to ourselves and our relationships with others. All of our accomplishments are dust in the wind, and will be forgotten.
My point of moral productive work was to differentiate it from things like financial fraud or telemarketing, which require a great deal of work, but are ultimately unproductive and/or come at the expense of society.
My other point about leisure/pleasure seeking is that you are always, no matter what, giving your life to something. If you give your life to leisure/pleasure it is a resource that is wasted that detracts both from your life, and the lives of any person you may have helped with that resource. I reject the notion that self destructive behavior doesn't hurt anyone else. I'd hate to live in a society of bums and drug addicts. We all do better when we all do better.
Right now, fully a third of all of my work efforts (read: taxes) are wasted on retired dabblers and dilettantes who do nothing to help the rest of us. Their pleasure comes at the cost of myself, and my children.
So long as you pass on your genes and your ideas, your efforts matter on Earth, and potentially our actions matter on a spiritual/supernatural level. The only respite I find in these conversations as that the hedonists will just be dust in the wind.
>> moral productive work and rearing children that actually advances the human race
Do not assume that everyone has the freedom to make such decisions. Moral decisions are ones that you can make regardless of life circumstance. Many people simply cannot afford the traditional lifestyle of getting married and having kids. I don't mean incels, I mean that all over the world there are young people who want to marry and have kids but are locked into economic situations that preclude the ability to take that "moral" path.
This is partially caused by the thinking in the article.
The modern selfish senior would rather live 5 more years in a nursing home with a bad quality of life than give their inheritance to their children. The inheritance is instead given to the state and megacorps.
I would encourage you to read up on "the success sequence". It's very simple to avoid poverty, but it involves depriving yourself of pleasure. I say this as someone who grew up in poverty and escaped it.
Poverty isn't what I meant. There are people, sometimes rather well off people, who are nevertheless in economic situations that preclude marriage. For instance, some people have elderly or disabled family members which they must take care of. There is huge gap, the entire middle class, between "poverty" and not having enough money to hire 24/7 care. Others have good well-paid jobs, but jobs that mean they are located in places with male/female ratio that makes finding a partner next to impossible (China's "bachelor" villages). Still others are limited by cultural norms that do not accept marriage of persons without traditional full-time employment regardless of wealth (India, Japan). Just look at the difficulties surrounding Japan's princess. The real issue there isn't that her husband is poor, he really isn't, but that he doesn't have a traditional fulltime job.
An obvious missing thought by John Lee here is that people would go for their hedonism at different ages depending on their expected years remaining.
If you told me I will live to 100, quitting at 70 to travel the world sounds ok.
If you told me I’ll die at 50, I will be retiring before that.
By prolonging life from 80 to 90, we also encourage people to retire later. So even if “meaningful” would mean “work” (and oh boy, it doesn’t) it still is important to to prolong life.
You can always trust an intellectual to not consider anything but first order effects I guess.
An important conversation, but I don’t feel this piece contributes anything. Hand-waving words are not going to solve the hard problems of where to allocate limited dollars.
Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) are a widely used tool for measuring and reasoning about health care trade offs. They let you make utilitarian estimations on welfare to evaluate outcomes.
The author is basically using a sentiment-driven “think of the children!” style argument, without making any attempt to weigh or quantify harms on either branch of the decision tree. That isn’t a particularly helpful approach in public health policy in my opinion.
To be fair they seem to be responding to opinion pieces (not data driven arguments) from the other side of the argument so maybe I’m setting too high a bar. But I feel the QALY based approach is not the mainstream idea, particularly in the USA, so it warrants a bit more defending.
Oh boy, yet another "actshually" filled with emotions that supposed to give "another view".
You precisely know what Emanuel and Lee mean when they quanyify that someone with 25 years is a greater loss than someone with 60 years. This emotional story about grandmother does nothing to change their statement.
That's not the point that the article takes issue with. Not the difference in time, which the author acknowledges is important, but the classification of those later years as being inherently less valuable than the younger ones.
The problem is that insurances pool everyones money for treatment. No death can be prevented, only deferred.
Is it justified to extend the life of a terminal cancer patient for another miserable few months with chemotherapy, at full cost to everyone else in the pool?
I dare say not, and QUALY is the measure we use to calculate this, imperfect as it may be. It also is worth noting that QUALY is not conditioned on worker productivity, as suggested in the article.
Everyone wants their grandma to get the most treatment possible, just no one else's. When it's "society" - people will say we're spending too much money. When the shoe is on their foot, people won't like it and say they "deserve the best care."
> for another miserable few months with chemotherapy,
My grandfather hated chemo. But he did it for those few more months - and he got to see my cousin get married. How do you account for this? You can't.
Indeed, you can not emotionally account for individual tragedies or circumstances with a statistical measure. Unfortunately, somebody has to financially account for it, because as I said, this is a pool of money that everyone chips into.
If you are willing to pay extra, or out of pocket, to have your life extended to the absolute limits, that is fine with me, but please do not push this attitude as the “morally right one” unto everyone else.
> but please do not push this attitude as the “morally right one” unto everyone else.
I will push whatever I want to, thank you. Insurance is supposed to provide healthcare. It isn't supposed to judge what is a good life. I shouldn't have to pay extra for care that I was always paying for because you're mad your rates went up. Don't like it, don't buy the care. Ridiculous assumption to let society decide when people should live and die.
It's also unnecessary to. On the populations we are talking about, individual cases like people living long on chemo in miserable lives to die are counteracted by people who died way younger. It's easy to calculate the risk and spread that among insurance holders.
Let me rephrase that: When making an emotional appeal, you aren't making a sound argument. It's effective, but also intellectually dishonest.
> Insurance is supposed to provide healthcare.
Healthcare providers provide healthcare. They need to get paid. Insurance providers offer the insured the possibility to spread the risk of large individual healthcare costs among many participants.
If you have the opinion that health insurance should be a universal right, you will also have to consider that those countries who have such systems also put strict limits on the extent of end-of-life healthcare.
> I shouldn't have to pay extra for care that I was always paying for because you're mad your rates went up.
If costs go up, rates go up. As your individual risk goes up, your individual rates go up. The more you pay, the better your insurance is going to be able to cover you. You're going to pay extra either way.
What are you going to do if you can't afford insurance anymore, except the most basic plans that are capped at the top? You're not going to be able to afford that last round of chemo.
> Don't like it, don't buy the care.
So... let the prices rise until nobody can afford insurance anymore, then blame the people for not buying it? Medicare-for-all? I'm afraid that won't pay for everything either.
> Ridiculous assumption to let society decide when people should live and die.
That's the way it works either way. If you lived in a hypothetical society that goes to any length to extend everyone's life to the maximum extent possible, then that society decided that.
> On the populations we are talking about, individual cases like people living long on chemo in miserable lives to die are counteracted by people who died way younger.
People who died way younger also stopped paying way younger. It's also rare. The chance of developing cancer in your lifetime is 1 in 4.
Furthermore, in many cases, the effectiveness of chemotherapy is quite low, especially considering its severe impact on QOL. Many doctors refuse chemo after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, opting for palliative care instead.
> It's easy to calculate the risk and spread that among insurance holders.
It's easy to calculate the cost, it's not so easy to actually get it paid. Suppose your cost rises by 10%, so you raise prices by 10%. As a result, revenue goes down 5%, because people drop out of insurance. You need to raise prices again, or reduce coverage, increase co-pays, and so on.
It's not later years per se but level of health which is adjusted for.
We tend to think of this in terms of whether we should extend life with poor years or not but if you think about treatments or devices which won't extend life but might well have a dramatic effect on level of health, mobility etc during those years then it becomes clearer why this is an important consideration. I think most people would say that in a resource constrained world there still ought to be room to fund those things.
Surely, this evaluation relates to the public sphere perspective. Along with insurance companies, every single relevant government action that requires estimations of life value, tacitly or explicitly agrees that later years are indeed less valuable than the younger ones and likely, always will. NICE - the UK medical board that decides which medicines can be used in the NHS, constantly makes calculations on quality of life for all ages. This is inevitable if public funds are involved.
In the private sphere, it’s a completely different matter. This seemingly 'uncaring' stance only applies where public decisions are involved. No reason for this evaluation to necessarily work at a personal level if the state (taxpayer) does not pay for it.
> But are these life-endings [of a young person and an old person] equivalent? Perhaps, on a philosophical level, they are. On a practical level, however, the death of an 85-year-old person from a preventable cause has cost them a few years at the end of life, while a 25-year-old has, on the same calculation, lost over 60 years of life, including their most active and event-filled years.
Every time I think about the USA, I get a strong feeling that the current structure of systems are designed for the old to flourish and at a heavy cost of the young. I would be surprised if my feeling is actually wrong and everything isn't actually designed for the older population to continue flourishing the longest at the cost of the young. I'm curious what HN thinks. I personally think the value of the young should be set higher to flourish than the old and the systems of society should be designed that way.
The more accurate picture is that the US is designed for the wealthy to flourish. As it happens, the wealthy tend to be older for a variety of reasons.
A wealthy 25 year old is unlikely to face any significant risk that they will miss out on a medical procedure vs. an older adult, or ultimately face any existential risk for that matter.
How many billionaires have had multiple bankruptcies?
I don’t understand the logic here. Yes, of course a wealthy person will be able to pay for procedures and avoid going broke. Isn’t this universally true? Perhaps you meant the US is poorly designed for poor people, which is not something you can say about every country.
The previous generations got a lot of stuff for free by promising each other pensions and not funding them. Obviously they were better off than we were: we don't have access to this trick anymore, and have to make actual sacrifices today if we want to retire in the future. To say nothing of the taxes we will have to pay in exchange for services long gone.
Corporations (and the mob) generally stole the funds of the pension and used them. And they were promised pensions in line with prevailing wages, which were higher.
My impression of the US in the pandemic era is that the value of the old is not held in high regard. Even prior, culture was focused on the young.
However the value of money (which on average the old may have more of?) and catering to those who have it is definitely real and may be what you are suggesting.
I think the main reason for the investment differential between the young and the old is that spending on the elderly is typically urgent. Problems for the elderly are mostly health related and if left unfunded will means someone, somewhere will be blamed. Problems for the young will show up later in some second order effect or missed opportunity. That's really hard to hold someone accountable for (especially public officials) and so its much easier to ignore.
You should always vote against improving the lives of those younger than you at the cost of your own well-being, since you will never be younger than you are now.
Pretty sure this was a satirical post you guys, of course the youth are more important than the old. They're the only ones who can reproduce and ensure we have a strong civilization for thousands of years to come.
People commenting on this story should state their age. It would be interesting to help understand aspects of the answer. Some parts of this essay worked for me but I believe in QALYS as a basic measure to keep in mind, like millimorts.
Another version of this thesis is "it takes a village to rear a child"
Completely off topic, but... it does take a village to raise a child.
I understand that instinctively, and I suppose I've read enough factual articles about it to believe it, but I'm missing a real explanation. Something I could point people at in lieu of trying to explain why that is, myself, which covers everything from "A higher diversity of 'parents' is helpful" to "it's not good to segregate children by age, actually".
I don't suppose you'd have something?
Or perhaps more likely, fiction which demonstrates the same thing would be valuable. Fictional evidence may not be evidence, but it's good at convincing people all the same. My personal favorite in the genre is Non Non Biyori; if you want to take a look, it's an excellent and relaxing story for these times.
I think, if you go into genetics, you would be looking to the altruistic benefits to the gene pool of non-gene transfer roles in the community and effect on the gene overall. Lots of organisms show collective child rearing, for defense against predators, for food management, to ensure 'sneaky fucker' offspring get raised (that whole top-dog king-lion thing is a bit of a myth: everybody gets some, if they can..)
It's got to be cultural, right? In humanity's case...
Anyway, my personal opinion isn't so much about long-term outcomes. Those seem almost wholly determined by genetics, anyway. It's instead a question of--
How happy is the child? How much do they enjoy life?
I feel like that's a question which researchers tend to miss, and/or assume doesn't matter -- perhaps because it's harder to measure -- but isn't enjoyment of life the entire goal, in the first place? And childhood is a significant fraction of life.
I really disliked this essay. It seems to not be saying very much; what little it's saying doesn't really need to be said; and moreover what little it's saying doesn't need to be said, of all times, right now.
It strikes me as a kind of mawkish attempt to rebut the comments of two doctors about weighing the lives and well-being of younger people more heavily than that of older people when forced to make public policy choices. I'm not sure why these particular doctors need rebutting; the more extreme of them, Ezekiel Emanuel, made some comments seven years ago and a year and a half ago that are being responded to; the other, John Lee, published an essay on Unherd recently, which is a fairly fringe site I think? Looking at Wikipedia it's British, so maybe it's not so fringe in the the UK? But The Hedgehog Review and Alan Jacobs, the author of this piece are both American. At any rate, neither of them are prominent or influential. And truth be told, it seems like Emanuel - who seems to have said some pretty unpleasant things and is the primary target here - was roped in as a way to tarnish Lee's more recent, more relevant, more even-handed comments.
The upshot is, old people can do meaningful things, like go on vacation and have a fun time, too! ...which is so banal as to not really be worth saying. Of course they can! They just...can do a lot less of it in the remainder of their lives, on average, across the entirety of the population; and they've had more opportunity to do so already compared to the young. Under normal circumstances this doesn't really matter. But when circumstances are forcing a choice...well. Jacobs acknowledges that maybe we do have to make some kind of brutal calculations, but doesn't really suggest how; he just pleads sentimentally. Which isn't surprising, because if you're ever actually willing to make that kind of brutal calculation, it's hard to imagine a moral calculus that says "killing young people with their lives ahead of them so the elderly can get a few more golden years in" is the right way to go. And there's the kicker, in the conclusion: "it would be good if some of our public-health experts would find a way to incorporate those ineffable but vital things into their calculations", as though any public-health experts anywhere seem to be willing to make the trade-off he seems to be accusing them of making.
And - admittedly this is more of an emotional reaction - the paragraph about how "['Covidtide'] has offered opportunities for renewed connection and a deepening of affection" feels, to me, borderline offensive in light of everything "Covidtide" (ugh) has wrought: the deaths from the disease itself, the mental health disaster of isolation, the poverty from economic shutdown, the debt we'll spend decades paying off (at the cost to social services), abuse victims trapped in their homes with their abusers...I guess it's just an attempt to look for a silver lining in a bad situation, but looking all that in the face and saying, "ah, but it's so nice that I got to spend a bit of extra time with my grandkids!" smells faintly repulsive.
> First of all, they evaluate the quality of life almost wholly in terms of activity, especially professional activity. Valuable years for Lee are “active and event-filled” years. Emanuel asserts, “There are not that many people who continue to be active and engaged and actually creative past 75. It’s a very small number.” It is hard to know whether this is true because he doesn’t define “active” or “engaged” or “creative,” but elsewhere in the same interview he is extremely dismissive of anything, including especially “play,” that is not “meaningful work.” He is quite explicit in his scorn for anyone, even well past retirement age, who lives for play rather than work: “But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.”
> And truth be told, it seems like Emanuel - who seems to have said some pretty unpleasant things and is the primary target here - was roped in as a way to tarnish Lee's more recent, more relevant, more even-handed comments.
Lee never defines active as having to do with professional activity (at least not in what's quoted in the article), that is Emanuel's definition.
> what little it's saying doesn't need to be said, of all times, right now.
The philosophy of life and death needs to be considered and discussed especially when humankind is faced with difficult choices of life and death. The choice of optimizing saved life-years may be the right one now, but we as human beings must not become cynical. The value of life can not be measured in terms of events and activity.
I do understand your point of view. For someone who has lost much to Covid-19 and realizes how much we will lose, it is easy to read the article as childish and arrogant. But that is not the only way to read it.
In the 50' we used to see Science Fiction stories about robots taking the yoke of labor from our shoulders, to allow us all to live our better, truer lives.
Now that it's happening, all modern philosophers can think of is, How to get Everybody Back To Work! Like that is some end in itself.
I'm never really to sure which to find more shocking about these kind of public intellectuals, their hubris in thinking they can define what makes a life meaningful for someone-- everyone--else or that they are often given positions of actual influence.
Then again, maybe things makes more sense if the people running the world think the only thing giving other peoples lives meaning is work.