death and succession — Tarik Yildirim

Proper time management is impossible for the simple reason that you do not know when you will die. You can not just take the longevity statistics of your population and do a global optimisation over your whole lifetime, because these statistics are meaningless on an individual level.

Do not live as if you will die tomorrow. (Otherwise you will quickly turn into an hedonist.) Do not live as if you will live until 75 neither. (Otherwise you will be making naively long unrealistic plans.) The best is to imagine that you still have another couple of years to go.

Imagining far future makes me anxious. The feeling that something great lies ahead reminds me of death.

People spend a lot of effort to switch from a goal-oriented mindset to a process-oriented one. For me, this happens automatically for all the long-term tasks. Deep down I feel that I will never be able to complete these tasks anyway. In other words, I have no choice but to climb for the sake of climbing.

After my daughter's birth, a lot has changed. In fact, things started changing even before her birth.

I have become more afraid of dying. I have also started to feel this hard-to-describe "succession urge". I want to help her navigate through life. (For instance, I secretly wish that she will read all the stuff I have written here when she grows up.)

But who am I to entertain such thoughts? I rejected my own dad's dreams of succession. Ela will probably reject mine as well. That is how adolescents build-up character, right? May be I am wrong and these instinctive feelings are there for a reason. Perhaps a proper hand-over of accumulated knowledge, wealth etc does not need to fuck up the character build-up process. May be it is all about how something is handed over rather than what is actually handed over.