思考与写作dcurt.is
那场抗争
The Fight
2012 — 2014，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这是 Dustin Curtis 的一篇自述文章：他在跑步机上突发心脏骤停、被救回一命后，反思生命与「奋斗」的意义，主张不要被惯性和现状推着走，要清醒地选择自己真正想投入的事。文章在 Hacker News 上两次引发大讨论，评论者既被触动，也对其中的励志结论提出质疑。
为什么经久不衰：它把「濒死体验」写成一篇关于人生优先级的追问，而评论区围绕「死亡到底该教我们什么」展开的争论同样精彩，十多年后读仍能促人自省。
HN 评论精选
濒死反思应让人重估而非强化既有目标，不必被世俗成功观绑架。
这当然是面对死亡的一种合理反应，但暗示所有人都该从中学习、都该这样生活，在我看来是误导。思考死亡不应让你加倍投入现有目标（尤其是那些「做出非凡成就」之类的空话，它们往往只是掩盖真实动机的面具），而应促使你重新审视它们。人终将一死，宇宙终将归于虚无，所以你成就什么都不重要——所有道路最终通向同一处。我认为思考死亡教给我们的，恰恰是不必遵从别人的价值观，去做让你快乐的事，哪怕它很平凡。
ForrestN查看英文原文
This, as any would be, is certainly a valid way to respond to a brush with death. But implying that this is somehow a lesson to be learned by everyone, suggesting that others should live their life this way, seems misguided to me in context. Contemplating your mortality shouldn't necessarily convince you to double down on your current priorities (especially if those priorities are centered around banal platitudes like "doing something remarkable with your life," which are probably masks to keep you from thinking about what really motivates you.) It should cause you to reevaluate them. The fact that you will die, the fact that everyone you know will die, and the fact that eventually the universe might become a field of equidistant neutrinos means that it really, really doesn't matter what you accomplish. All roads, if you stay on them long enough, lead to the same place. There will be no progress. There will be no one remarking. I would say that the lesson to be learned from thinking about death is just that there's no reason to adhere to anyone else's values, or to feel pressure to do anything in particular. You should do what you want, what makes you happy, even if it's humble. Existential steps backward can be a tool to remove yourself from things that aren't really helpful, like for example a hyper-competitive capitalist rat-race justified by language like "fight the status quo" or "great visions of the future" that, instead of contributing to humanity, is mostly really about love, insecurity, and fear of death (like so many human pursuits). "Fighting" here, the battle between the heroic pursuit of accomplishment on the one hand and the "insidious machine called quo" on the other, is just the author reporting his own conflicts about what he wants to do. Part of him wants to expend massive amounts of energy attempting to out-compete the people he sees as his peers. But another part of him doesn't want to do that, which is why he loses motivation and doesn't always end up behaving the way a hero-CEO might. There is not some kind of evil, inherent inertia at work that all people must fight against. Instead, there is only ambivalence and subconscious motives. In my opinion, if you really internalize death and it's implications, the notion that you can justify prescribing ways of thinking or behaving just starts to look absurd.
亲历他人濒死让他对自身必死性有了切身体会。
不久前我在伦敦街头遇到一位陷入困境的老人，等救护车时他「死」了——没有心跳、没有呼吸、嘴唇发紫。我立刻给他做心肺复苏直到救护车赶到。几个月后我得知他活了下来。任何与死亡擦肩的经历都会逼你认真思考自己的必死性。看着这个陌生人的眼睛失去神采，对我而言是改变人生的经历。
jgrahamc查看英文原文
Some time ago I came across an elderly man in some difficulty lying in the street in London. While waiting for an ambulance he 'died' (no heart beat, no respiration, no signs of life at all, blue lips and gums) and I immediately did CPR on him until the ambulance arrived. Months later I learnt that he survived. Any brush with death makes you seriously think about your own mortality. I know that watching this stranger's eyes go dead was quite life changing for me.
对死亡的真正理解只能来自亲身经历，说教无效。
道理都对，但如果你没有亲人或好友去世或濒临死亡，再多说教——「活在当下！对抗惯性！活得尽兴！」——都没用。你必须亲身经历，遗憾的是没有别的途径。我父亲两年前突然去世，就这样，前一秒还在，下一秒就没了。我试图把那种感受写下来让人共鸣，但没用。那是一种没人会自愿再经历一次的体验，太黑暗了。
huhtenberg查看英文原文
It's all good, but if you haven't had a close relative or a close friend die or come close to it, then no amount of preaching - Live now! Fight the momentum! Live it to the fullest! - is going to do any good. You have to experience it, unfortunately there's no other way. My dad died suddenly two years ago. Just like that - here he is, poof, here he is not. I tried to capture the feelings in a written form and then have people relate. It does not work. It is a sort of experience that no one will re-live willingly. It's just too damn dark.
「看似健康」可能是假象，突发心脏病说明潜在问题未被发现。
这是一篇好文章，但我觉得还有一层 Dustin 可以理解地没去强调：所谓「身体完全健康」往往是幻觉。按我近年对健康的了解，我不相信他真的一直很健康，否则不会只是在跑步机上慢跑就心脏骤停。我们多数人感觉和看起来「完全健康」，却在为时已晚时才发现潜伏的重症——这主要是现代医学和健康观念的失败。答案或许在「量化自我」或 PG 所说的「持续诊断」这类方向。
tomhoward查看英文原文
It's a great post, but to me there's another message that Dustin - understandably - hasn't focused on: "perfect health" is often (usually?) an illusion. Given what I've learned about health in recent years, I can't accept that this guy really was in perfect health; if he was, he wouldn't have suffered a major cardiac arrest while simply jogging on a treadmill. I think it's mostly a failure of modern medicine and modern attitudes towards health that most of us walk around feeling and looking like we're in "perfect" health, only to find all too late that a severe condition was lurking undetected. The answers may lie in fields like Quantified Self [1], or PG's suggestion of Ongoing diagnosis [2]. But whatever the case, we're only just starting to scratch the surface of an area that I think this post demonstrates is hugely important. [1] http://quantifiedself.com/ [2] http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
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