mountainFrugal Journal

[guitarplayer]

I was also meant to say that to 195 is quite a span ! I am trying to device a way to empirically find my HR max, dug out an old Garmin and the highest I had gone to recently was 177 which obviously I could go higher. I think I will try again with burpees but go from jump straight to squat for some 50 times, this should I hope get me to the theoretical 220 - age. Though if you have a tried and tested way to squeeze the last breath from someone, let me know! I easily manage to game myself so this needs to be something very hard to hack / cut corners.

[7Wannabe5]

I think this is mostly for egoistical reasons having doubled down on some career that gives you some semblance of prestige.

Yeah, I grok this. I still sometimes find myself identifying as book dealer even though it hasn't been my main gig for a while now. However, I also sometimes describe myself as being a Permaculturist in certain contexts, even though I sold my last project several years ago and never rolled a cash profit. I sometimes just say math tutor, because that is my main very part time gig currently, but it seems incomplete. I never say LentilBaby, but mostly because most people wouldn't get the lentil part and nobody would believe the baby part based on my appearance. On one of my dating profiles, I metaphorically described my occupation as "I occupy a dilapidated gypsy caravan parked in Thoreau's bean field." The funny thing is that the last time I briefly worked a low prestige job as one of my gigs, I got shit for being too much of a "princess"; I think mostly because I forgot to make an effort to adjust my vocabulary like I did when I hung out with the burn-out crew in high school, but also because I asked about the location of the hazardous waste bin.

One of the most frequent responses I have received over the years to whatever I say is, "Can you make a living at that?" which always strikes me as a somewhat difficult question to answer when I am obviously not dead yet. Since this is also obviously kind of a Midwest thing, I sometimes just nod my head or point towards whatever sort of vehicle I arrived in and reply, "You see what I'm driving." which will almost certainly get a laugh. During the last recession in some areas, the standard question became, "Still working?" so "Not much. You?" pretty well covered me.

[mountainFrugal]

Yeah. I am likely due for a retest for maxHR. I did it a few years ago to come up my initial zones on this ridge run that got gradually steeper. I hit 192 on the wrist watch and had to physically stop moving. A true test is you collapse and fly off of a treadmill while using a heart rate chest strap. My estimate is that I had a few more beats! It also might be off because of the wrist watch estimate. 220 minus your age is just a rule of thumb so don't get too caught up with it. If you are doing a lot of regular exercise and have been for a while it will not be accurate. If you are doing a test like this you want the load to gradually increase after at least a 10-15 minute warm up. That is why they are usually done on a treadmill that gradually increases the angle or a stationary bike that gradually increases the resistance. You might look into volunteering for a university exercise study as a way to get one for free.

https://www.gla.ac.uk/undergraduate/deg ... e-science/
https://education-sport.ed.ac.uk/resear ... d-research

This training year I am going to be spending much more time in zone 2 155-162. If you are just starting out you want to avoid this zone until you have a really good base. My workout yesterday was 15 minute warm up, 30 minute ramp through zone 1 and then 1.25 hours doing zone 2. I can have a slightly uncomfortable continuous conversation at that pace. This year is going to build on top of the massive base to harvest gains!

@7w5 Yeah. There is some masking involved depending on who you are interacting with. It is easier to ask questions than to give specific answers. "I retired from science and now make and teach art full-time" is my go-to response. It is true, shuts up the prestige folks, is not that pretentious, and implies that money is a solved issue given my age. If the prestige folks want to challenge it I have a lot of back-ups describing how I no longer need to work, but find what I do enjoyable.

[AxelHeyst]

But I do agree that INTJs are more risk averse.

Also, though, more likely to see through to the idea that over-abundant small-potatoes risk-aversion is the greatest risk of all (getting to the end of life having never lived according to one's own terms being the greatest risk of all) and counter that risk via highly calculated risk-taking systems.

[mountainFrugal]

The risk of not having lived terrifies me and should terrify everyone who has read any of the literature on end of life care/interviews.

[chenda]

The risk of not having lived terrifies me and should terrify everyone who has read any of the literature on end of life care/interviews.

What does it conclude?

[mountainFrugal]

That being scared of doing something that you wanted to do is one of the largest regrets along side not spending time with loved ones. More or less - I wish I had the courage to freedom-to!

Nicely summarized by pallitive care expert: https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/

" I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I had let myself be happier."

Large long term and eventual end of life study: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Life-Lesson ... 198216669X
See also Dr. BJ Miller's talks on youtube.

Add: To be clear I do not fear death. I just want to live as if I knew it were coming next week and I had time to contemplate it that I would not have any of the above regrets. If I am lucky and am somehow on the survivorship bias end of the distribution then that would also be a welcomed outcome from my lifestyle design. At the timescales of nature death is already a week away.

[chenda]

Thanks that looks interesting.

[ertyu]

It's easy to say you regret not taking the risk at the end of your life. The danger that stopped you isn't salient any more (you won't break your neck and be a paraplegic, you won't be stuck with 16 children until you're so ground down there's nothing left of you, you won't suffer derision from everyone you knew and end up as a hate-crime statistic...). Some fears are dumb (see the whole "but what if i fail and look like an idiot" class). Some "fears" are very much rational responses. "I wish I lived life true to myself rather than what people wanted of me" congrats if you were born gay in Iran, for instance. That sort of thing.

Early in life, the danger is salient, the possible maybe-reward of risking it all is a pie in the sky. At the end of life, what you never got to have is real and salient, while all the risks that stopped you are now immaterial. Neither vantage point is inherently "wiser" - they're just different vantage points. What I hope for for myself at the end of my life is to have compassion for the younger me. Of course I'll probably wish I had hings I feel I missed out on and regret I missed out on them. But I hope for acceptance first -- that life sometimes just turns out this way, and that I also missed out on a lot of suffering by not taking a different course.

[jacob]

Nicely summarized by pallitive care expert: https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/

" I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I had let myself be happier."

Is this corrected for individual preferences? Kinda like how taking the average of people's preferences suggests that everybody should enjoy traveling, eating out, talk about how they're doing and feeling, birthday parties, a massage, singing, ... whereas that's not necessarily everybody's cup of tea.

[mountainFrugal]

@etryu - knowing what you hope for is more than most people.

@jacob - most certainly not, but it is at least a good place to start for most people. You are likely safe... but who knows, you might regret not having lived that ESFP or ESFJ lyfe j/k

[7Wannabe5]

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

Maybe INTJs won't have this regret, because Te is a working dog, and also INTJs super-power when combined with Ni. Also, I didn't mean to imply that INTJ was a super risk-averse type, just tilted a bit that way from Pure Rational, whereas ENTP tilts to irrationally optimistic. INTJ: My no-fail long-term marshmallow accumulation strategy is flawless. ENTP: Best case scenario: Have marshmallow and eat it too! Worst case scenario: I will know what happens when a marshmallow is run through the Xerox machine and/or potentially funny story someday.

Rolling into my last quarter, I don't have any of those regrets (or their potential opposites like "I wish I had kept my shit together and not expressed my feelings so much."), and nothing is even popping up on my Big Stuff I Still Haven't Done screen like it usually does when I'm about to enter a new decade. It has been my experience that some of the big items get crossed off the list because you did them, some get crossed off because you did something that effectively served the same purpose, and some just eventually fall off because developmentally resolved. It can even happen that you end up doing something at a juncture where it no longer seems so big. OTOH, you can also always try to remember what your big things were when you were 10 or 30 and see if you can shine them up a bit larger. Odd thing is that interests often persist as values change and perspective matures. If you wanted/appreciated the consumer product toy version from Santa when you were 8, you'll probably still want the post-consumer developmentally appropriate version of achieving or actualizaing it at 60.

[guitarplayer]

Is this corrected for individual preferences? Kinda like how taking the average of people's preferences suggests that everybody should enjoy traveling, eating out, talk about how they're doing and feeling, birthday parties, a massage, singing, ... whereas that's not necessarily everybody's cup of tea.

I take it liberally

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

With the proviso life true to myself can be life others expected of me for some people, like the most common Kegan level.

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

As in 'do something I don't want to do that others (including for example from my past experiences = 'duty') tell me to do.

I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

To others or to myself, outward or inward.

I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Friends can be authors of old books or non people for example

I wish I had let myself be happier.

Well, @suo recently mentioned about squishy terms and happiness is one of them. Maybe invert this.

[jacob]

Maybe INTJs won't have this regret, [...]

Indeed! My worry is that I might regret not having worked harder or that I somehow could have done more to make a difference [that made a difference].

[suomalainen]

I dunno why one would wait until the end of life to examine any regrets. Presumably if you've been doing this all along, you'll have self-corrected enough so that by the end of your life, you'll mostly be doing what you want to do be doing and mostly be avoiding what you want to avoid. Having done this consistently, I suppose your life satisfaction levels would be higher? As if your memory is simply the sum of a series of experiences? In contrast, I wonder if peak-end theory of memory controls, and you'll be more satisfied at your death bed if you're more satisfied with the peak and end of your life, and less if less. Like, maybe at your death bed you're more likely to be unhappy if recent events have been unhappy (child won't speak to you, painful course of painful chemotherapy, etc.) as opposed to you have a big happy 4 generation christmas gathering and everyone hugs grandpa and then he dies as he settles into bed with a satisfied sigh and a smile.

As to the list, everyone has (gets to choose?) their own values, even if a species has a lot of overlap among individuals (gasp).

[chenda]

There's a good chance you'll be riddled with dementia at the of life in which case none of this will even matter.

[bos]

Having a close sibling quickly highlights ones regrets. I don’t have to wait until the end of my life to reflect on them. Every piece of advice I give my younger brother is a blend of my successes and regrets.

[jacob]

There's a good chance you'll be riddled with dementia at the of life in which case none of this will even matter.

It's only 10-15% insofar you live an average life span of 75ish. I think it's more pertinent to wonder whether you'll still care about the things you do today twenty years from now. To be fair, a substantial fraction of humanity live most of their lives not changing most in terms of values, etc. from back when they were still in HS, that not uncommonly being the high-point in their life.

[mountainFrugal]

I agree with @guitarplayer's liberal interpretation of the questions and also intend to die with my boots on if I can help it.

In grad school I did some of the exercises suggested in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Year-Live-This-W ... 0609801945 . However, I did not actually read the book, only did a year countdown with some of the exercises and discussed it with my mid-50s computer programmer friend/sparring partner after our Kung Fu classes. The point is to act and behave as if death is right around the corner. As Suo mentioned above, this should offer you ample time to course correct as you go.

Here is a summary I found of some of the exercises:
https://www.themortalatheist.com/blog/a ... hen-levine

The most interesting one(s) to me involve altering your senses (blindfold, hearing loss, etc.) or being completely taken care of by someone for 24 hours. I think contemplating those and simulating them could be especially insightful for all the "rugged individuals" we have around here. Even if you did not do any of the exercises outlined in the blog post, if you have immediate reactions to any of them, it might be a place to be curious about as to why.

Forget old age, it will be here soon enough for all of us (and maybe already here for you). If you were going to die on December 19, 2025...what, if anything, would you do differently?

[jacob]

Forget old age, it will be here soon enough for all of us (and maybe already here for you). If you were going to die on December 19, 2025...what, if anything, would you do differently?

Trick question? Everything I've ever done made sense at the time I did it, so nothing. That is the upside of essentially living true to myself, expressing and living my beliefs in the pursuit of whatever my regional maximum of happiness is. The small risk here is eventually being shown to be wrong. Like, maybe maximum meaning or happiness truly is in driving a Tesla MX on Mars for the cheap price of only $5M or gaining eternal life for the entry price of $50M. In that case, I'm going to be rather very disappointed in my life choices come 2050.