It’s great that many young hackers are giving a lot of thought to being happy throughout their lives instead of focusing on a specific work related task that ends up being irrelevant in the long run.

Having already come across the Top five regrets of the dying, I found Majd Taby’s article on a moment of clarity following the same thought process I went through not too long ago.

There seems to be a wide range of advice within the hacker community, where superstar VCs such as PG (Paul Graham) of YCombinator urge folks to spend their youth working insane hours so that they can retire early and enjoy the rest of their lives. On the other end, hackers such as Jamie Zawinski, early engineer at Netscape, have written great accounts of how getting rich or making somebody else rich may not be the best way to spend your youth.

It ultimately boils down to everybody finding their own path to happiness but the plethora of accounts on the web make it easier to understand the maturity in the thought process for people who may have taken a similar path as yourself. It is also fascinating to walk in the shoes of those who were on death row for capital punishment. For example, take a look at the last statements of 500 executed offenders in Texas. If it wasn’t limited to 500 people, I’d find it to be a bigger time-sink than Reddit.