It feels reassuring that none of these surprised me, and I strive towards a lot of these views/learnings already. Hopefully a good sign! Packard's writings help give me a little more clarity too, especially when written in such a thoughtful way. Very cool <3
I still have my first edition Cave of Time. I don't think it's a first printing though but still, when they came out it was simply awesome. I got the first 6 books in a pack for my birthday, I shared them later on with my children and they loved them too when they were young.
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
Yeah, and it's kinda depressing how hard it is to get people to accept that. Every community and group seems to operate under the assumption that anyone who's not 'successful' is too lazy or selfish to deserve it, and that those who are winning have to be the smartest, hardest working people around.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
I think that in a sense, there is a skill to being lucky. You may have exactly the same opportunities as another person but you may have more capacity to take advantage of those opportunities due to being open minded, adaptable, giving, and curious. I call that lucky.
Guess the child born into abject poverty in a war-torn country in sub-Saharan Africa who died before their 5th birthday due to malnutrition and disease just didn't properly prepare or have enough ambition then right?
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
Since he might not be known to most (especially a younger audience), the author is a writer best known for many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were hugely successful in the 80s.
Thank you, Kevin, for sharing this, and thank you for your insights, Edward. As a young man without a father anymore, it's always a pleasure learning about people's life experiences to help me be my best self without years of trial and error
In my late 20s, I felt disillusioned with this kind of wisdom. Found it too simplistic and not enough to cope with the fact that existence is absurd. I am 32 now, and I can't help think that simplicity is all that there is: curate a happy state of mind, meaningful relationships, active lifestyle, and maybe some audacious goal to keep yourself busy. Thinking that there's some higher state of mind (via spirituality, for eg) is delusion at best.
I feel everything follows the Midwit meme progression [1]: at first you use crude, obvious methods because you don’t know better. Later, complexity is alluring, you drown yourself in optimisations and finding the bestest tools and methods. In the end you come back to the same conclusion: simplicity was the most reliable tool the whole time.
> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind."
I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.
There's fundamental lack of emotional depth in our society as I believe you can be happy and displeased or in pain _at the same time_. I can say that I'm never unhappy but I do feel displeasure, anger and pain at times as these aren't opposites and don't cancel each other out in my model of the world.
Nothing earth-shattering but quite true nonetheless (or it may be the reason all this is common knowledge is because it's true).
This made me smile:
> Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard
It sounds like a honorific title to outline that this person teaches at Harvard, but it's in fact the opposite. It needs to be said she's from Harvard because most people have never heard of her. "Königsberg teacher Immanuel Kant" would be funny.
I was hoping for more of the author’s own perspective over those ninety years. Instead, it read more like a stitching project of other people's ideas. In particular the barrage of quote fragments disrupted the flow and made it harder for me to engage with the main point of each section.
>“It’s not so difficult to be a buddha,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “Just
keep your awakening alive all day long.”
And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall.
Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed.
Ok, that’s a lot of "witty remark I could make regarding" the text (and avoid doing instead). So, let’s take a bit of these advices in practice. Thank you Edward Packard for sharing with us some final reflections on life after a long one, displaying humility while presenting a vibrantly human figure.
Buddha would probably say it’s very easy to “be” a Buddha. To become one, on the other hand, is hard in my opinion, takes thousands of hours of practice. Once you’re there however, it is open effortless awareness and not hard to maintain, so they say!
Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in the world
Instantaneous transcendence is the reason humans are such a desirable birth according to the old school Hindu/Buddhist beliefs.
Better to be born a Human and live 100 years - it's the best chance at getting out of this trap. Being born a dirty would mean several hundred thousand millennia of divine life - thats going to manifest forgetting, by the end the next rebirth is almost always lower.
Animals have thousands of births per form.
Only a human can be born an ignorant savage animal person and in less than 100 years become a Buddha and transcend existence.
That's a lot of the fish analogies in early Christianity and earlier - we all get out, but it takes forever for some of us, God is always looking for the next one of us that's grown big enough to become "a big fish" - "chosen easily from all the rest"
It's unsettling how often we think we’re in control when we’re really just chasing impulses or clinging to stories we’ve told ourselves. The bit about sleepwalking through life resonated... Reminds me of how easy it is to let years slip by on autopilot, especially in high-functioning careers
From a really quick read, good advice and a great read — though, as he admits in the introduction, luck played its role in how things turned out:
>>> That I’d survived thus far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit, determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck.
Would things have been different if he’d lived by his own advice earlier? Maybe. But it’s impossible to know. Pushing back a little: don't underestimate luck. It can be deeply unfair, and it can distort our sense of what is deserved or earned.
This is not to say that principles, effort, wisdom don't matter. But so does the randomness of where, when, and under what conditions we live and act.
I enjoyed this piece, including references to the Stoics and Spinoza. It preaches serenity, goodwill, composure, etc.
As someone in their 30s with children, work and a generally busy life, I wonder if anyone can recommend some pieces with more direct application - that is, in this vein, but perhaps an operational / how-to guide. Sometimes, it's hard to translate principles to action.
>Once you’ve achieved that — once you are virtuously selfconstituted — you will be self-assured and have reason to be so. You will be emotionally invulnerable to being pushed around.
I don't feel that's true? I am currently in a massive turmoil at work because my line-manager is breaking all ethics rules, with higher leadership caring little. Because I try to follow my values I've spoken up numerous times and all I got for that is a mountain of stress. Turns out I am not emotionally invulnerable.
> To guard against self-deception – recognize biases, avoid wishful thinking, and question entrenched beliefs
This is such an immensely important point. Seeing my current reality, bad and good, have been one of the most essential elements in taking the right decisions and steps.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 84.9 ms ] threadAnyone know what direction i should look at?
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
Lots of people pass or aren't prepared to do what is neccessary when opportunity presents itself. The people who are, are called "lucky"
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
Jimmy Maher wrote about them recently https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/
Thanks for sharing this <3
I feel everything follows the Midwit meme progression [1]: at first you use crude, obvious methods because you don’t know better. Later, complexity is alluring, you drown yourself in optimisations and finding the bestest tools and methods. In the end you come back to the same conclusion: simplicity was the most reliable tool the whole time.
[1]: https://medium.com/@obandoandrew8/bell-curve-meme-avoiding-t...
I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.
If others can not feel joy from that in person, you're doing it wrong.
Never forget what it feels like when fate smiles on you, even when it's almost never.
This made me smile:
> Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard
It sounds like a honorific title to outline that this person teaches at Harvard, but it's in fact the opposite. It needs to be said she's from Harvard because most people have never heard of her. "Königsberg teacher Immanuel Kant" would be funny.
And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall.
Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed.
Ok, that’s a lot of "witty remark I could make regarding" the text (and avoid doing instead). So, let’s take a bit of these advices in practice. Thank you Edward Packard for sharing with us some final reflections on life after a long one, displaying humility while presenting a vibrantly human figure.
Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in the world
Better to be born a Human and live 100 years - it's the best chance at getting out of this trap. Being born a dirty would mean several hundred thousand millennia of divine life - thats going to manifest forgetting, by the end the next rebirth is almost always lower.
Animals have thousands of births per form.
Only a human can be born an ignorant savage animal person and in less than 100 years become a Buddha and transcend existence.
That's a lot of the fish analogies in early Christianity and earlier - we all get out, but it takes forever for some of us, God is always looking for the next one of us that's grown big enough to become "a big fish" - "chosen easily from all the rest"
>>> That I’d survived thus far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit, determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck.
Would things have been different if he’d lived by his own advice earlier? Maybe. But it’s impossible to know. Pushing back a little: don't underestimate luck. It can be deeply unfair, and it can distort our sense of what is deserved or earned.
This is not to say that principles, effort, wisdom don't matter. But so does the randomness of where, when, and under what conditions we live and act.
As someone in their 30s with children, work and a generally busy life, I wonder if anyone can recommend some pieces with more direct application - that is, in this vein, but perhaps an operational / how-to guide. Sometimes, it's hard to translate principles to action.
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GV-yxI4sBS5gg4belO6hXuFvSFW...
I don't feel that's true? I am currently in a massive turmoil at work because my line-manager is breaking all ethics rules, with higher leadership caring little. Because I try to follow my values I've spoken up numerous times and all I got for that is a mountain of stress. Turns out I am not emotionally invulnerable.
This is such an immensely important point. Seeing my current reality, bad and good, have been one of the most essential elements in taking the right decisions and steps.