Tony Ennis's Blog Posts about The Most Important Question

"What really matters, it turns out, is family and relationships and authenticity."
"I’m not convinced that the reported regrets of the dying provide us with reasons to think them valuable"
"Their lack of engagement in ongoing projects might leave them with an impoverished sense of their value."
"Might be subject to hindsight bias, in the form of a tendency to assume that their current epistemic perspective looking back on the past is identical to the perspective they should have adopted at the time"
"the dying escape the consequences of their advice" <- I find this a little weak. It's true, of course, but there is little incentive for the dying to give bad advice.
"We might do better to prefer the wisdom of 40-somethings"
"The dying person knows that if they say they regret not making more money, they’ll be seen as shallow" <- hard agree with this one. I'd guess there are other big regrets people have that aren't socially acceptable and thus they avoid. This also backs up the skepticism of the "nothing to lose" point above.
"No one ever said on their deathbed I wish I’d spent more time at the office’ and close variations thereof return close to 40,000 hits on Google" <- We are very mimetic, platitude-driven creatures
"The ubiquity of the advice suggests that there’s a cultural script in play here: a set of expectations that shapes what’s said and what’s heard". "perhaps her reports are accurate and representative, but they were expressed because these are the kinds of things that one’s supposed to say in this kind of situation"
"Heidegger argues that death individualises us, because at death we cease to be in social relations with others"
"t is only from within our life projects that questions about justification can be answered at all because, in the absence of the commitments that give our struggles meaning, nothing is justified"
"Once you know your death is imminent, extended plans and projects cease to have a grip on you as valuable activities; valuable for you"
"If that’s right, the view from the deathbed is epistemically distinctive. It’s the perspective of someone who is embedded in a simpler set of commitments: for whom simpler pleasures – those that can be realised immediately, or come to fruition relatively quickly – retain their grip, but for whom broader commitments are absurd"
"These projects are telic: they have a goal, and it’s our commitment to this goal that makes them meaningful to us"
"Perhaps the perspective from the deathbed authentically reflects what matters for those who are forced to withdraw from ongoing activities,"