It is always very humbling to read such notes - the self-written post passing away letters. There have been others in hacker news, and they always make me think about life, about what matters to me the most and of course, what matters to others.
What struck me most about this one is that it spoke much more about the professional life then about the personal one. I would imagine that if I were to ever write one (which I won’t, cause I’ll live forever) it will be more on the side of outside work experiences.
Life is a beautiful gift, and it’s worth remembering that every day. Do what you love, do a lot of it, be kind to others, hug your cherished people, laugh, enjoy, smile…breathe.
I love you all, and hope you’re enjoying every moment of this incredible journey through the Universe on this floating space rock.
Old family photos do that for me too — make me think of both the brevity of life and the beauty it is just to have lived. To see the arc of those who have gone before you should be a sobering thought, but I also find a kind of comfort in a humbleness of knowing I too am just like them as they once were like I am now.
(In fact, something similar was a common headstone epitaph that a relative of mine who died over 100 years ago has on his own headstone.)
I was recently privileged to see video of my long-deceased grandfather who passed away when I was a toddler as a little boy, laughing and swimming in the Thames with my great grandfather and great great grandfather. What a strange thing that is. It felt very familiar but surreal at the same time. I wondered what the moment would be like if I could go back to that moment and tell that 10 year old boy that I'm his grandchild and that there was an entire lifetime of adventure, love, age, and ill health ahead of him, and that one day he'd only exist to me and the world in the stories of his temperament.
And for millions of years, there are similar men. The 19th century provides me with some portraits from archives. The 18th and 17th century has just names.
I will blow away too in time, and my grandchildren can watch the lego engineering youtube videos I uploaded to Youtube when I was 9, and wonder what it would be like to meet me, too.
> if I could go back to that moment and tell that 10 year old boy that I'm his grandchild and that there was an entire lifetime of adventure, love, age, and ill health ahead of him
And you can't of course. But the takeaway is to tell yourself that instead. Memento Vivere.
IMHO it's only natural. If I were to write such a letter, the public version would be about what the public might be interested in, such as professional life. A personal version would be sent to those who I personally know and care for, and not to the general public.
I'd imagine for most of us, our professional lives are less interesting to the general public than other things.
If I were writing about my life, there'd be roughly a single line saying "I worked in tech, which gave me the disposable income and free time to ..." and then a description of all the things I've done which are actually interesting, unique or worth sharing for the sake of advice. If I waste my final days talking about my jobs, that's a clear sign that my mind is already gone.
There are probably some HN users who are working as research scientists on clean energy or vaccines, or at Doctors without Borders or similar, who have interesting things to say about their career. For 99% of us though, we sat at a computer and did meaningless drudgery in exchange for a paycheck.
+1. I have no career achievements worth including in an obituary. My life will be measured, hopefully, by the help I was able to provide others with the output of the meaningless work, and those I was lucky enough to connect with during our shared journey on the timeline.
> Life is a beautiful gift, and it’s worth remembering that every day. Do what you love, do a lot of it, be kind to others, hug your cherished people, laugh, enjoy, smile…breathe.
> I love you all, and hope you’re enjoying every moment of this incredible journey through the Universe on this floating space rock.
Thank you... this is what it's all about - it's really as simple as that.
The reason may be that the intended audience was the readers of his professional blog. He propoably prepared a more personal one for close friends and family.
So often people write about their children and the love they had seeing them grow up. Children have given me the most pleasure in life. Food for thought for those that are fully capable of having kids, but choose not to for whatever reason
> It is always very humbling to read such notes - the self-written post passing away letters. There have been others in hacker news, and they always make me think about life, about what matters to me the most and of course, what matters to others.
Am I nuts or are they appearing more often recently on the front page of HN?
Not sure what to make of that. Are the increasingly common thing to do for the terminally ill? Are people more attracted up voting them?
> What struck me most about this one is that it spoke much more about the professional life then about the personal one.
I was thinking the same thing when reading the man’s reflection focused so much on his personal accolades and so little on what David Brooks calls “eulogy values.” But to each their own.
The article prompted me to think about what I would talk about in a situation like this and honestly I immediately jumped to my time abroad working in China.
My personal and family life is great, but it's also ordinary. That makes it no less meaningful to me but I would struggle to tell you anything profound about it that you don't already know. For a lot of people who are journalists, writers, spent time in the military or abroad I think that's just what stands out to them.
My parents died just as I was entering adulthood many years ago. They were both kind/accidental iconoclasts with lives that were unusual to the tune of 1 in a billion, or really, discretely unique, like all people perhaps. They bridged eras, continents, cultural inertias, familial blendings.
I lost so much... everything really, when they died. I have so many questions I forgot to ask, so many things I forgot to write down.
People are important. Even people who go unnoticed can have weird and niche insights.
I think of ImageNet. People are far more important and their lives and insights far less uniform. We miss much by letting all these people go without hearing them, without trying to understand them.
Second this. My father passed suddenly and the recordings we made a year before while looking at newly digitized family movies are a treasure. I get to hear his voice. Mom passed 30 years ago and I have some speeches she gave recorded, but it isn't the same.
I got to hear my dads voice courtesy of Youtube for the first time in decades and it was the weirdest experience, especially because that recording was so unlike the person that I knew in real life.
Reminding me of Poe's album, "Haunted" where she discovered a trove of cassettes from her father — many addressed to her (and she used small clips in the mixing of the album).
There was an astronomy professor on YouTube that trained an LLM on everything he’d ever written (diaries, papers, notes, etc.) to try to make an interactive model of himself that you could talk to.
There’s really not enough data in your notes to clone your entire personality, so it only halfway sounded like him. But it was an interesting experiment.
> Jonathan Clements founded HumbleDollar at year-end 2016. Earlier in his career, he spent almost 20 years at The Wall Street Journal, where he was the newspaper's personal finance columnist, and six years at Citigroup, where he was director of financial education for the bank's U.S. wealth management arm. He was also the author of a fistful of personal finance books, including My Money Journey and How to Think About Money.
I'm suffering from a serious lung illness that might, "take me out of the game" and honestly it's so cathartic to read stuff like this. You get a sense that death is just another milestone. It isn't degrading. I hope as an atheist that it is, "the end" in the Buddhist sense when I go.
I'm so tired and angry. I miss the calm of the evening. I don't miss my friends. I never fell in love and I don't regret it. Life is worth losing.
Good luck anon. I think you've nailed it in the last sentence.
For me it was liberating to realize that my life isn't that special and it's not a huge tragedy to lose it. I'll do what I can while I am here. Not even gods can ask me for more. And death doesn't take away all the things I did in the meantime.
I learned a lot about investing and index funds from his Getting Going column. A shame that he didn't get to retire on all of his frugally invested money. He was 62.
There is definitely a balance. My wife and I traveling some now while we have health and energy rather than wait until retirement. The future is so murky.
I seriously thought there was a service with this name (like deadmansswitch) and searched online for it. Then it hit me, and I got what you meant! I agree that’s the best way to handle it.
It's not an answer to this, but tangentially related as we had a similar conversation at work very recently. Not many people know about Google and Apple's inactive account manager setup (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en). If you've not already done this I'd highly recommend adding your spouse/kin/best mate etc as a contact. I set this up to transfer over access to my Google Drive to my wife if I've been inactive for some period. We have separate offline docs around keys and access, but if the worst happened, then eventually she'll get a message with instructions on decrypting and accessing the critical info she needs. A lot of my (tech savvy) co-workers had no idea this was a thing.
This feels like a very risky choice that a technical error or other interruption announces your death prematurely.
I would probably just ensure at least one or two trusted people have the access to post it on your behalf and know it is very important to you that it gets done.
Yeah, you could lose control of some account and that would be pretty awkward if your Goodbye Farewell just plopped out when you went in to extend it another week but found out you’re sitting on a support ticket.
Or worse; I dunno get hit by a bus and be in the hospital, or perhaps arrested? Friends and family don’t know what happened to you and then your death announcement blares.
I think only people expecting their death to be likely in the next year should want to employ this however, and that probably changes things.
Solutions I've seen before allow you to set a backup person that gets contacted. So, like, maybe there's a weekly email you have to reply to. If you don't respond in a day, it texts you instead. After a set period of time it will reach out to your trusted contact who can confirm whether you're okay or not.
If you can trust Github enough, then Github Workflow that runs a schedule build everyday should be able to do it. Have a future date post (built-in with Github Pages), say, a month ahead of now. Every now and then, you as long as you are alive, increase the month.
Like everything, there's a balance. I hope his savings help his wife thru the rest of her life and any children and grandchildren.
Not having it most certainly results in suffering and consequently different memories. Money won't buy happiness but it sure eases a lot of the petty sadness.
Farewell notes offer an interesting peak into the world of another and are so much more engaging, honest, and grounded than the paid obits which commonly mention how the deceased was beloved by everyone.
I got a sense of Jonathan while reading his farewell note. And the note challenges me to do and be better. RIP Jonathan.
Nobody gets out of here alive, but that's a great goodbye note. I especially liked one of the articles linked to by the one posted here: https://humbledollar.com/2024/06/the-c-word/
What a lovely note. Very reminiscent of the old school Chrimbo catch up letters but with the hefty twist ("Soz, going to have to bugger off now - cheers!)
I (Jon) lived in Twikkers too, a few years later than this Jon was born there.
Followed humble dollar during my stint in personal investing. There was a revival of personal blogs pitching index funds alongside books like The Wealthy Barber.
Its sad and scary to see just how fast he died from cancer. Also bewildering he stopped smoking at 27.
It is always very humbling to read such notes - the self-written post passing away letters. There have been others in hacker news, and they always make me think about life, about what matters to me the most and of course, what matters to others.
What struck me most about this one is that it spoke much more about the professional life then about the personal one. I would imagine that if I were to ever write one (which I won’t, cause I’ll live forever) it will be more on the side of outside work experiences.
Life is a beautiful gift, and it’s worth remembering that every day. Do what you love, do a lot of it, be kind to others, hug your cherished people, laugh, enjoy, smile…breathe.
I love you all, and hope you’re enjoying every moment of this incredible journey through the Universe on this floating space rock.
Old family photos do that for me too — make me think of both the brevity of life and the beauty it is just to have lived. To see the arc of those who have gone before you should be a sobering thought, but I also find a kind of comfort in a humbleness of knowing I too am just like them as they once were like I am now.
(In fact, something similar was a common headstone epitaph that a relative of mine who died over 100 years ago has on his own headstone.)
I wrote a bit about it here: https://engineersneedart.com/blog/camera/camera.html
I was recently privileged to see video of my long-deceased grandfather who passed away when I was a toddler as a little boy, laughing and swimming in the Thames with my great grandfather and great great grandfather. What a strange thing that is. It felt very familiar but surreal at the same time. I wondered what the moment would be like if I could go back to that moment and tell that 10 year old boy that I'm his grandchild and that there was an entire lifetime of adventure, love, age, and ill health ahead of him, and that one day he'd only exist to me and the world in the stories of his temperament.
And for millions of years, there are similar men. The 19th century provides me with some portraits from archives. The 18th and 17th century has just names.
I will blow away too in time, and my grandchildren can watch the lego engineering youtube videos I uploaded to Youtube when I was 9, and wonder what it would be like to meet me, too.
Sobering.
> if I could go back to that moment and tell that 10 year old boy that I'm his grandchild and that there was an entire lifetime of adventure, love, age, and ill health ahead of him
And you can't of course. But the takeaway is to tell yourself that instead. Memento Vivere.
Great read, I appreciate the amount of effort it took. Thanks!
(someday I'll build my own SystemSix).
IMHO it's only natural. If I were to write such a letter, the public version would be about what the public might be interested in, such as professional life. A personal version would be sent to those who I personally know and care for, and not to the general public.
I'd imagine for most of us, our professional lives are less interesting to the general public than other things.
If I were writing about my life, there'd be roughly a single line saying "I worked in tech, which gave me the disposable income and free time to ..." and then a description of all the things I've done which are actually interesting, unique or worth sharing for the sake of advice. If I waste my final days talking about my jobs, that's a clear sign that my mind is already gone.
There are probably some HN users who are working as research scientists on clean energy or vaccines, or at Doctors without Borders or similar, who have interesting things to say about their career. For 99% of us though, we sat at a computer and did meaningless drudgery in exchange for a paycheck.
+1. I have no career achievements worth including in an obituary. My life will be measured, hopefully, by the help I was able to provide others with the output of the meaningless work, and those I was lucky enough to connect with during our shared journey on the timeline.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/927691-what-is-success-to-l...
I think this is it, I bet there is a family and friends version too
For me, what I do is fairly closely linked with who I am. It's no longer unhealthy, but it used to be.
A lot of my legacy will be completely unheralded, and that's as it should be.
I do appreciate (but can't really say I "like") these posts.
Much better than the old "GBCW" (GoodBye Cruel World) posts that people used to post, when they rage-quit forums.
Im a generally happy, fulfilled person but if I get one more chance to blast the HN crowd on my way out Im gonna take it
If you care to elaborate, it would be interesting to know what change made the link no longer unhealthy.
I had to give this some thought. It's one of those "I know it's true; but not sure why" things.
I believe that it happened when I found out that I'm "on the spectrum," fairly late in life (in my forties).
Before that, my work was "scratching an itch," but after, it was "doing what I love."
> Life is a beautiful gift, and it’s worth remembering that every day. Do what you love, do a lot of it, be kind to others, hug your cherished people, laugh, enjoy, smile…breathe. > I love you all, and hope you’re enjoying every moment of this incredible journey through the Universe on this floating space rock.
Thank you... this is what it's all about - it's really as simple as that.
thanks and i appreciate! every moment!
The reason may be that the intended audience was the readers of his professional blog. He propoably prepared a more personal one for close friends and family.
So often people write about their children and the love they had seeing them grow up. Children have given me the most pleasure in life. Food for thought for those that are fully capable of having kids, but choose not to for whatever reason
> It is always very humbling to read such notes - the self-written post passing away letters. There have been others in hacker news, and they always make me think about life, about what matters to me the most and of course, what matters to others.
Am I nuts or are they appearing more often recently on the front page of HN?
Not sure what to make of that. Are the increasingly common thing to do for the terminally ill? Are people more attracted up voting them?
> What struck me most about this one is that it spoke much more about the professional life then about the personal one.
I was thinking the same thing when reading the man’s reflection focused so much on his personal accolades and so little on what David Brooks calls “eulogy values.” But to each their own.
The article prompted me to think about what I would talk about in a situation like this and honestly I immediately jumped to my time abroad working in China.
My personal and family life is great, but it's also ordinary. That makes it no less meaningful to me but I would struggle to tell you anything profound about it that you don't already know. For a lot of people who are journalists, writers, spent time in the military or abroad I think that's just what stands out to them.
I often think of Speaker for the Dead.
My parents died just as I was entering adulthood many years ago. They were both kind/accidental iconoclasts with lives that were unusual to the tune of 1 in a billion, or really, discretely unique, like all people perhaps. They bridged eras, continents, cultural inertias, familial blendings.
I lost so much... everything really, when they died. I have so many questions I forgot to ask, so many things I forgot to write down.
People are important. Even people who go unnoticed can have weird and niche insights.
I think of ImageNet. People are far more important and their lives and insights far less uniform. We miss much by letting all these people go without hearing them, without trying to understand them.
Al you can do it record what you recall about your parents — and record things about yourself for future generations.
Second this. My father passed suddenly and the recordings we made a year before while looking at newly digitized family movies are a treasure. I get to hear his voice. Mom passed 30 years ago and I have some speeches she gave recorded, but it isn't the same.
Here's a conversation outline from StoryCorps https://storycorps.org/participate/tips-for-a-great-conversa...
I got to hear my dads voice courtesy of Youtube for the first time in decades and it was the weirdest experience, especially because that recording was so unlike the person that I knew in real life.
Reminding me of Poe's album, "Haunted" where she discovered a trove of cassettes from her father — many addressed to her (and she used small clips in the mixing of the album).
Forgive me for not understanding, why do we need AI? Can't we use pen to paper or a tape recorder? What advantage does the AI bring here?
There was an astronomy professor on YouTube that trained an LLM on everything he’d ever written (diaries, papers, notes, etc.) to try to make an interactive model of himself that you could talk to.
There’s really not enough data in your notes to clone your entire personality, so it only halfway sounded like him. But it was an interesting experiment.
It's funny how Black mirror episodes that fill me with dread are other people's technological dreams
Oh wow, Freudian? Yeah, supposed to be "All".
I believe it was meant to be "All you can..."
Some additional context about the author:
> Jonathan Clements founded HumbleDollar at year-end 2016. Earlier in his career, he spent almost 20 years at The Wall Street Journal, where he was the newspaper's personal finance columnist, and six years at Citigroup, where he was director of financial education for the bank's U.S. wealth management arm. He was also the author of a fistful of personal finance books, including My Money Journey and How to Think About Money.
* https://humbledollar.com/about/jonathan-clements/
* A Money Guru Bet Big on a Very Long Life. Then He Got Cancer. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/your-money/jonathan-cleme...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/1npe...
* Tributes to Jonathan Clements https://humbledollar.com/2025/09/tributes-to-jonathan-clemen...
* Best of Jonathan’s HumbleDollar Posts https://humbledollar.com/2025/09/best-of-jonathans-humbledol...
* Choosing Happiness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804468 (3 years ago, 101 comments)
I'm suffering from a serious lung illness that might, "take me out of the game" and honestly it's so cathartic to read stuff like this. You get a sense that death is just another milestone. It isn't degrading. I hope as an atheist that it is, "the end" in the Buddhist sense when I go.
I'm so tired and angry. I miss the calm of the evening. I don't miss my friends. I never fell in love and I don't regret it. Life is worth losing.
This hurts my heart to read.
I hope you find peace soon.
Good luck anon. I think you've nailed it in the last sentence.
For me it was liberating to realize that my life isn't that special and it's not a huge tragedy to lose it. I'll do what I can while I am here. Not even gods can ask me for more. And death doesn't take away all the things I did in the meantime.
I learned a lot about investing and index funds from his Getting Going column. A shame that he didn't get to retire on all of his frugally invested money. He was 62.
The thought of this kind of thing makes me think I should just go buy that Aston Martin tomorrow.
There is definitely a balance. My wife and I traveling some now while we have health and energy rather than wait until retirement. The future is so murky.
It makes me think I should spend more time with my friends and familly.
go and buy 2
Only do that if you want to live to 100, and be destitute.
How would one employ a dead man's switch to post a blog entry like this?
Are there any services you would recommend?
I prefer the service known as “your family and friends”.
I seriously thought there was a service with this name (like deadmansswitch) and searched online for it. Then it hit me, and I got what you meant! I agree that’s the best way to handle it.
There is one. It's called deadmanssnitch.com
It's not an answer to this, but tangentially related as we had a similar conversation at work very recently. Not many people know about Google and Apple's inactive account manager setup (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en). If you've not already done this I'd highly recommend adding your spouse/kin/best mate etc as a contact. I set this up to transfer over access to my Google Drive to my wife if I've been inactive for some period. We have separate offline docs around keys and access, but if the worst happened, then eventually she'll get a message with instructions on decrypting and accessing the critical info she needs. A lot of my (tech savvy) co-workers had no idea this was a thing.
Just a scheduled post that you postpone while you're alive.
No, the proper way to do it is to include the curl request to be run as part of your last will and testament.
Event-driven architecture.
This feels like a very risky choice that a technical error or other interruption announces your death prematurely.
I would probably just ensure at least one or two trusted people have the access to post it on your behalf and know it is very important to you that it gets done.
Yeah, you could lose control of some account and that would be pretty awkward if your Goodbye Farewell just plopped out when you went in to extend it another week but found out you’re sitting on a support ticket.
Or worse; I dunno get hit by a bus and be in the hospital, or perhaps arrested? Friends and family don’t know what happened to you and then your death announcement blares.
I think only people expecting their death to be likely in the next year should want to employ this however, and that probably changes things.
Solutions I've seen before allow you to set a backup person that gets contacted. So, like, maybe there's a weekly email you have to reply to. If you don't respond in a day, it texts you instead. After a set period of time it will reach out to your trusted contact who can confirm whether you're okay or not.
You could do the warnings aka similar to domain expiry. Lots of follow ups etc.
I like the curl on will option (or for a lawyer maybe email with link)
I wrote something that does this (amongst other things) ages ago when I was learning Go. https://github.com/intermernet/watchdog
If you can trust Github enough, then Github Workflow that runs a schedule build everyday should be able to do it. Have a future date post (built-in with Github Pages), say, a month ahead of now. Every now and then, you as long as you are alive, increase the month.
Money seems like everything until you realize there is an end to all of this.
Like everything, there's a balance. I hope his savings help his wife thru the rest of her life and any children and grandchildren.
Not having it most certainly results in suffering and consequently different memories. Money won't buy happiness but it sure eases a lot of the petty sadness.
Fair.
Farewell notes offer an interesting peak into the world of another and are so much more engaging, honest, and grounded than the paid obits which commonly mention how the deceased was beloved by everyone.
I got a sense of Jonathan while reading his farewell note. And the note challenges me to do and be better. RIP Jonathan.
Nobody gets out of here alive, but that's a great goodbye note. I especially liked one of the articles linked to by the one posted here: https://humbledollar.com/2024/06/the-c-word/
What a lovely note. Very reminiscent of the old school Chrimbo catch up letters but with the hefty twist ("Soz, going to have to bugger off now - cheers!)
I (Jon) lived in Twikkers too, a few years later than this Jon was born there.
Rest in peace mate.
RIP
Viveu jovem e morreu livre
Followed humble dollar during my stint in personal investing. There was a revival of personal blogs pitching index funds alongside books like The Wealthy Barber.
Its sad and scary to see just how fast he died from cancer. Also bewildering he stopped smoking at 27.
All in all, RIP.
RIP
I have to admit I don't understand the epitaph "Family • Readers • Words"
Is it a reference to something?
Was the description a few lines down helpful?
Somehow the fact 'Readers' and 'Words' weren't capitalised meant I completely missed the association. Thanks.