If we’re going to dissect Job’s comments and measure how hyprocritical he is from a handful of sentences at a commencement, we should at least once see the full context:
“This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
He was just making the standard ‘carpe diem’ speech, and his segue was his near brush with death (the claim being he now had the experience to make this comment with more weight.) He already said he didn’t want to die and he explicitly said he hoped for a few more decades.
I think what he said was kind of dumb—I’m sure he would choose to live forever if he perceived the immediate chance, and wouldn’t have begrudged our immortality either, so he must have meant something else. (Indeed, it’s a very ‘far’ and removed perspective to think of species and generations of humans replacing one another like generations of computers.)
I don’t know what Steve Jobs meant, exactly, or what his motives were for making that statement. But I don’t think he was claiming he was nonchalant about his own mortality.
If we’re going to dissect Job’s comments and measure how hyprocritical he is from a handful of sentences at a commencement, we should at least once see the full context:
He was just making the standard ‘carpe diem’ speech, and his segue was his near brush with death (the claim being he now had the experience to make this comment with more weight.) He already said he didn’t want to die and he explicitly said he hoped for a few more decades.
I think what he said was kind of dumb—I’m sure he would choose to live forever if he perceived the immediate chance, and wouldn’t have begrudged our immortality either, so he must have meant something else. (Indeed, it’s a very ‘far’ and removed perspective to think of species and generations of humans replacing one another like generations of computers.)
I don’t know what Steve Jobs meant, exactly, or what his motives were for making that statement. But I don’t think he was claiming he was nonchalant about his own mortality.