Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years
32 comments
·September 23, 2025a_c
It is the simple things that is the hardest. If anything, having children revealed many of the mentioned. To me, having children is enlightenment
amatecha
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
Stiffly6471
a completely different topic & question on this post. how is his blog made? I like the style (simple yet clear and beautiful).
Anyone know what direction i should look at?
aktuel
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 6.8.2" />
koakuma-chan
I think this is just a PDF hosted on WordPress?
jxmesth
WordPress
reenorap
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.
la_bruin
I bought my son "The Whole Enchilada", the pack of 100+ Edward Packard authored CYOA books. (No RA Montgomery titles)
He liked the Encyclopedia Brown books & Two Minute Mystery books I bought him so I thought he'd like the CYOA books as well since I cherished them as a kid but alas, he never got into them like I did.
I'm hoping he likes Infocom text adventures better when I introduce those to him later.
NoMoreNicksLeft
I used to think I had read that one... but after a days-long argument on the scifi SE, turns out it had been Return to the Cave of Time.
zwnow
Another old person thinking they figured out life... Most humans have this idea of what a human should be, what a human should feel and how a human should treat others. The result is dismissive of other humans that dont strive to be happy or a "good person". Its the same with people who have a family and kids that become dismissive of every other way of life, that doesn't include a wife or kids. Too bad it took them 90 years to build up this very limited outlook on life.
jader201
Encouraging others with positivity to be kind is rarely a bad thing.
Dismissing others that try to spread positivity is rarely a good thing.
zwnow
According to? What gives someone the right to encourage someone with their own views? Being kind is being weak. It forces you into situations u dont wanna be in in the first place.
peepee1982
You're confusing kindness with being a pushover. You can be kind and self-respecting at the same time.
Your last two comments here make me suspect you suffer from some kind of traumatic abuse you haven't had the chance to poperly recover from yet.
vincnetas
don't you want to be in the world where people are kind? or you rather be in a world where everyone is selfish? Heard of categorical imperative?
komali2
> According to?
General consensus. Also it seems to lead to more stable societies when people are kind to eachother. That creates mutual safety and comfort. Humans are uncomfortable with constant conflict and violence. Doing things that lead to that are wrong.
You're right in that there's no god or universal measure against which we can say that being good is Good and being bad is Bad, we have to just throw our hands up and pick, luckily humans mostly agree and so picking being Good isn't inherently a conflict-causing thing, except to those who prefer people are constantly at war with eachother. I'm perfectly fine saying those folks that prefer that are valid in their way of thinking, but invalid in trying to apply it, and therefore should be stopped.
> Being kind is being weak.
Well it's a bit silly for you to argue against universal morality and then argue for universal concepts of strength and weakness. Anyway I disagree, being kind takes tremendous strength.
> It forces you into situations u dont wanna be in in the first place.
Ah! Being kind doesn't always mean saying "yes," sometimes it just means saying "no" instead of shouting it.
aeve890
>The result is dismissive of other humans that dont strive to be happy or a "good person".
This has to be satire.
whaterinkles
The irony in this comment is palpable.
exac
> Another old person thinking they figured out life
I didn't get this impression at all.
kayer8987
youve been hacked
Love these. This quote stuck out to me:
> It follows, I think, that the luckier you’ve been, the more humility and generous spiritedness you need, and the unluckier you’ve been, the more compassion for yourself you need, and unfair as it may seem, the more you need irrepressible resolve.