When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?
Put another way, if you have an extra hour tomorrow with nothing planned, what could you do with yourself to later say: I’m glad I did that? What if you have an unplanned day? Or a week? Does how you use that time change? Would the choice of how to use that time be more or less deliberate, depending on how long you have? Does that choice define you as a person?
lasting contributions to open-source software
Definitely a worthwhile thing to do, but software is so ephemeral that it’s hard to say “lasting.” If I died tomorrow, all my projects would likely be irrelevant and forgotten within a few years. Though some projects have stronger lasting power than others. Now I’m curious what the oldest line of code in the FreeBSD kernel is.
Sorry, not trying to be negative on your accomplishments. Just been thinking about this lately.