Show HN: A living wall of life goals and deathbed regrets

[jamespetercook]

Answer the question "Before I die, I want to..." and post it to the wall.

I built this as part of a journaling app I’m working on as a side project. Personally I find life goals fascinating - they're the things we think will make us feel the happiest and the most fulfilled, yet often people think they won't achieve them.

I have tried to make it feel atmospheric with the goal of making you stop and think about your own life for a second.

[littlekey]

I love the juxtaposition between the serious posts and the funny ones. Great to see "I want to make peace with my father" right next to "Unify the Mongol tribes under one banner".

[toomuchtodo]

If you ever decide you don't want to run this anymore, I'll take it over and wire it up to the Internet Archive for long term storage. Great project in search for meaning and the human experience.

[jamespetercook]

That's a great idea. If it gets no traction, I'll be in touch. If it does, I might still ask you for some help...

If we had access to the same question being asked at different times through history, I bet the answers wouldn't be so different.

[w10-1]

Call it Memento Mori?

I find life goals and wishes to be mostly regressive projections.

To me the real value is understanding people's regrets -- typically for lacking courage.

When everything, including yourself, is against you, it's only not wanting to regret a lack of courage that can motivate you.

[milst]

Very cool. Are the posts I see random from all stored, or are they the latest posts or something?

[jamespetercook]

They're random from the entire set. There's only about 90 posts at the time of writing. I did disable a few... somebody was very keen to express their love for genitalia lol

[Xiol]

Scrolling on the site is broken / janky.

[jamespetercook]

What device do you have? The animations are kind of resource intensive. There are some performance optimisations if the frame rate drops but perhaps it needs to go further

[0_AkAsH_03]

seems pretty cool.