What would it be like to live to a thousand? The average human lifespan in the Western world is about 80 years old. In parts of Africa, it's less than 40. There's also a correlation with gender, women tending to have slightly more time in this mortal coil. That's all statistics; an individual person's life might be as long as 110, or it might be numbered in hours. But how much difference does it really make? My thesis is that the exact number of years isn't as important as I used to think.
I'll go so far as to assert: all humans have roughly the same perceived lifespans, regardless of their actual lifespans. If I die at 40, or if I die at 80, it won't make much difference in how much perceived time I have!
Thus we often use a "lifetime" as a kind of vague unit for measuring time. Rare occurrences are said to happen "once in a lifetime". Of course this is just a turn of speech, but there's something deeper behind this particular idiom, a subconscious (or should I say sublinguistic) nod to the general principle I made just above.
Remember how long an hour was, back in childhood? When Mom sent us to our rooms for an hour of timeout, wasn't that an eternity of torment? And a day was this unimaginably vast span of time-- remember how impatiently we used to wait for Christmas, the later weeks of December creeping like molasses. As we grew older, the hour grew shorter, and now it seems like three or four hours flit past and we hardly notice. Days have lost their longevity, and adults utter cliches like, "why can't there be more hours in the day?" As I write this, I'm 25, and it seems like whole weeks have contracted, passing in a blur.
I realized that there was a general pattern here: the older I become, the faster time seems to pass! To make sense of this, we need to invent a unit for measuring perceived time. The particular unit isn't important, just as the laws of physics don't depend whether you use meters or feet, so we'll adopt something arbitrary for now. By one perceived hour, I mean the amount of time perceived to pass during one real hour, by an infant one year of age.
The general pattern from above can be stated as follows. A perceived hour and a real hour are exactly the same, if you're exactly one year old. If you are older than one year, then a perceived hour is actually longer than a real hour, and the older you get, the more comparatively so. If you are under one year, a perceived hour is actually shorter than a real hour.
What this all means is that there's actually a lot less variance in lifespans between different people-- assuming we count only the perception of time. For someone who dies young, more of life is spent observing time to pass relatively slowly. Later years of life are perceived to fly past, each successive year adding fewer and fewer perceived hours. Hark back to the early years of your life and remember how long a single year was back then-- it was an eternity, unfolding into the horizons. It used to seem like adulthood was literally a lifetime away-- as a matter of fact, it roughly was. Of all the perceived hours we enjoy, most were childhood hours.
This observation may seem a little frightening. The implications are sobering: you've lived most of your life already, and you'll die pretty soon. But actually, this law of equal lifespans can be empowering: let it urge you to stop putting off the pleasures of life. The old saying "live fast, die young" has a certain ring of deep wisdom to it after all. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow cometh the reaper.
Taken to its extreme, the corollaries of equal lifespans can seem a little reckless: it's better to be happy while you're young, even at the price of elderly poverty. For, the young years filled with fun will linger on, you can savor them while time idly lazes by. And then, if old age must be endured in poverty, you can rest easy knowing it'll fly past in a blink anyway. The most foolish thing you could do would be to sacrifice your whole life investing for retirement. Retirement-- what a cruel hoax! Would you break your back all your life in exchange for one minute of leisure at the very end? Of course not-- but in terms of perceived minutes, that's exactly what retirement amounts to!
So what, indeed, would it be like to live to a thousand? The answer is, it wouldn't be much different from living to be twenty. A thousand is fifty times twenty, but you wouldn't come anywhere near fifty times the perceived time. By the time you hit 200, whole years would seem to flit past with the snap of a finger. By 500, decades would march by to the cadence of your breath.
Carpe Diem-- seize the day. Days are a currency of dwindling value, so avoid the inflation by enjoying them while they're high!
FURTHER READING
Taking Control of Life
Short Term Assets vs. Long Term Assets
51 Things That Won't Matter When You Die
I'll go so far as to assert: all humans have roughly the same perceived lifespans, regardless of their actual lifespans. If I die at 40, or if I die at 80, it won't make much difference in how much perceived time I have!
Thus we often use a "lifetime" as a kind of vague unit for measuring time. Rare occurrences are said to happen "once in a lifetime". Of course this is just a turn of speech, but there's something deeper behind this particular idiom, a subconscious (or should I say sublinguistic) nod to the general principle I made just above.
Remember how long an hour was, back in childhood? When Mom sent us to our rooms for an hour of timeout, wasn't that an eternity of torment? And a day was this unimaginably vast span of time-- remember how impatiently we used to wait for Christmas, the later weeks of December creeping like molasses. As we grew older, the hour grew shorter, and now it seems like three or four hours flit past and we hardly notice. Days have lost their longevity, and adults utter cliches like, "why can't there be more hours in the day?" As I write this, I'm 25, and it seems like whole weeks have contracted, passing in a blur.
I realized that there was a general pattern here: the older I become, the faster time seems to pass! To make sense of this, we need to invent a unit for measuring perceived time. The particular unit isn't important, just as the laws of physics don't depend whether you use meters or feet, so we'll adopt something arbitrary for now. By one perceived hour, I mean the amount of time perceived to pass during one real hour, by an infant one year of age.
The general pattern from above can be stated as follows. A perceived hour and a real hour are exactly the same, if you're exactly one year old. If you are older than one year, then a perceived hour is actually longer than a real hour, and the older you get, the more comparatively so. If you are under one year, a perceived hour is actually shorter than a real hour.
What this all means is that there's actually a lot less variance in lifespans between different people-- assuming we count only the perception of time. For someone who dies young, more of life is spent observing time to pass relatively slowly. Later years of life are perceived to fly past, each successive year adding fewer and fewer perceived hours. Hark back to the early years of your life and remember how long a single year was back then-- it was an eternity, unfolding into the horizons. It used to seem like adulthood was literally a lifetime away-- as a matter of fact, it roughly was. Of all the perceived hours we enjoy, most were childhood hours.
This observation may seem a little frightening. The implications are sobering: you've lived most of your life already, and you'll die pretty soon. But actually, this law of equal lifespans can be empowering: let it urge you to stop putting off the pleasures of life. The old saying "live fast, die young" has a certain ring of deep wisdom to it after all. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow cometh the reaper.
Taken to its extreme, the corollaries of equal lifespans can seem a little reckless: it's better to be happy while you're young, even at the price of elderly poverty. For, the young years filled with fun will linger on, you can savor them while time idly lazes by. And then, if old age must be endured in poverty, you can rest easy knowing it'll fly past in a blink anyway. The most foolish thing you could do would be to sacrifice your whole life investing for retirement. Retirement-- what a cruel hoax! Would you break your back all your life in exchange for one minute of leisure at the very end? Of course not-- but in terms of perceived minutes, that's exactly what retirement amounts to!
So what, indeed, would it be like to live to a thousand? The answer is, it wouldn't be much different from living to be twenty. A thousand is fifty times twenty, but you wouldn't come anywhere near fifty times the perceived time. By the time you hit 200, whole years would seem to flit past with the snap of a finger. By 500, decades would march by to the cadence of your breath.
Carpe Diem-- seize the day. Days are a currency of dwindling value, so avoid the inflation by enjoying them while they're high!
FURTHER READING
Taking Control of Life
Short Term Assets vs. Long Term Assets
51 Things That Won't Matter When You Die
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1 comments:
I think that perceived length of time is moreso a function of what you do with that time. The reason why time seems to fly so fast for people who get older is because they are in routine in which each of their days culminates into nothing of value. The average middle aged person goes to work, does stuff with their family, watches TV, and then pays the bills or something. This is a state of stagnation; the person has simply stopped growing as an individual. Of course they're going to say that 10 years flew by between the ages of 45 and 55 because perception of time is being influenced by frame of reference. If an individual is exactly the same and has done nothing noteworthy in a 10 year span, those years will simply blend in with each other. Children on the other hand, learn and grow so much each day that the days appear to contain more time for than relative to those of the average adult. And 言うまでも無く old people pretty much never do anything of value so of course their days will just blend in with each other.
My conclusion actually brings me to your social learning model, which is that if we wanted to extend our perception of time we should look at children (who are always learning, growing individually, and being curious) and replicate that in our own lives.
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