Life is not short
March 30th, 2024
Note: I wrote this in December 2022 but never published it. I stumbled upon it today and decided to publish it after making a few tweaks. The opinion expressed in this piece still represents my views today.
This week I finished reading a book called “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”. The book is centered around the idea of time, and how we can spend it most optimally. But despite this description, it’s actually an anti-productivity book. I don’t want to review this book here, but rather codify how I’m thinking about the remaining ~2700 weeks or so I have left.
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief.” reads the hook on the inner cover flap of Four Thousand Weeks. Though I agree with most ideas in this book, I think that this perspective, though a prevailing one, is shallow and flimsy.
The most common adjective used to describe the average duration of a human life is “short”. “Life is short.” serves as the foundation for many trendy ideologies, ranging from mindfulness (as in Four Thousand Weeks) to “hustle culture”.
The flaw with this perspective, though, is that “short” is relative. We describe someone’s height as “short” or “tall” based on the height of the average person. Describing a person as “short” because they are not as tall as the Empire State Building is a worthless comparison. What comparison are we drawing to the human lifespan to conclude that it is, indeed, “short”?
My perspective is that we aren’t drawing any comparison. If we were, I think we would likely arrive at the opposite conclusion.
In the mid-19th century, the average human lifespan was ~41 years, compared to ~73 years today. We’ve nearly doubled the time we get to spend on this planet in the last 200 years, or 2.5 average lifespans. Humans have been around nearly 300,00 years - meaning this doubling of lifespan occurred in the most recent 0.07% of human existence. We are living longer today than ever before in our species’ history, and given the exponential advancement of medicine and technology, it’s likely this trend will continue to accelerate.
The implication of foregoing this quantitative comparison is that we will feel that life is “too short” regardless of how long we are able to live. As our lifespan increases, the expectation of what we can accomplish in our lifetime grows in tandem. This is closely related to Parkinson’s Law - the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Substituting “work” for “our expectations of life” sums this point up effectively.
The internalization of life’s brevity can be a valuable forcing function to accomplish more in a short period of time, but I think it also leads to a sort of entitlement about how long we deserve to live. Life being short implies there’s some standard that we are entitled to and not receiving. Although I believe that (the average) life is not short, I am still driven to achieve and to use my time to the best of my ability. This change in perspective has not impacted my motivation or ambition, but has opened me up to feel more gratitude about the time that I do have to live.
At the age of 25 years, I feel that I have experienced an enormous amount of what life has to offer. I’ve fallen in love. I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve set big goals and achieved them. I’ve fallen short and failed. I’ve picked myself up after challenging times, and grown from them. I started off as a child, existing at the mercy of the world around me, to an adult, empowered to live my life as I choose and make my own mark on society. I’m sure that you have experienced some of these things, too. That’s a pretty full life if you ask me.