Is Life Short?

"Life is short" is one of the more common cliches, and one I cannot remember being disputed.  It is usually associated with the idea that you can't get the time back once it has gone, so you better make sure you make the most of every minute and get everything you want to do in your life done.  As an exhortation it is probably better than "don't bother, you're just going to die in the end anyway" but I think it has its' drawbacks.

"Life is short" is a goal-driven cliche.  If you have no goals then saying "Life is short" is simply depressing (unless you hate life, in which case I suppose it's encouraging).  Sam Harris in a recent talk claimed that if you don't believe in an afterlife then life is an emergency, a very long emergency.  There are things to get done, and a limited time to get them done.  The cliche is about making sure you have done what you wanted to do to the fullest extent possible.

The reason this topic came to my attention today was a result of my sitting on the grass, reading a book with my dog curled about against my back.  I just had a moment of contentment and looked up from the book.  I spent perhaps fifteen seconds just looking around at the grass, the trees and the sky.  It struck me first how vast and complicated the world is.  A scant few yards contained hundreds of plants, insects scurrying through the these plants, and below and above these plants.  Each of these hundreds and thousands of things part of an almost unimaginably vast ball that is covered entirely with this vast complication.  The seconds stretched out languidly, unhurried, marveling.

I thought about when time seems short and when time seems long.  Time seems shortest when there is something that must be done, when we are busy, when things are intense.  Time seems the longest when we have nothing to do (particularly if we are waiting for something to happen).  Time passes (at least for humans) at a fixed rate.  An hour is an hour regardless of anything else.  Yet the experience of time can vary greatly.  If you go and see an action blockbuster for ninety minutes time will seem to go by faster than if you sit in a park with nothing to do but look around.

I have always actually thought that life is long, the longest thing that I will experience.  It is actually the total of all the experiences I will have and so the experience of time with regard to my life is the maximum amount of the experience of time I can possibly have.  For me, life is so long that I cannot remember almost all of it, and yet I experienced vast amount of things, second by second.  What is the extent of your memories from 1997, fifteen years ago?  If I put my mind to it I can probably come up with two minutes of memories, and most of those are facts rather than recreations of experiences.  There were 31,556,926 seconds that year, 267, 974 times as many seconds experienced as I can remember from that year.  Just try and sit still for two minutes without doing anything, you may well find it difficult.  If you manage it then just think of that times 267,074, multiplied by the amount of years you have been alive.  That is the length of your life so far.  When put that way doesn't life seem inconceivably long?  However, later on today you will rush to do something that will take at least two minutes.  This will seem to flicker by.


Therefore, it seems to me that the phrase "Life is short" is to an extent a self fulfilling prophecy.  If you feel that life is an emergency, that you must rush to make sure you get everything in your life done and there isn't much time left in which to do it, your life will seem shorter.  On the other hand, if you spend your time going through life not doing very much and without the feeling that you are supposed to be doing things, then life will seem much longer.


I'm not saying that people shouldn't have goals, or decide that they really want to do things.  I'm not saying that moments are not precious and that we shouldn't make the most of them.  I'm just saying that life is as long or as short as the manner in which you approach it, but it will always be the longest thing you will ever experience.