The Battle of Time and Being Alive
Open your phone right now and go to create a new event. Do some mental math and determine what year it will be when you’re expected to turn 38 years old. Now, hopefully your calender is able to do this (if not, try creating a task), but you need make an event for your 38th birthday to ‘take a moment to recognise that almost 50% of people in the world are younger than you in that moment of time’. Conversely, you must also realize that the other 50% of people in the world are older than you. Take a moment to process that. Try to gauge how you’ll feel in those moments of true, statistically backed, mid-life. Will it be time for a crisis? Maybe you had already had one… Or even a few. Maybe your future-self is in a really good place. Perhaps you’ve died just days before and never got the opportunity to be mindful about such a thought. It’s a beautiful idea and a terrifying reality all in one. It seems to me that it’s a question of goals. This could be a fitting moment to reflect on the years of your life gone by, never to return. What’s next for your aging flesh-balloon of bones?
I suspect a feeling of melancholy to come out of experiencing this myself. Maybe it’ll be followed by existential dread and a marginal amount of balckhole chaos. I don’t like the idea of turning 30, let alone 38. The age of 38 means less on paper than 30 years does, but clearly has significant meaning. The younger half of the world will have a higher probability of living longer than me throughout the entire year and by the time it’s over, the situation only gets worse. To say that all the people younger than me (on any timeline) will live longer is, of course, rediculous. People of all ages die every minute on this mysterious planet. Maybe that won’t be the case for 38 year old me. The things the survivors will see beyond my time may not be much different, but they’ll get to see it after I am no longer able to and I am eternally jealous of that. People living long past me will see things like new planet colonisations and different types of ways to alter genomes that can revolutionize the animal kingdom! People may even bring Earth animals to other planets with genetic modifications that will allow them to live among new worlds. Perhaps there will be immense joy and suffering related to things that reach past my abilities to even dream. At least I’ll be aware that, like always, the sheer amount of people older than me will never get larger and will eventually and most-certainly shrink to zero.
