NewPhilosopher Life’s too shortA few years ago, Iopenedthecal-
culator app on my phone andfigured
out that the standard humanlifespanis
only about four thousandweekslong.
To be honest, I’ve never quite been
the same since. Fourthousandweeks!
Later, when I asked afriendtoguess,
without doing any mental arithmetic,
how many weeks the average person
could expect to live, shenameda num-
ber in six figures. ButasI feltobliged
to inform her, a fairly modestsix-figure
number – 270,000 weeks– is theap-
proximate duration of allhumancivi-
lisation since the ancient Sumerians
of Mesopotamia. Life is short – and
thanks to the troubling way that the
experience of time speedsupas youage,
it feels even shorter. Soif youwereof-
fered a few hundred extraweeks,you’d
probably say yes. But whatabouta mil-
lion more? What abouteternallife?
by Oliver Burkeman
In his new book, This Life, the phi-
losopher Martin Hägglund describes
the dramatic landscape of his native
northern Sweden, where he spends
each summer with his extended fam-
ily. “Part of what makes it so poign-
ant,” he notes, “is that I may never see
it again.” The fact that the experience
can’t be guaranteed to recur – summer
after summer extending infinitely off
into the future – is why it’s so pre-
cious. The same goes for time spent
with each member of his family: it
matters because it can’t be taken for
granted, because it must one day end.
Hägglund’s book is an extended argu-
ment against the religious craving for
eternal life; were we to attain immor-
tality, he insists, we’d discover, to our
dismay, that there was nothing left to
live for. And so the Silicon Valley vi-
sionaries who dream of ‘solving death’
risk swapping one problem for a worse
one, eliminating mortality at the price
of eliminating meaning.
A more concrete way of making
a similar point involves what econo-
mists call ‘opportunity cost’. Because
your time is finite, every decision to
do anything with a given hour, or
year, implies a decision not to do anessentially limitless number of other
things. Suppose you decide to work as
a lawyer, marry a specific person, have
kids, and make your home in the city:
you can’t then use that same portion of
your limited life to pursue a different
full-time career, marry someone else,
live the childfree life, and retreat to a
cabin in the mountains. Yet such com-
mitments are meaningful precisely be-
cause they entail that kind of sacrifice.
If life were infinite, you could commit
to a decades-long marriage without
using up a single day of your time. But
then in what sense would it be a com-
mitment at all? There’d be nothing at
stake. At best, as the philosopher Ber-
nard Williams argued, you’d satisfy
your important desires in the first part
of life, then spend eternity restless and
bored. At worst, the first part of life
would feel pointless too: confident of
having time for everything, you’d nev-
er truly give yourself to anything.
For those of you too sceptical of
both religion and Silicon Valley to think
eternal life is coming anytime soon, the
crucial issue, then, is whether and how
to face up to your finitude, rather than
trying to push it from your minds.
According to an enduring strand ofLife’s too short