If a king has no children, he is a failed king. The line ends with him, whatever great accomplishments he achieved in his life. But it isn’t enough to have children. The tyrant must have successful children. If a king’s sons and daughters are weak and incapable, it’s as good as having none at all. Even if the heirs to the throne are strong and wield their scepters confidently, if those heirs are failures, then their father is a failure too. Perhaps his failure took longer to manifest than that of the sterile monarch, it takes longer for the warlords and the power vacuum to appear, but the king whose every child is a failure, that king is a failure too.

In fact, pushing this argument to its extreme, the only way for a king not to be a failure, is if he has infinitely many descendants. If the sultan has only finitely many descendants, then at some later generation, his line will be completely extinct. Maybe it will take a hundred years, or maybe ten thousand, but eventually, the seed of the king-with-finite-descendants will vanish from the world. Whether he has ten descendants or ten billion, once the last one dies, their accomplishments will be for naught.

Who has more power? The emperor who conquers all of Asia and dies childless? Or the pauper whose prolific progeny endures forever? In the short term, the emperor is the more powerful, but in the long run, the pauper wins hands down. After some thousands of years, the pauper’s descendants will board starships and colonize distant galaxies; the emperor and all his legacy will crumble to dust.

Who, then, is the true emperor? All the men and women with infinite descendants, I say they are true emperors, whether they wear crowns or rags. The beggar with infinitely many descendants is an emperor-in-exile. The almighty despot, destined to have “only” fifty billion descendants, he is an imitator to the throne, and when his fifty billionth descendant passes away, then the beggar’s heirs will fill in the vacuum.

FURTHER READING

Mathematical Royalty
Abstract Systems of Royalty
Fixed Points and Futurism

Assuming the Many Minds interpretation, the cat itself has nothing to fear from the experiment. In dead-cat universe, our feline has no consciousness. Thus, the animal’s consciousness is “forced” to take the live-cat universe. From the cat’s point of view, she lucks out and survives the experiment. Repeat the experiment a thousand times, and from her viewpoint, she’ll survive them all– which, if the cat believes in the classic interpretation, must seem like divine intervention!

I learned about this idea of quantum immortality when a random click of the StumbleUpon button led me to the wikipedia article on same. The reason it stuck out at me was because I’d been contemplating some similar thoughts on my own recently. It’s as if the universe answered my questions through a Stumble. That kind of synchronicity can’t be ignored– there was no choice but to write this article!

Quantum immortality isn’t restricted to the box in Schrodinger’s lab. Taking it to its logical extreme, I can never die as long as there’s absolutely any way for any quantum waveforms to collapse anywhere/anytime to save me. If a butterfly flapping its wings can chaos-theoretically cause or prevent a typhoon, then so can a quantum waveform collapsing in a certain way. That typhoon might have forced President John F. Kennedy to cancel his Texas photo-op in favor of a hurricane-devastation photo-op, and he’d be alive today. From Kennedy’s point of view, he is alive today: just not in the same universe you and I inhabit. He was prevented from coming to this universe by an assassin’s bullet, so his consciousness must have taken a different turn.

The consequences of this reasoning are rather grim if you follow them far enough. Although you and I will eventually see each other die, neither of us will see our own death. We’ll each survive indefinitely. Does that mean we’ll become older and older, surviving in a world where everyone marvels how the old geezer’s heart is still beating after breaking all the old-age records, eventually existing in a near-vegetative state and wishing for the sweet release of mortality? The mechanism of quantum immortality allows the conscious mind to steer clear of universes where it dies, but not from universes where the body is injured. Over time, injuries should accumulate until life is a living hell…

We should hope that these grim consequences are not true. That forces the question: how could the eternal living hell be avoided? If the classical interpretation of quantum physics were the true one, then we wouldn’t need to worry about accumulating injuries. Another way out would be if consciousness really does continue after we die. If there’s some conscious world beyond this life, that would give our consciousness a place to go instead of going to an alternate reality where we were miraculously saved. A pet theory of mine is that dying in this life causes us to “wake up” into a higher life, where we realize this has all been a dream; in turn, dying in that higher world would make us wake up to an even higher one, and so on indefinitely. Just wait ’til I die, then I’ll publish an article to let you know whether I’m right or wrong

FURTHER READING

How to be Solipsistic
Ten Metaphors For Death
Permadeath
Dream Report, Jan 9, 2010

The Overly Clever Zen-master

The ninja Nobushige visited the Zen Master Haukin and asked: “Is there a Heaven and Hell?”

“Who are you?” asked the old master.

“I am a ninja” replied Nobushige.

“You, a ninja!” exclaimed Haukin. “What kind of ruler would have you as his ninja? Your face looks more like that of a beggar!”

Nobushige was furious and he began to draw his katana.

Haukin said: “So you have a katana! It looks much too dull to cut off my head!”

Nobushige whipped the blade out and thrust it toward Haukin.

Haukin remarked: “Here open the gates of H–” He was interrupted as Nobushige cut his head right off.

Never Ask A Ninja For Enlightenment

One day, Ichirou approached the village ninja. “How can I attain enlightenment?” asked Ichirou. The ninja whipped out a shuriken and flicked it right into Ichirou’s heart. Right away, Ichirou was enlightened.

How To Live Forever

A ninja-in-training asked his master: “Is it possible to live forever?” “Yes” replied his master. “How can I live forever?” asked the student. “First, you must never utter a false statement,” began the master. “I can do that,” the student assured. “Second, every day you must say: `tomorrow I’ll cut off someone’s head’. Follow these two rules and you will never die!”

The Gōjian Knot

One day, the great ninja shogun Arekusanda arrived at Gōjiamu, where he found a certain cart tied to a post. This was no ordinary cart or post: prophesies said that whoever could untie the knot would become shogun of all Asia. Arekusanda struggled with the knot but he could find no way to untie it. Finally he whipped out his katana and slashed the knot, cutting it right in half, as well as the post, the cart, and several witnesses standing nearby.

A Wise Saying

If you meet the Buddha, kill him. If you meet someone else… kill him too.

Wise Emperor Soromon

One day, Soromon the Ninja-Emperor was holding court when two disputing women were brought for his judgment. There was a baby with them, and the two women each claimed to be the baby’s true mother. Soromon pondered the situation for a moment. He whipped out his katana and cut the baby and both the women clean in half.

No Coming and No Going

Just before Ninakawa passed away, Ninja-Master Ikkyu visited him. “Shall I guide you on?” Ikkyu asked.

Ninakawa replied: “What on earth are you talking about? I’m perfectly healthy and AAAA GURRRRRGLE” Ikkyu had whipped out a length of piano-wire and strangled his host.

Forest Ninjutsu

If a ninja and a tree are in a forest, and the ninja slashes through the tree with his katana and disappears in a puff of smoke before it can hit the ground, does it make a sound?

FURTHER READING

Ten Buddhist Koans
Three Ways to Be More Present
Ten Metaphors For Death

Get Out of the City

If you want to starve, you’d better get as far away from civilization as possible. Cities are chock full of free food. Stores and restaurants literally throw away as much food as they sell, it’s so plentiful. It’s not even enough just to go live in the woods, you need to totally unlink yourself from the grid. Once you begin experiencing success in your quest to starve, you’re likely to lose enthusiasm, and if you have, say, a cell phone, you’ll be very tempted to use it to obtain food. If you have any link at all to the outside world, pesky government-employed rescue workers will probably come mess up all your carefully laid plans.

Don’t Tell Anyone Where You’re Going

The quest for starvation must be carried out with ninja-like stealth. Society will brand you with derogatory labels such as “Missing Person.” Your own family will betray you, and you’ll have people combing the woods, deserts and ocean, trying to put a stop to your fast. The only way to escape all these enemies trying to shove food down your throat, is to disappear without a trace.

Go Back In Time to the Ice Age

Starving would be considerably easier if it weren’t for all these humanitarian institutions, all this advanced agricultural technology, all these cities and all this temperate climate. And starving isn’t gonna get any easier, either: pesky scientists work tirelessly to improve food technology more and more. You’d better get working on starving soon, before we have robots running around everywhere giving people food. Your best bet is to build a time machine and travel back to the ice age. Just make sure nobody knows your exact spacetime coordinates, or some well-intentioned Kyle Reese might come terminate your mission

Blow Up the Sun

As long as sunlight shines upon the surface of the world, life and vegetation will stubbornly grow and blossom. Just as your quest for starvation nears completion, your willpower will break down completely and you run the risk you might give in and eat something. The only way to be really sure is to blow up the sun. Act fast, before all these pesky scientists find some way to turn lifeless rocks into food!

Annihilate Your Remains with Antimatter

If anything at all is left of you after you starve, the annoying Cycle of Life will somehow incorporate it into the circle. While this doesn’t exactly stop you from starving, it kind of goes against the bigger “Starvation Movement” of which you are now a member. You don’t want some leeching bacteria to come feast on your bones, that would be a goal for the Non-Starving team! It’s not even enough to blow up the sun or seal yourself in a glacier, eventually after many eons some exotic microscopic organism will get at you.

FURTHER READING

The Work Ethic
The Overpopulation Myth
The Case for Basic Income
How To Destroy Planet Earth (oops, I never wrote that one, I just can’t think of any realistic way to do it! )

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Buddhism which sets it apart from a lot of Western religions: followers are encouraged to alter and change old teachings rather than try to preserve them. Such preservation would go strongly against the whole philosophy of “This too shall pass.” So, I shall take the liberty of “modernizing” a couple of the stories below, but you’ll have to guess which ones. Also I’ll completely ignore the names other people have given them and make up my own names.

About the title: technically the plural of “koan” should be “koan” (just like the plural of “ninja” should be “ninja”), but in English the plural has become “koans”.

1. The Delicious Strawberry

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

My interpretation: Rather than try to impose one strict interpretation, I’ll just offer a couple questions: what are the tigers in your world, and what’s the strawberry?

2. Tozan’s Brain Twister

A monk asked Tozan, “How can we escape the cold and heat?” Tozan replied, “Why not go where there is no cold and heat?” “Is there such a place?” the monk asked. Tozan explained: “When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through.”

My analysis: This one’s over my head; but that’s good! If I could understand all the parables, there’d be no point in meditating upon them.

3. The Soul

What is this mind? Who is hearing these sounds? Do not mistake any state for self-realization, but continue to ask yourself even more intensely– what is it that hears?

My commentary: Nothing I write here can do the verse justice. Instead I offer the following link: Three Ways to Greater Presence.

4. No Coming and No Going

Just before Ninakawa passed away, Zen-master Ikkyu visited him. “Shall I lead you on?” Ikkyu asked.

Ninakawa replied: “I came here alone and I go alone. What help could you be to me?”

Ikkyu answered: “If you think you really come and go, that is your delusion. Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and no going.”

With these words, Ikkyu had revealed the path so clearly that Ninakawa smiled and passed away.

My comments: No comment on the meaning, I’ll only say that the first time I read this one, it almost brought me to tears.

5. Lively and Buoyant

If you want to be free, get to know your real self.
It has no form, no appearance, no root, no basis, no abode,
But is lively and buoyant.
It responds with versatile facility, but its function cannot be located.
Therefore when you look for it, you become further from it;
When you seek it, you turn away from it all the more.

6. Counterculture

Zen Master Unmon said: “The world is vast and wide. Why do you drive to work at the sound of the alarm clock?”

7. How To Avoid Crusades

A university student visiting Master Gasan asked: “Have you ever read the Christian Bible?”

“No, read it to me,” said Gasan.

The student opened the Bible and read from the gospel of St. Matthew: “And why take ye thought for rainment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these… Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”

Gasan said: “Whoever uttered those words I consider an enlightened man.”

The student continued reading: “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.”

Gasan remarked: “That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.”

My remarks: You probably know this already, but the man St. Matthew was quoting was Jesus.

8. A Warning

A monk asked Master Kegon: “How does an enligthtened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”

9. Condescending and Judgmental

In Tokyo in the Meiji era there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics. One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon, kept Buddha’s precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants, nor did he eat after eleven o’clock in the morning. The other teacher, Tanzan, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University, never observed the precepts. Whenever he felt like eating, he ate, and when he felt like sleeping in the daytime he slept.

One day Unsho visited Tanzan, who was drinking wine at the time, not even a drop of which is suppposed to touch the tongue of a Buddhist.

“Hello, brother,” Tanzan greeted him. “Won’t you have a drink?”

“I never drink!” exclaimed Unsho solemnly.

“One who does not drink is not even human,” said Tanzan.

“Do you mean to call me inhuman just because I do not indulge in intoxicating liquids?!” exclaimed Unsho in anger. “Then if I am not human, what am I?”

“A Buddha,” answered Tanzan.

10. The True Nature of Reality

FURTHER READING

Three Ways to Greater Presence
My Adventure in a Buddhist Cult
A Modern Version of the Lord’s Prayer
Kubla Khan
Connections between Japanese and Buddhism

At first, I didn’t like the idea of my characters being permanently buried. It was a step back in technology, to more primitive times, when we played games on the original Nintendo with no saving mechanism. Except this time, there were no extra life mushrooms hidden in floating question boxes. “Man, I’m never gonna beat this game!” I thought in frustration. Most the characters I generated– wizards, archers, warriors, whatever classes I picked– perished before even reaching the half-way point. And yet, there was something about the system which really brought the game to life. Decisions had consequences. It made me realize that a lot of modern RPGs are nothing but artificially elongated movies. Movies where you have to push the right buttons to proceed to the next scene, but don’t worry, if you get the buttons wrong you can try again and again and again. Much as I love a game like Final Fantasy VII or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, ADOM forced me to admit that there was no visceral thrill in the modern game, no cold sweat of panic when the party runs into an unexpected monster or runs out of potions. There’s nothing really at stake: just the minor inconvenience of starting over from the last time you saved, five minutes ago.

Think how it must look through the party’s eyes. Whenever you reload a savefile, the party’s memories are also set back to that point. “I don’t get it,” Cloud Strife must inevitably muse after yet another flawless run through some incredibly dangerous labyrinth. “It’s like some higher consciousness is intervening in our favor…” It’s a wonder more videogame heroes don’t descend into paralyzing nihilism. Eventually you’d think they’d become totally numb and jaded, bored of a life where nothing can ever go wrong. No wonder they feel no qualms at all about casually strolling into and looting random strangers’ houses in front of their very faces. Whatcha gonna do, fight back? I’ve got the reset button, biznitch!

So it got me thinking: noone forces us to use save points. Why not play through every game the Thomas Biskup way? If your party dies, you start over from scratch. Of course, there’s a big problem with that. Most games aren’t randomly generated every playthrough like ADOM is. If you played Parasite Eve with permadeath, you’d end up watching that sweet opera scene where everyone catches on fire, over and over again. Sure it’d be cool the first five times, but eventually it’d get really old. But then, noone’s forcing us to start over, either. What if we just threw the cart away the first time Mario plummeted off a strangely-located bottomless crevasse? Or better yet, we could ceremoniously bury it, right next to the Zelda II cartridge and the GTA:SA discs.

Face it, there are so many video games out there, you’re never gonna play through all the ones you want to if you do each one from start to finish. If you let your dead characters rest in peace, you’ll be able to play all the productions you always wanted to, and still have time to have a real life of your own. Not only that, but the games will offer a thrill you’ve never felt from gaming before. Imagine how much of an adrenaline rush fighting Hitler would’ve been in Wolfenstein if you knew you only had one chance. Beads of sweat forming on your brow as you carefully weigh the shopkeeper’s offer to sell you a potion for 150GP. Your girlfriend defensively clutching your arm every time Alice runs into an Umbrella Corporation zombie.

Of course, in the game of real life, there are no save points… or are there?

FURTHER READING

The Katamari Damacy Model of Growth
Lands of Aethar
51 Things That Won’t Matter After Death
10 Metaphors About Death

The poem opens at a wedding-feast. Three wedding-guests are stopped by a mysterious old seaman. Two of them escape, but the third is compelled to listen to his amazing story…

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Navigate to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

PART I

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
Mayst hear the merry din.’

He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
`Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye -
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

“The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.

The sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon -”
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

“And now the storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken -
The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it were a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

It ate the food it ne’er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner’s hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white moonshine.”

`God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus! -
Why look’st thou so?’ -”With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.”

Navigate to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

At first, the wedding-guest is annoyed by the mariner. But the ancient mariner has a certain compelling power in his eyes, and the wedding-guest is spellbound, listening even while he’s supposed to perform duties in the wedding ceremony.

The old seaman tells how his ship set sail. It was struck by a storm, which drove it south, as far as the antarctic regions. There, the sailors were stuck by walls of ice. But an Albatross visited the ship, and it was a bird of good fortune: soon as the sailors gave the bird food and played with it, the ice split apart and they escaped their icy prison, though they still suffered lots of fog and mist.

Halfway through this part of the tale, the wedding-guest hears the ceremony going on without him, and he is distraught that he’s missing it, yet he has no choice but to listen as the mariner goes on.

Near the end of this Part I, the mariner suddenly looks very grieved and distraught. So much so that his listenter has to ask what’s wrong. Then comes the confession: unprovoked, the mariner shot and killed the Albatross.

Jump to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

FURTHER READING

A Modern Version of Genesis Chapter I
10 Metaphors for Death
Gloom and Doom

Death is……

……A Deep Sleep. This metaphor takes some of the fear away from death: it’s just a very long nap. Every time we sleep and dream, we’re practicing for the inevitable departure from the mortal coil. When you close your eyes at night, for awhile you bid farewell to the world, and the same is true of the Final Slumber.

……A Climax. If life is a play or a movie, then passing away is kind of like the big dramatic climax. They say your life flashes before your eyes in the final moments; maybe that’s something like a Hollywood montage. One of the consequences of this metaphor is that you shouldn’t let your final moments occur in bed. That’d make for a pretty lame climax. Let the reaper find you on a battlefield, or doing something cool and dangerous.

……An Awakening. As the song goes: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream.” If our time in this world is just a slumbering reverie, then when we die, we must re-awaken in some higher dimension where we went to sleep in the first place. Maybe you’ll even forget all this life, just like you forget a dream. Or, more likely, you’ll hang on to just some fleeting memories: the face of a loved one, the intensity of an emotion.

……The Void. Total annihilation, the total cessation of existence. It’s difficult to get a grasp on what this would be like, since it’s totally unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Should we fear the void? On the one hand, it seems like we should be mortally afraid, and yet, there’s nothing to fear: we won’t experience the nothingness because the experience of nothingness would itself be something. We won’t be there to experience it.

……A Gift. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien’s prelude to the Lord of the Rings, tells how the creator of the universe designed the two races of Elves and Men. He gave the Elves incredible beauty, skill, knowledge, wisdom, strength, eternal life… it seems at first glance that the race of Men was totally screwed by comparison. But the creator gave men their own gift, and that is death; and it’s said that, as time wears ever onward, even the gods themselves will envy this gift! It makes sense, if you think about it. Life is awesome, but we’re not designed to exist eternally. Even ignoring things like the eventual burning-out of the sun, mankind would eventually go insane if not for the graceful relief of dying.

……Game Over. If life is a game, then death is the end of the game. It makes me wonder whether there are “save points”. In a video game, when you die, you can go back to the last time you “saved”. Of course, I don’t remember ever dying and reloading, but that makes sense, because reloading at a savepoint would also reload my memories, wiping away the memory of dying. When you play a tough videogame, you might watch as your party dies over and over, but to the party itself, it seems like everything went smooth

……Judgment. A common idea is that when we pass away, we’ll be judged for our behavior in this lifetime. This is a very useful notion, not for you and me, but for the people who want to control us. Personally, this doesn’t make any sense to me. Judgment is usually attributed to some legislative deity, but it just doesn’t make sense that an all-powerful entity would have any interest in punishing puny mortals. If there is a creator, I can’t help but think of him like a voluntary game programmer, whose sole purpose in creating the universe is for “players” to “log in” and have lots of fun.

……Forgetting. Whether or not there’s an afterlife, the one thing we can say for certain is that we won’t have access to our physical memories. That’s because they are stored in a physical brain, and after we die, our brains crumble to dust. It’s weird to try to imagine this. One of the things you’ll forget is all spoken language. The words and grammar of English are carved into my gray matter, but they won’t outlive me.

……The End of the Universe. To the solipsist, the universe is only here because you’re here to observe it. When you die, the universe too will cease to be. In a sense, this is objectively true: the universe is experienced a little differently by each of us, so at least the universe as you see it will evaporate.

……Life. Whether as explicitly as reincarnation, or as subtly as the circle of life, death is rebirth and life. Birth and death accompany each other perfectly: one never exists without the other, and in that sense, the two are one.

FURTHER READING

10 Metaphors for Life
The Length of a Human Lifetime
The Beauty of Decay

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!

How many times you mowed the lawn.
How clean your underwear was when you died.
How many confrontations you managed to avoid.
Whether or not you cheated on a midterm in college.
Whether you managed to keep up with the Jones.
How many songs or movies you pirated.
How many TPS reports you filed.
Whether your facebook status was up to date.
The excuses you made not to follow your dream.
Whether or not you had sex before marriage.
Whether you saw every episode of that TV show.
How up to date you were on “current events”.
How many widgets you managed to collect.
Your number of extra lives in Mario World.
The ideas you kept to yourself.
Whether or not you saved your old tax forms.
How many items you listed in a blog post.
Whether you said “po-tay-to” or “po-tah-to”.
How many times you reviewed your flashcards.
Whether you left hair in the bathtub drain.
Until what age you still picked your nose.
The number of times you wore that shirt.
The talents which you never expressed.
Dreams forgotten when the alarm clock rang.
How many toys you collected.
Old grudges which festered within.
How many digits of pi you memorized.
Whether you were rejected that one time.
How many eggshells you tiptoed over.
What your boss thought of you.
Whether you managed to follow regulations.
Whether or not the neighbors approved.
All those times you felt embarrassed.
Whether or not “Ms. Manners” approved.
Your post count on any online forums.
Whether the professor gave you an A or A-.
How good you were at drill in boot camp.
Whether or not you told them you were hardcore.
Your annual performance reviews.
Whether or not you played using cheatcodes.
How straightedge you were.
Whether you gave them a proper 2-week notice.
Whether you played Nintendo or Playstation.
What place you came in in the ratrace.
Brand-name breakfast cereals or generic.
What you bought people for Christmas.
Whether the boss gave you a letter of recommendation.
What your neighborhood council thought of you.
Who you had a secret crush on (keyword: secret).
How much space was left on your hard drive.
How many nasty comments you got on the internet.
How much busywork you accomplished.