Life is Short

January 2016

Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder
about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining
about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was
short if we lived 10 times as long?

Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped
wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer
the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time,
into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year
old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only
get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's
impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity
like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8
peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would
definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.

Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know
that?

It has for me. It means arguments of the form "Life is too short
for x" have great force. It's not just a figure of speech to say
that life is too short for something. It's not just a synonym for
annoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for
something, you should try to eliminate it if you can.

When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word
that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is
somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that
it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does
have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it.
It's the junk food of experience.
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