At the time I’m writing this, it is February 2021. Almost exactly one year has passed since the pandemic hit the world, drastically changing how we live. Five years ago, Donald Trump was elected as the president of the US. Already seems like a long time, doesn’t it?
A kid who was born on the first day of the 21st century is now legally allowed to drink. Since then, 9/11 happened, iPhone was invented and the human population increased by almost 1.6 billion - exactly the amount of people that were walking the earth at the outset of the 20th century.
100 years of the 20th century brought us two world wars and the internet. Kane Tanaka, the oldest living human to date, was born in 1903. Her birth was closer to Napoleonic wars than to the invention of the iPhone. Scroll ~2000 years back, and for Romans, the Egyptians were as ancient as Romans are to us now and ancient Egypt is around where our recorded history ends.
The human civilization itself started almost 10 thousand years before Christ was born. This is when the first temples were built and the age of agriculture started. It took us, the Sapiens, almost 190 thousand years to realize that we can grow wheat. Before, we were just running around forests and hunting animals for tens of thousands of years. Today, a new iPhone is released and 2.2 million books are published each year. For our ancestors, each year was the same as the previous one and the next one, over and over again. Innovation was not a thing.
Crazy. And if you think about it, human history is not that long at all. Humans (ancestors of Homo Sapiens) have lived on earth for approximately 6 million years and this is six lifetimes (3000 lifetimes of Homo Sapiens) of theirs before the last dinosaur died. And guess how long those big guys have been walking on the planet? For 165 million years.
I guess at this point, that is enough to put things into perspective. Our life is quite short. On the scale of the cosmos, let alone earth, our lifetimes are incomprehensibly minuscule. And at the same time, they are not.
Let me explain. I was about to write that our lives are like drops in the ocean when I fact-checked this. There are 2.73 * 1025 drops in the ocean. 13.8 billions years has only 4.3549 * 1017 seconds. So there are 108 more drops in the ocean than the seconds that have passed since the big bang. Theoretically, it is possible to fill the ocean just by pouring drops of water (that would take quite some time though). Just as the drops of water, seconds matter too.
This means that it is useful to look at life in two ways.
One of hand, life is long enough to create something meaningful. Whether you’re building a rocket ship that will fly us to Mars or being a delivery guy to make sure that people are not hungry and have that extra time to continue hustling on someday flying us to Mars - your work matters. Making life a tiny bit better for current and future generations is something that all of us can do, though it often requires hard work and discipline.
On the other hand, life is, indeed, not that long. We must realize this to let go of our fears and doubts. Life is just too short to live with those feelings all the time. We should be bold with our actions because there are only that many chances to take those. So next time you hesitate, don’t - ask her out :)
I was hugely inspired by this article from Tim Urban, which I have read and reread many times. And if you’re not a fan of reading, this video from Kurtzgesagt is awesome.
Also, today, Lithuania celebrates the signing of the Act of Independence of Lithuania. This is an example of how a few people with an idea and strong will can affect many generations to come.