I went to college two years late, at age 20 instead of the usual 18. That meant I had had two extra years’ practice with teenage philosophizing compared to my classmates.
So when one of those classic freshman-year, fall-semester, late-night, deep discussion topics came up — “What would you do if tomorrow was the last day on Earth?” — I had a unique take.
The usual answers to that question are sky diving… some kind of wild sex proposal to your old crush… or going to admire the sunset one last time.
“I wouldn’t do anything different than usual,” I said. “I imagine I’d be paralyzed with fear. I’d probably just do the same things as every other day. Or maybe I’d spend the day lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling.”
I proposed a different hypothetical instead.
“What would you do if tomorrow there was an announcement that death has been cancelled, or at least pushed back by a few dozen millennia?”
That’s a question I’ve thought about a few times. I think it’s worth thinking about even today, long after college.
If you could live on, as you are now, or as healthy and as young as you want to be, pretty much indefinitely, what then?
How many more days or hours would you go on doing the job you are doing now? What would you do instead?
Would you try to save money? What for?
Would you stay in the same relationship that you’re in now? How would the prospect of thousands more years together weigh on you?
Of course, this is just a hypothetical. I used to write a weekly newsletter about the latest longevity science, and based on what I’ve read, death will not be cancelled tomorrow, or the day after.
Still, I think the above is a useful thought experiment.
A lot of modern-day gurus out there preach an abundance mindset. “Those who have will be given more,” they say, paraphrasing the Bible, “and those who have not will lead miserable, miserly lives regardless of their actual circumstances.”
This abundance mindset is almost always applied to things like money, achievements, opportunities, stuff in your life.
But then those same gurus — and I can name three off the top of my head — turn around and say, “Life is short.”
The implied message being to use your time wisely and conservatively, not to waste it or fritter it away. In other words, to be a bit of a time miser.
Maybe these abundance gurus are right. Maybe time is different from all the stuff that’s abundant in the universe.
All I can tell you is that personally, I’ve found that thinking that “life is short” is more likely to lock me up with fear and indecision than it is to make me hustle and prioritize.
That’s why I choose to believe I have all the time in the world, specifically, all the time I need, and that everything that needs doing is getting done, or will get done.
Counterintuitively, I find this actually helps me move and get things done now, while urgency and scarcity have the opposite effect.
I’m not sure if you can agree with me, or if this helps you in any way. But perhaps it can give you a different way to look at some familiar things.
In entirely unrelated news:
The last few days, I’ve stopped promoting my Daily Email Habit service because, frankly, I thought I had tapped out demand for the moment.
But then yesterday, a handful more people signed up, “on their own,” that’s to say, even without me promoting the offer in my daily email.
Maybe I was wrong?
So let me remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which is designed to help you start and stick with sending daily emails to your list.
It’s only the second week this service has been running, but I’ve already had a bunch of results-based testimonials about it. Here’s one from Alex Ko, who is a senior copywriter at edtech company KooBits:
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Thanks for setting up DEH and troubleshooting the streak counter. While the streaks feature is great, I especially love your daily puzzle.
It takes the stress out of finding a topic to write about, and for me, looking back at the body of work I’ve done over the past week feels much better than keeping the streak alive.
It’s already gotten me to write on weekends, something I usually avoid since I treat them as rest days.
Looking forward to sharing more results in the future!
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If you feel that it might be the right time to start a consistent daily email habit (weekends optional), here’s the full info on how I can help you with that: