This will (not) last forever

Harmful belief

One of the most harmful beliefs is that our present experience will last forever.

We take things for granted. We far underestimate the rarity of our experiences. We don’t realize just how few times we will do a particular activity.

When it comes to bad experiences, we all know to tell each other that “this too shall pass”. We somehow fail to do that when it comes to good experiences.

I suspect that this is cause for much suffering when it comes to broken relationships and deceased friends.

How many times will you go to the movies with your parents? They will soon be too old to be doing that stuff with you, if they aren’t already. How many times will you chat endlessly with your friends? You will soon all be too busy to even be in the same city at the same time, if you aren’t already. <insert other rare experiences here>

As seekers of the truth, we need to be keenly aware of exactly how rare our experiences are. Not a vague idea of how the times are changing, or a faint feeling of malaise on a dull Sunday evening. We need to bring it front and centre in our lives.

Discrete and Finite

PG mentions that we think of time as a continuous quantity. This makes us imagine that there is an infinity of it. After all, you can peer closer and closer at the real line and you will always find a stream of points going on, like 2.445353534536… and so on. But this is an illusion. Time is discrete. At least, our ability to discern between two instants is limited. We cannot in fact go deeper and deeper into one instant. Our brain runs at a finite frequency (I’m told 200 Hz) and, in any case, we don’t have the tools yet to exploit short fractions of time on any meaningful level.

Once you look at time as a discrete quantity, your life suddenly goes from “infinitely long” to “holy crap! It’s just ~600000 hours!” (assuming you live for 70 years). Of course, given our scope insensitivity, that too seems close to infinity. Those zeros do nothing to help us imagine the figure. Hmmm… We don’t have something concrete to visualize.

Let’s try instead thinking in terms of the number of key moments. How many more New Year’s Eve parties? Well, at best 45 (for me, now). But, after I’m 50 or 60, I probably won’t (or can’t) go to those. So, that leaves only 25 New Year’s Eves.

Another example is about the number of aimless, fun-filled meetups with close friends. My friend plans to get married in a few months. So, that made New Year’s Eve 2015 the last time our group would hang out together! Next year, he would surely be off with his family or his wife’s family. A few years down the line from that, he would be off with his kids, and there would be no earthly excuse he could give for running off with his friends. So, this was it for our group’s New Year’s Eve. Similarly, this was it for random, spur-of-the-moment trips - we are rarely even in the same city anymore!

Also look at Wait But Why’s The Tail End for a visual of your time left. Lesson: You’re in the tail end of your time with most of your favourite people (parents, siblings, best friends). Takeaway: “Living in the same place as the people you love matters.”

Why? Because things are caused by things close by in space and time. So, your emotions will be affected by things that are near you. Yes, you can Skype with your friends across the world, but sharing activities and intimacy is something you can only do in person.

Lesson: Surround yourself with things that you want to cause your thoughts and emotions.

For example, keep great books and movies close by, great friends and family members even closer, and push harmful influences away.

Why care?

If we realize just how few times we might live a particular experience, we might cherish it even more. We may even change our priorities. After all, we generally ignore our dreams, family, feelings, friends, and happiness.

The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family, suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of mistake, because you make them by default.

– Paul Graham, The Top of My Todo List

What do we do instead? I think we get caught up in trying to live life successfully as per the current societal norms, which unhelpfully don’t promote these values. As PG said, we fall into the trap of becoming a cog, someone who fits in with society’s current demands. And those demands are moronic, for the most part.

Why don’t we make the important things our top priorities? My hypothesis is that we don’t realize how rare and valuable these experiences are. We think we will do these after we have met some other requirements. First I’ll do this crap work, and then I’ll follow my dreams. Let me get well-settled and then I’ll spend a lot of time with my family. I’ll finish this godforsaken project, and then I’ll pay attention to my feelings. Let me become successful and then I’ll spend time with my friends. Let me get everything done really well, and then I’ll remember to be happy.

A striking prediction of this hypothesis is that if someone does realize how rare and valuable these experiences are, they will focus significantly more on the above values and less on socially conditioned crap. No one can say my hypothesis is not falsifiable!

Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Taleb was talking about opportunities that could lead to a big break, but this maxim applies equally well to everyday joys. They really are much rarer than you think.

And remember, we won’t ever have magic moments that make up for years of misery. Life is not made up of great moments. It’s just made up of mundane everyday moments. Saying hi to a friend, smiling with your loved ones, teasing your siblings, watching your favourite sports team, doing a little bit more work on some project - this is the stuff life is made of, to paraphrase Ben Franklin.

I kept thinking that some extraordinary moments would make my life worth it, somehow. I still feel that way. But I’m wrong.

If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.

– Eliezer Yudkowsky, Joy in the Merely Real

Love

We overvalue romantic relationships, especially the ones we don’t even have yet.

Infatuation

We think our feelings of being crazy about something will last forever. They won’t. This too shall pass.

This holds for love interests, favourite celebrities, movies, etc. For example, I was crazy about a certain musician for a while. I felt like I would be his fan forever, and that he would continue to make brilliant music till the end of time. But, five albums later, a little suckage started to seep through. Now, I’m no longer so hot about his music.

Why will the feeling pass? Because we adapt. Our brain simply isn’t designed to find something novel and interesting forever. The craze might depart eventually, but the point is, in the moment, we think it won’t. That’s why we make poor choices.