Life’s too short
A few years ago, I opened the calculator app on my phone and figured out that the standard human lifespan is only about four thousand weeks long. To be honest, I’ve never quite been the same since. Four thousand weeks! Later, when I asked a friend to guess, without doing any mental arithmetic, how many weeks the average person could expect to live, she named a number in six figures. But as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number – 270,000 weeks – is the approximate duration of since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Life is short – and thanks to the troubling way that the experience of time speeds up as you age, it feels even shorter. So if you were offered a few hundred extra weeks, you’d probably say yes. But what about a million more?
