Your Life in Weeks

This morning I saw a post on twitter that said:

"The tragedy about waiting 6 months for something is that there aren't many "6 months" in a human life to wait.

This was in the context of a discussion about various services and their relative speeds, e.g. Amazon delivery versus health care or city planning. Amazon might be able to deliver a thing tomorrow. Fixing a road, acquiring a city permit, or getting a doctor's appointment might take several months.

But the general point is true in the long-view of life in its entirety -- the clock is always there, ticking. Time is essentially the ultimate currency. Lost or stolen time can never be returned or recovered.

It reminded me of this post from Wait but Why -- an illustration of the average human lifespan. This hit me hard when I first saw it. Life feels long until you see it laid out in weeks: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

I like to imagine a potential future where bureaucracy lessens over time and most things eventually function as swiftly as Uber or Amazon. Part of such a future would likely involve confronting external forces we may feel we do not have much control over. But we might find we have more control over them than we think, since the other part of the equation is asking—both as individuals and as a civilization—how can we use time more effectively?