According to a statistical model, I will die on August 17, 2035. My dad died young. My mom was closer to average age when she died. If my lifespan is exactly equal to the average of lifespans, August 17, 2035 will be my last day of life.
OK, I admit, this is a pretty crude statistical model. It doesn’t account for any of the lifestyle choices that tend to correlate with lifespan. For instance, it doesn’t consider any of the things that probably contributed to my dad’s short life such as the amounts of coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and bacon he consumed (lots) or the amount he exercised (little). Sure, it’s a crude model, but when it comes to predicting how long we will live, reliable models are pretty scarce.
The best model of a cat is a cat.
All models are simplifications, but some models are useful.
Imagine if each and every person knew how much longer they had left to live. I’m talking about knowing with certainty, like crystal-ball-type certainty. Stop for a minute and consider what that would be like…
In one variation of this thought experiment, everyone dies at the same time and everyone knows it’s coming. This doomed-humanity theme is the premise for movies like “Melancholia” and “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.” Stories like this get their dramatic charge by asking the question, “If you knew the world was ending, what would you do?”
Some would shelter in place with loved ones. Some would abandon their marriages or other stifling relationships. Some would pursue their bucket-list dreams. Some would throw caution to the wind and leap head-first into the wild activities they always wanted to try. Some would get drunk and stay drunk. Some would try to get closure on an unfinished mission. Some would find the courage to finally profess their love for that special someone. The juicy part of this premise is to see what’s really important when you remove all the trappings of people’s quotidian life.
An interesting sub-plot is, if everyone suddenly became self-directed, they would stop going to work; all industries would grind to a halt and society’s taken-for-granted services would collapse. Good luck catching that flight to Fiji for your bucket list when there are no pilots to fly the plane!
In a different iteration of this thought experiment, all humanity faces extinction, but it’s not going to happen until some time in the distant future. For instance, scientists identify a planetary body that is on course to collide with the earth in a half century. In this doomed-later scenario, humanity would react differently than they would in doomed-soon scenario.
Some people would devote their lives to thwarting the crisis. They might seek to develop rockets to launch, detonate and destroy or deflect the approaching space rock. This could become the existential mission of humanity, the unifying effort, the thing we must all assist or else become extinct. This project may be so large and complex and require such massive coordination that some pan-governmental body would have to be formed to mobilize the whole world’s resources. I imagine many people would recognize the urgency of the effort, realize their efforts could actually make a difference one way or other, and proudly conscript themselves into service for humanity. They would see it as their duty to help.
Others, however, may resist these directives from the pan-governmental organization, and refuse to participate. They may view the whole thing as a hoax, just as some believe the earth is flat, the lunar landings were faked, or photos of the planet earth as seen from space were products of trick photography. They may claim the planetary-body conspiracy is just a ploy to control the masses, and be damned if they follow the herd. They would consider themselves lions among sheep. Some would view the planetary body as part of god’s divine plan and refuse to intervene as conscientious objectors. They might even launch efforts to prevent others from intervening.
Then what would happen? Answer: society would splinter. Each group would hurl insults at the other, claiming they are brainwashed, deriding them for their stupidity. The pan-governmental entity may need to pass new international laws and enforce them, drafting people into coordinated service, and locking up protestors like draft-dodgers. “If they don’t want to help, we’ll have to get them out of the way!”
Regardless of whether we’re talking about a doomed-soon event or a doomed-later event, any event that threatened to wipe out all humanity at a specific time would galvanize the behavior of the world’s population, with variability among individual responses. Looking at the population as a whole, most people would behave in ways that were categorical. If you ever studied statistics, recall that the behavior of individuals is unpredictable, but the behavior of the population is actually quite predictable.
In contrast to the doomed-soon and doomed-later scenarios, in yet a different iteration of this thought experiment, every person would have advanced knowledge of when they themselves will die, but otherwise the world is no different. So, in this thought experiment, I would know my last day alive would be August 17, 2035, and you would know your last day would be July 29, 2080 (congratulations on your long lifespan), and that other guy would be aware he was going to die next week. How would all this play out?
Well, unlike the other two scenarios, there would be more variability among individual reactions and less uniformity across the whole population. Again, people’s reactions would be largely time-horizon dependent. Those unfortunate individuals who found out their death is imminent would likely embark on the same activities as the doomed-soon population, sheltering in place with loved ones, leaping into their bucket-list activities, etc. Only this time, most of the world’s taken-for-granted services would still be available, such as the flight to Fiji for that one last week on the beach.
People who knew they still had many years to live would probably do things that most people do today such as going to school, getting jobs, starting families, etc. Only, their lives and activities would be infused with a special knowledge of how many days they have left to live. They would probably have less patience for bossy bosses, dead-end jobs, and relationships that go no-where, especially as they got into the later stages of their known lives.
Time is a funny thing. As you get older, it has the illusion of speeding up. It’s a well documented illusion based on the fact that each day becomes a smaller and smaller unit of your lifespan as your lifespan gets longer and longer. When you are two days old, one day equals 50 percent of your life. So, day three is a really big day. But by your first birthday, one day is equivalent to about three-tenths of one percent of your life – not nearly so big. And by your 100th birthday, if you should be so fortunate as to live that long, one day is about three-one-thousandths of your life. It is just a teeny tiny blip of your existence, a single tick of your life’s stop watch. Regardless of your age, one day equals the same 24 hours, but it becomes a vanishingly tiny proportion of your life as your life goes on. That’s why time seems to speed up.
However, if you knew exactly when you were going to die, your relationship with time would change. The same 24-hour day would grow larger and larger as a proportion of the time you have left. If you knew you were going to die in one year, today would be equivalent to about three-tenths of one percent of the time you have left. What would you do with the time you have today? And by the time you reach the eve of your demise, today would be 50 percent of your remaining time. A sobering thought.
In this context, the closer you got to the day of your demise, if you knew which day it would be, the more precious each of your remaining days would become. And likewise for each remaining hour and each remaining minute. Approaching your fateful day, you would scrutinize more closely your decisions about how you spend your time.
How does this thought experiment fit into Singular Links? Remember, a Singular link is the combination of elements to create something unique. Well, what if you consider your life legacy to be your unique something, your Singular Link? You already know your life as it is today. Then the question becomes, What will you add to your life today and for your remaining days, however many there may be, until you have created your unique legacy? Ask yourself, What will you do with your time to craft your Singular Link?