How To Cope With The Shortness Of Life - Dean Rickles

Life is supposed to be a journey. And if you imagine a sailor who went out in a ship and was just tossed around by the ocean and then came back, although they endured and there was time lapsing, well, he didn't have a journey. Whereas a sailor who's going and exploring all of these new lands, well, that's a journey and that's what you want your life to be like. It's not enough just to endure and just to exist. You need to be choosing.

Is it right to say that life is short, in your estimation?

It is short. I think it is a little bit too (laughs) short. Even- even though it's necessary that it's finite. I don't think it needs to be quite this finite. Although having said that, I mean, I- that's just my selfishness and my ego talking. I would like more-

What would you optimize for if you had the choice? 250?

That would be- that would be pretty good, but then if it was 250, we'd be sitting here saying, "I don't know."

"I wish it was 750," you know, yeah.

"If it's 50, pretty sure..." (laughs) But, um, but it seems to be... Like, the way the... I- I mean, I make this point in the book. The way the- the memory system and the human mind is put together seems to be pretty much well-made for about 100, maybe 120, something around that, years, because... Um, one of the examples I give is, uh, this classic example from the philosophy of memory, sort of back in the Enlightenment period, were there were these debates between John Locke and, uh, Thomas Reid, a pair of philosophers, and they were talking about, um, what the nature of self is and the continuation of the self. And there was a- a memory theor- a memory theory of the self, which is that we're just sort of this continuation of being able to remember who we were over our lifespan. And Thomas Reid pointed out, well, no, there's a... We can imagine situations where when you're sort of in your mi- middle age, maybe 30 years old, it's easy to remember what you were doing when you were five, maybe, or a little easier. You can remember scrumping apples when he was a kid is the example he gives. And then as he gets older, this, um, he's supposing it's an officer, he can remember being, um... When he's retired, he can remember being an officer, but he can no longer remember scrumping apples. He's lost that bit. So there's- there's sort of limits, finite limits that have been placed by biology on what we can fit coherently in a lifespan and what we can remember about ourself to hold our self together.

Yeah, because, I mean, the Ship of Theseus is an example, right, that if you replace every board on this ship after a particular amount of time, is it the still- still the same ship? Now, the difference is that the ship has no idea that it is a ship or that it can remember each of the floorboards being removed. I think it's every seven years, pretty much every cell in your body has been recycled so that there are no cells that would have been there seven years before.