Measuring life in lifespans

According to this life expectancy checker, I’m expected to be kicking around for 85 years. That means that I am just about 30% of the way through my life. I won’t be adding a countdown timer anywhere to keep track, but it has got me thinking about how long we live relative to other things. For example, I have been around longer than YouTube, but not as long as Python. I have lived through 5 different US presidents, and (assuming the two, four-year term limit remains for the duration of my life) will live through 7 to 14 more. I didn’t grow up with social media, and completed university just as generative AI was rolling out. I have never known a world without the internet. Perhaps more interesting than when all of these events started (which we can know with certainty in hindsight), is when will any of these things end?

The last blockbuster

When I was young, going to the video store to rent movies was a favourite Friday night activity. Eventually, that store closed as streaming services, lead by Netflix, entered the scene.

Now, there is one remaining Blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon that sells merchandise of days past. At the time, going to the video store didn’t seem extraordinary at all, now, it would be seen as an event. The VHS tapes that I used to load into the player weren’t special, but now some of them may be worth hundreds of dollars. Eras come and go, and we don’t know how to define them until they have passed. Songs like Last Time for Everything and movies like We Live in Time capture this feeling, highlighting the individual moments of our life and how they are woven together to create the narrative arc that we experience.

The End of History illusion

Reflecting on the 30% of my life so far, I can see how far I have grown and how far I have come. I often go through days thinking “this is it” or “I’m now where I will always be”. Psychologically, I seem to want to front load the important changes in my life and dismiss the remaining 70% as locked-in. Interestingly, while I am bias towards thinking that I am static, I am likely also bias in thinking everything around me will always change. Perhaps it is because urgent messages of external change grab our attention, far more so than reflecting on ourselves. What if the thought of the day was “Evidence shows that you are are a more patient person than you were two years ago”? That would be pretty uplifting.

The Lindy effect

In thinking about how long things that exist now will last, I stumbled upon the Lindy Effect. Broadly speaking, it argues that the life of a non-perishable thing (such as an idea or technology) is proportional to how long it has currently existed. There are some that use the concept of this effect to determine whether things are “Lindy” in a binary way^[1]. While I don’t think it is quite that simple, I am curious about thinking through different things relative to our lifespans using the principle of this effect. Will Spotify be around for the rest of my life? The Lindy Effect says no, based on the fact that it has only existed since 2006. Harvard University? Likely will exist until the day I die.

Permanence is painted in broad strokes

It can be easy to get caught up in specifics, asking “how long will a specific company exist?” rather than “how long will the principles behind the company be around?”. Any given food fast-food company may fade from existence, but the overall trend of people sacrificing health for convenience may be here to stay, because humans have had a bias towards the present for centuries.

Morgan Housel explores this concept in Same as Ever: A guide to what never changes, inviting us to think differently about how we see the world. By zooming out to a larger scale, we can see that corruption is perhaps the expectation rather than the exception. Despite technological innovation, happiness at both an individual level and as a global population doesn’t really change that much. People will also chase a dream (usually due to seeing their peers) and then move on to the next objective if that dream does materialize.

Living through uncertain times

Depending on how you look at it, living in the time span we do can be seen as a blessing or a curse. There are truly unique things about our age that haven’t existed before (such as the ability to destroy the entire world quite quickly with nuclear weapons^[2]), but change in general is not unique to our age. Taking the long view, a lot of the world starts to seem like a broken record. We consume more, we innovate, and we face a constant struggle between selfishness and selflessness on an individual and societal level.

We each exist for a slice, but that slice overlaps with those that came before us and those that come after. To me, I may never know a world without Google. Seven generations from now, people may forget that Google ever existed.