The Longer You Live, the Shorter Life Gets
And how we learn to accept that paradox
The early years
When you’re seven, life is infinite. The teenage years are still around that next bend, over the hump that is ten. Adulthood feels like an improbable dream. Jobs? Relationships? Children? They’re so far ahead you can’t imagine them, so you believe they will probably never happen to you.
(I remember being nine years old and getting ready to go abroad on holiday for the first time — to France, as it happens. Because I couldn’t picture myself there, I was convinced I was going to die before reaching foreign shores. Spoiler: I didn’t.)
And then you’re a teenager and adulthood is just around the corner. But thirty is as far away as your birth was — fifteen years is a whole lifetime to you.
Adulthood
And so it goes on. Even at forty, you hope your life isn’t yet half over. And after all, you tell yourself, you’ve only been an adult for twenty years! You probably still have in front of you more than twice your adult life so far. People tell you life begins at forty, and you choose to believe that.
Something shifts at about fifty, or shortly after, I believe. (Or it did for me and I can only speak for myself.) You recognise you’re…
