Stagnant Time and Immortality — Why ‘YOLO’ Is Wrong
I know, I know: the last time you heard someone say “YOLO” was in 2012. Although the once popular “you only live once” phrase is no longer in circulation, the sentiment of living life as if every moment were your last remains common. The reason behind why this mindset is misguided is based first and foremost in its literal inaccuracy; contrary to only living once, we are all immortal.
According to trusty Google, time is “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Google also supplies that progress is “forward or onward movement towards a destination.” So, if progress requires a destination, but time is indefinite and possesses none, then time really is just stagnant, isn’t it? I think it’s safer to say that instead of time being the entity that passes, it’s us that does the moving. Clocks don’t so much measure how much time has passed as they do how much distance we have traveled along time.
The stillness of time means that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, regardless of whether we are privy to experience them as such. Moreover, in this way, we are all immortal, as no version of ourselves ever stops existing.
We also achieve immortality in another way. The Seven Second Theory indicates that after we pass, there are seven seconds during which our brains enter a dream-like state. Of course, when we are in this state, not only do we lack awareness of our unconsciousness, but we also fail to retain any sense of time. Those seven seconds could be seven minutes, seven years, seventy years. Those seven seconds could be an entirely new life — a life that is so beyond the confines of our imagination, surpassing any realm of current understanding, that we could not even begin to formulate a hypothetical experience.
If you had that life, one with no consequences and endless possibilities, what would you do with it? Now, what’s the difference between that and the present? I have no intention of inducing an existential crisis, but the reality is we have no way of truly knowing what state of consciousness or what point in time we are living within — so why not make the most of those possibilities?
Where YOLO fails is, while people could adopt the mindset of ‘you only live once, so throw precaution to the wind,’ the average realist will think ‘you only live once, so why mess it up with risk?’
Of course, the idea of immortality is not to discourage life’s meaning or value. ‘Immortality’ does not mean each of our actions suddenly doesn’t matter, but rather that our fears matter less — that the stuff we let hinder our ambitions matters less.
Ultimately, whether you buy my theory or not, we could all stand to hold a little bit more immortality in our perspective, and live life to take advantage of its opportunities — though, YOLO does have a catchier ring to it, that I’ll admit.
