Life isn’t a journey towards death
Time, at least in our universe, is linear; it can only move forward. We can, and do try, to stop it or re-wind it, like going back to that same vacation spot where we had such a great time, but more often than not this turns out to be a disappointment because it doesn’t work. We can perceive it differently; ten seconds in extreme pain can feel like an eternity, while a year can surprise us with how fast it flew by. While we can perceive it differently, in the end an hour for me is the same length of time as an hour for you*
An unfortunate consequence of time being linear is that we tend to view our lives as journeys from point A (birth) to point B (death). The fact that we all start at the same point and end up at the same final destination adds to the illusion that our lives are moments that must be lived in certain sequences. It’s like we’re all trains, running on parallell tracks with the same scheduled stops.
The questions “What year were you born?” and “How old are you?” might seem so similar that the difference is negligible, but when we view life as a linear journey towards death, they have very different implications. The question of birth year attempts to establish the chronological start of someone’s journey, while the question of age is an attempt to find out if your life-train is running according to the standard schedule, as set by the majority of the other life-trains.
Already when we’re born, before we’ve become self-aware, the schedules for our life-trains are set by our parents and families. Around the age of 20 we’re expected to arrive at the College station. Sometime between 25 and 35 should hit the stop known as settling down with kids and we can expect the train to pass peak career at 45 or so before pulling in to station retirement at 65-ish. These expectations come from a place of love, but even with the purest and most well-meaning of intentions expectations are a prison.
You see, expectations are a powerful thing. They tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies and excuses. If I see myself as a time-optimist, a person incapable of being on time, I never have to examine the behaviors that contribute to me being late. Our expectations on women being inherently more capable as caretakers leads to women becoming the primary caregivers for kids — thus becoming better as caretakers. Expectations can even make people literally blind.
While “How old are you?” is the most basic “Is your life-train on time? question”, there are others:
When are you going to find someone and settle down? is a question single people get asked around their late twenties. This question gets asked more frequently as you come closer to the perceived deadline for station long-term relationship, and once you’re sufficiently off schedule people avoid the question to such a degree that they might as well hold a sign proclaiming your perceived failure to reach station Happy Monogamous Long-Term Relationship.
When are you going to have kids? is another of these questions. Kids is a mandatory station for straight women of fertile age in a long-term relationship, more so than for straight men. After all, the woman is the one growing the baby and kids is Grand Central Station for straight female life-trains. The only acceptable reason not to stop there is because you can’t.
The expectations from people around us become internalized to such a degree that it can be hard to know if it’s something that I want or if it’s something that other people want me to. As a social species who have lived in groups and tribes for tens of thousands of years, we don’t want to disappoint our tribe, and so we try really hard to fulfill expectations, even if that ends up harming ourselves. Ask any unstraight person who grew up in a conservative environment which lengths they went to trying to lead a straight life. Ask any heterosexual spouse of a gay person who succeeded too long, but not long enough.
We choose our career somewhere around the higher education stop and once we’ve done that we can’t move back.
Time cannot move backwards in our universe, and so we believe that neither can our life-trains. We choose our career somewhere around the higher education stop and once we’ve done that we can’t move back. We get taught that some stops are supposed the best times of our lives and we should make sure to enjoy them, because no stop after will ever be as fun or allow us as much freedom to experiment and try things out. I’m not sure which part is worse: that you spend two thirds of your life believing and expecting the peak to be behind you, or the fact that feeling pressure to enjoy something turns into a downwards spiral towards the opposite of enjoyment.
Retirement is a particularly interesting stop. It’s the modern, secular equivalent of the Christian concept of Heaven. Retirement was financial support during the last years of your life when you were too weak and mentally incapable to do real work. As scientific and medical progress and living standards increased our life spans, retirement started to become a reward for a productive life. The more you sacrifice for your career, the bigger the reward once you can stop working. We still see remnants of it: we ask for higher salary rather than more vacation days, as if money was more valuable than time. Fathers sacrifice spending time with their children for their careers. Even in countries like Sweden, where parents can split the 480 paid days of parental leave evenly, men only take about a quarter of the days.
So what is the alternative to viewing your life as a train speeding towards the final destination? For me, it’s viewing life as a series of avatars, but more on that in my next post.
* at least while we’re on the same planet.
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Related reading:
Binary thinking vs directional thinking
Your life is Tetris. Stop playing it like chess.
