Life is Short -->

January 2016

Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder<br>about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining<br>about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was<br>short if we lived 10 times as long?

Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped<br>wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer<br>the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time,<br>into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year<br>old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only<br>get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's<br>impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity<br>like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8<br>peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would<br>definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.

Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know<br>that?

It has for me. It means arguments of the form "Life is too short<br>for x" have great force. It's not just a figure of speech to say<br>that life is too short for something. It's not just a synonym for<br>annoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for<br>something, you should try to eliminate it if you can.

When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word<br>that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is<br>somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that<br>it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does<br>have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it.<br>It's the junk food of experience.<br>[1]

If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit,<br>you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless<br>disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's<br>mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

There are two ways this kind of thing gets into your life: it's<br>either forced on you, or it tricks you. To some extent you have to<br>put up with the bullshit forced on you by circumstances. You need<br>to make money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Indeed,<br>the law of supply and demand ensures that: the more rewarding some<br>kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it. It may be that<br>less bullshit is forced on you than you think, though. There has<br>always been a stream of people who opt out of the default grind and<br>go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional<br>sense, but life feels more authentic. This could become more common.

You can do it on a smaller scale without moving. The amount of<br>time you have to spend on bullshit varies between employers. Most<br>large organizations (and many small ones) are steeped in it. But<br>if you consciously prioritize bullshit avoidance over other factors<br>like money and prestige, you can probably find employers that will<br>waste less of your time.

If you're a freelancer or a small company, you can do this at the<br>level of individual customers. If you fire or avoid toxic customers,<br>you can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more than<br>you decrease your income.

But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the<br>bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's<br>fault but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder<br>to eliminate than the bullshit that's forced on you. Things that<br>lure you into wasting your time have to be really good at<br>tricking you. An example that will be familiar to a lot of people<br>is arguing online. When someone<br>contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty<br>overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But<br>like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we<br>now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of<br>the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally<br>taking your life.<br>[2]

Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. There are more<br>dangerous things than that. As I've written before, one byproduct<br>of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more<br>addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious<br>effort to avoid addictions � to stand outside ourselves and ask "is<br>this how I want to be spending my time?"

As well as avoiding bullshit, one should actively seek out things<br>that matter. But different things matter to different people, and<br>most have to learn what matters to them. A few are lucky and realize<br>early on that they love math or taking care of animals or writing,<br>and then figure out a way to spend a lot of time doing it. But<br>most people start out with a life that's a mix of things that<br>matter and things that don't, and only gradually learn to distinguish<br>between them.

For the young especially, much of this confusion is induced by the<br>artificial situations they find themselves in. In middle...