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Re21: Time's Up

Retraice^1

Real deadlines are happening all around us, all the time.

Air date: Sunday, 16th Oct. 2022, 11:50 PM Eastern/US.

You never know when will be the last time you pick up your daughter.

--Sam Harris (paraphrasing)

The darkness

It feels academic to think about deadlines in terms of GNR (genetics, nanotech, robotics), GCR (global catastrophic risks) and B&R (blue and red politics). But the deadline problem is not academic. Only eight billion humans, in all of history, haven't died; but all of those eight billion are on track to do so. What if we knew exactly how much time we had left, as in the movie In Time (2011)? Most of us would find an early end to be a nightmare; most of us are not so ready as we could be.^2

`Last-time' thought experiments

The deadline for picking up your daughter for the last time is (usually, barring tragedy) a life deadline, not a death deadline. The last time comes because she's growing up.

What about the last time you play guitar? Watch TV? Drive a car? Go to the grocery store? Wake up and read the news^3 ? Now what about the last two times of each of these things? The last five? The last fifty? At some point you reach the present, even with 20 years of life ahead of you. And again, other things than death can cause deadlines: life changes, life decisions, etc.

Now, Consider the differences between: o knowing late that it was `the last time' as you are suddenly faced with death (e.g., being diagnosed with Covid-19, and thus knowing that you'll be quarantine from your loved ones, even if you're breathing your last breaths), i.e. knowing in retrospect; o knowing early that it will be `the last time' (e.g. a death-row last meal, a crashing plane last-hug, a Nazi division event last-gaze at a loved one), knowing in prospect, or presently.

Knowing (or not knowing) about a deadline changes the way the world seems. But isn't there almost always hope--however irrational--that something unexpected will intervene, that `somehow, this isn't going to be it'? Not in the case of `the last time you pick up your daughter'.

Good or bad

An inversion of interpretation (from good to bad), based on a deadline:

"I'm looking out my office window, trees newly green, blowing in the breeze. If I have 10-40 years of life ahead of me, my vicious struggles with philosophy and income seem to me to be the beginning of a profoundly important life's work; if I have hours or days to live, the struggles seem to me to be a manifest failure at life, at living a good life, a tragedy that will weigh most heavily on my kids and wife."

Windows of opportunity

The above is a 180-degree turn of interpretation dependent on the deadline problem, the unknown end of one's window of opportunity.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."^4 (As a matter of opinion or philosophy, the author does not agree.)

Life is filled throughout with windows of opportunity opening and closing, real deadlines.

_

References

Knowles, E. (Ed.) (1999). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Oxford University Press, 5th ed. ISBN: 0198601735. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0198601735 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0198601735 https://lccn.loc.gov/99012096

Seneca (2005). On the Shortness of Life. Penguin Books. ISBN: 0143036327. Translated by C. D. N. Costa. Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger lived ca. 4 BC - 65 AD. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0143036327 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0143036327 https://lccn.loc.gov/2005047450

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Seneca (2005).

^3 Hitchens https://youtu.be/LIVEsa2g4ag?t=415

^4 Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601), cited in Knowles (1999) p. 663.