BLOG: What is a long life?

There comes the point in life when novelty becomes a rarity. Not sudden, but it creeps gradually on you. Things rarely make you wonder. Everything is about the same, all day, every week, every year.

The only surprise in life seems to be how quickly time seems to pass. It's only like yesterday your best friend from high school called, but it was eleven months ago. It seemed only yesterday when you graduated from college, but now it's almost time for your son's high school graduation.

Where did the time go? Did time (and your life) become a slave of machine-like to-dos routine? You probably remember summer break in middle school, when the summer never seemed to end. You were having enormous fun. Days were long to accommodate many different activities.

There's a scientific explanation for it. Our finite memory has to work efficiently. If it's the same activity, even though you have done it for a long time, it only gets a tiny portion in memory.

Welcome to adulthood, which is an execution of a set of predefined routines with very little room to maneuver. Those with the efficient performance of their routines are considered "success."

Drive to work, meet the same people, do the same job, drive back, rinse and repeat. You may have family time on the days you are not working late or not attending after-office happy hours. Family time is a misnomer because "important" breaking news, social media feed, and text messages constantly steal it. Then there are deadlines to beat, bonus objectives to meet, and social media approved life to curate. Life has become less about living and more about displaying.

And we wonder where life did go.

We seek a long life, but we never actually live it. Living has become a never-ending chase of one dopamine hit after another. We don't realize we are in a never-ending rat race because our mind is never free of noise to see clearly.

If we can take a pause, it won't take long to realize there's no point in trying to win a race that never ends. Nobody wins; it's only a matter of time you exhaust and collapse. Being a slave to a distracted mind is not different from living in Matrix. Who needs AI overlords when we can self-inflict slavery?

What is a long life? Does it matter how long we live if we never live outside the Matrix?

In Mahabharata, Yaksha asks Yudhishthira, "What is truly amazing in this world?"

Yudhishtira replies: "The most amazing thing is that even though one sees countless living entities dying every day, he still acts and thinks as if he will live forever."