Is Life Short?

Salvador Dalí's "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory"

It’s almost daily that we hear someone—including ourselves—saying something similar to “Life is short.” And it is. Or is it not? Perhaps it’s both at the same time.

Let's imagine we're thirty years old and that we have the ability to remember each passing second of our lives in between ages five and twenty-five. By the time we'd finish recollecting all those moments, we’d be fifty years old (30+20): That is, twenty years late for dinner. We'd probably also be very angry at the enormous waste of time devoted to thinking about our past.

Luckily and instead, our brains pick up just a few highlights out of all the time we lived, and present them to our conscious self as the past. That extremely edited version of our lives is much less time consuming. No wonder then that it seems to us that time passed so fast, and that “Life is short” is such an adequate phrase for what we've just experienced brain-wise.

It’s a tradeoff in the end. Life seems to be shorter than it really was, time seems to have passed faster than it actually did, yet and thanks to that trait we can stop from time to time and evoke our past without ageing too much in that very process.

Thank you, brain! You dearest traitor...