Rabbit
Ted Talks? Straight up hypnotism.
They’ll getcha every time. And rightfully so. They’re like that magic sword in Harry Potter. They appear when you need them to… and when you least expect them…
The other night I was on the computer, thinking of ideas for The Vortext. The things I do for y’all. But my brain just wasn’t… braining. A big fat blank page in front of me and not a damn clue what to do with it. Then a white rabbit the size of a quarter hopped across the screen.
“Forget all that. Let’s go,” the rabbit said.
“Say no more,” I said.
And off we were, down the hole, foot in hand.
- “twilight battle scene”
- “taylor lautner workout routine”
- “bowling alleys near me”
- “skyscanner”
- “google flights”
- “how much is a passport”
- “addicting games”
- “club penguin”
- “lists of rare Goosebumps books”
Soon enough the rabbit and I found ourselves on Ted’s YouTube channel, and we came across a video about procrastinating.
Coincidence or Big Brother?
Naturally, we clicked play.
After watching a 14-minute video about an instant gratification monkey (yes, you read that right), Rabbit and I dug deeper into the inventor of the instant gratification monkey, Tim Urban, and discovered his website, Wait But Why.
Well, now we were spiraling. Thanks, Tim.
Scrolling through his stuff, we found this: "How Long Would You Live if You Could Choose ANY Number of Years?"
Someone out there asks the same trivial questions to thousands of people that I ask my girlfriend five times a day? YES!
SparkNotes: You wake up in a room. There's a calculator on a desk. You have ten minutes to type in a number. That number determines how many years you'll live for. You have three options...
Leave it blank and live out your life naturally
Choose a limited number of years you’d like to live for
Choose infinity (the calculator has an infinity button)
Pretty cool, huh?
It took me a while to figure out what I would choose.
I wouldn't leave it blank. No-effin’-way! An opportunity to prolong my lifespan? Sign me up!
Without question I’d choose at least a thousand years. Life goes by pretty fast. I remember being in my mother’s womb just like it was yesterday. True story... for another time. So, a thousand years. Now, where to go from there...
What's the limit? What's too much for me? Two thousand? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand?
The most I’d do is ten thousand. Anything more is overkill. I know some people who would choose ten million or even ten billion. Nope. Not for me. No way, Jose.
Hmm, what to choose between one thousand and ten thousand?
Five thousand seems like a happy medium, right? But I don't know. That feels like a copout. Besides that was Tim's answer, and I don't wanna be a copycat. I actually wrote a post in a Facebook group about this dilemma and chose 8,001 years.
I added the one because it'd be pretty cool to walk around and announce that you're 8,000 years old. And dying at 7,999 just sounds really lame, so.
But there is that looming possibility that I'll get so tired of living and try to find different ways to die, knowing damn well I can't. So I take it back! Living for eight millennia sounds like a drag. Though in retrospect it seems reasonable. Compared to the age of existence, 8,001 years is nothing. Shit, the universe is a whopping 13.8 billion years old. Anything within a couple hundred million years is child's play.
Imagine choosing infinity. To outlive the universe? Man, that'd be something.
After giving it some thought, I’d cut it down to six thousand. Like I said, I don't wanna copy Tim's answer. But even then, that's a long, long time.
6,000 years
312,000 weeks
2,190,000 days
52,560,000 hours
3,153,600,000 minutes
189,216,000,000 seconds
Give or take.
Oh, did I mention everyone else in the world is making the same decision as you are, and you won't find out their answer until the ten minutes are up.
That changes things, doesn't it?
Knowing my family and friends, none of them would choose anything over a thousand. Maybe two thousand, but that's really pushing it.
Considering that, I'd cut down six thousand to four thousand.
But in four thousand measly years, we've had...
The Bronze Age and Iron Age (3300 BC - 550 BC)
Plague of Athens (430 BC)
Antonine Plague (first outbreak: AD 165 - AD 180; second outbreak: AD 251 - AD 266)
Vikings (9th century - 11th century)
The Middle Ages (500 - 1500)
The Crusades (1096 - 1291)
Magna Carta (1215)
Vampires and Werewolves (2400 BC - present)
Black Death (early 1340s - early 1350s)
The Renaissance (14th century - 17th century)
Cocoliztli epidemic (1545 - 1548; there were several epidemics, but this was the initial and worst one)
The Aztec, Maya and Inca empires (2000 BC - 16th century)
The thirteen colonies (1607 - 1776)
Great Plague of London (1665 - 1666)
Great Fire of London (1666)
American Revolutionary War (1775 - 1783)
Napoleonic Wars (1803 - 1815)
Industrial Revolution (1760 - 1914)
The War of 1812 (1812)
American Civil War (1861 - 1865)
Westward Expansion (1767 - 1890)
World War I (1914 - 1918)
Spanish flu (1918 - 1919)
The Roaring Twenties (1920 - 1929)
The Great Depression (1929 - 1939)
The Holocaust (1933 - 1945)
World War II (1939 - 1945)
The civil rights movement (1950s - 1960s)
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
Apollo 11 (July 16, 1969 - July 24, 1969)
Microsoft (1975)
Apple (1976)
The 1980s (1980 -1989)
Persian Gulf War (1990 - 1991)
Amazon (1994)
My birthday (1998)
Shrek (2001)
Global financial crisis (2008)
The Iraq War (2003 - 2011)
Swine flu (2009 - 2010)
The end of the world (2012)
Global surveillance disclosures (2013)
Coronavirus (2020 - ?)
Not so measly now, is it? History Crash Course with Mr. Thompson!
So… I think I’d cut it in half.
2,001 years.
Yep. Good enough for me.
Right about now, some of you may be asking yourselves, "Do we age? How are we going to die? Are we invincible until we die? Does it hurt? How would we die? Does our heart just stop?"
All of these questions are answered, more or less, in the fine print of Tim's post.
Go down the rabbit hole...