Ho Hum

One of the tropes of science fiction, a minor one actually, is that living forever becomes boring. I would’ve asked God for his take on it, after all, he actually is living forever, but I realized that his take on it would actually be irrelevant to my own. One of the main things I do with my time is to learn stuff, to work on developing expertise, and God is already an expert on, well, everything.

The internet has made it possible for me to easily subscribe to interesting sources of information. It’s so easy that I’m constantly searching for reasons to drop subscriptions, and I work very hard to not follow too many links out of the ones that I do read. Here’s the thing, and this is a “life” trope, there just aren’t enough hours in the day, or week, or year. I’d like to learn it all. I’d like to become an expert in everything. So I don’t know about “forever” but I could certainly be happy living for a very, very, very long time.

A smart man once told me that if you study something for just two hours a week, in a matter of just a few years, you’ll be an expert. I’ve seen quoted anywhere from two to ten thousand hours of doing something will let you master it. For me, the job of growing older has always been one of reigning in ambition. The older I get, the less time I figure I have left, the less time I have left, the fewer things I can learn really well. It’s tempting to say that by the time I die I’ll have figured out what I really want to know and have learned it, but the truth is, even if I live for a thousand years, I think I’ll still be just getting started, and I think I’ll still be pushing away things that I’d like to learn because there just isn’t time.

Yeah, I think the only way that life gets boring is if you just stop looking.

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