Life Is Not So Short, It’s Actually Long

I mean that in the best way possible

“Life is so short”

“Time flies by”

“Our kids grow up so fast”

We’ve all used these profound phrases before and we’ll adamantly continue to do so. In my book, these are nothing more than filler words.

Life is actually long. It’s so very long. I don’t mean that in a morbid way, like The Smiths sang in the song named “The Queen Is Dead” — Life is very long when you are lonely. (It is, ironically, my favorite song of The Smiths.)

Consider the amount of unnecessary and unimportant things we do in a day, mindlessly.

When you finish ONE Emily in Paris episode, Netflix autoplays the next episode and the next and the next season, and the next show you might like.

To be fair, Netflix does generously give you the whole five seconds to close it. But if you’re too lazy or too slow to close it, you’re binge-watching the entire thing, which gives you an identity to proudly put “binge-watcher” in your Instagram bio. (Who puts binge-watcher in their bio, you ask? For starters, my sister. Quite a feat. I know.)

Sometimes, Netflix, for some mysterious reason, doesn’t even let the current episode end completely and subtly skip to the next episode. Whoa! What was that?

It might as well tie my hand, put duct tape over my mouth, and put a gun to my head, to make me watch it.

I’m sure you’ve at least heard of the zombie show called The Walking Dead. Following its massive viewers count, AMC decided to make just a few spinoffs, which are:

Fear the Walking Dead

The Walking Dead: World Beyond

Tales of the Walking Dead

The Walking Dead: Dead City

The Walking Dead: Sex and the City

I made the last one up. But it easily could’ve been a show (You’re welcome, AMC). Don’t tell me you wouldn’t watch it. Please!

Do you know how many zombie episodes are there in total? It’s a zillion. Do you know how many people are watching all these shows? Your guess is as good as mine. People, obviously, are watching it if AMC has no intention of canceling this disruptive premise in the next eleven decades.

If you haven’t watched any of The Walking Dead episodes, you’re probably watching every Marvel movie and TV show. Did you know? Even Disney CEO Bob Iger recently got sick of Marvel creations and said enough is enough.

69.72% of the world (That’s just my random math) wouldn’t have watched the movie Barbie if their marketing team hadn’t successfully manipulated people to watch it, just because they can tweet it or post a picture of themselves in Barbie costumes. Quite a feat, girls. I know.

Take your iPhone and see your weekly report on how many hours you’ve spent on social media, which at this point is turning out to be a joke and it’s not funny anymore. The mindless scrolling is growing rampant!

Reading the same news in almost every Instagram post and Tweet about Taylor Swift fans (Swifties, apparently. How charming!) shake it off hard enough to cause an earthquake of magnitude 2.3 at a Seattle concert. It’s an earth-shattering event, literally.

Elon Musk changes the Twitter logo from the legendary bluebird to “X”. There are millions of people, losing their shit, tweeting about the same thing, and getting creative on memes. They have to have an opinion about every single useless thing on the planet.

Yeah. No shit. Life is short.

(Why can’t you be happy for the bird that is finally free?)

Of course, I’m not saying NO to the inane entertainment, the insane social media, and all the other hollow things I don’t even want to mention. But there has to be a healthy balance. Addiction to anything is unhealthy. It is, heartbreakingly, even worse when you aren’t consciously aware of it.

We shouldn’t let Netflix control us. It should be the other way around. I’ve turned off all my know-it-all app notifications. Spoiler alert? My life still goes on. In fact, I’ve truly learned the meaning of peace of mind.

What happened to self-control and self-awareness? Are they not trending anymore? Have people muted those words in their minds?

As Mark Manson said in his generation-defining book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, “If you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice — well, then you’re going to get fucked.”

Only people who actually live, giving importance to the most important things in life, get to say — life is short. Nobody else does.

My feeling is this — Whoever says or feels life is short, you double their lifetime or even triple it, their time on earth will still not be enough for them, if they keep doing the same pointless things over and over, just because it instantly releases dopamine.

Do you know whose life is actually SO short? Zombies’ life. Go watch The Walking Dead or any of its spinoffs, if you don’t agree with me.

Charles Bukowski put it beautifully, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by NOTHING.”

I get it. Most people say “Life is short” as well-intentioned advice or warning to others. But I’m going to take that literally and say to you, we can choose to make our life long. Really long and I mean that in the best way possible. We can choose to make every day count. Savor every single moment (Not necessarily on iPhones).

If you think you’re suffering and you can’t live because of your X and/or Y problems, I have news for you:

Life is suffering.

When you start to accept it wholeheartedly, you’ll start to live truly. It will have a profound impact on what you do, say, and think.

I don’t know how but my adversity made me come to terms with that and it has tremendously worked for me. I appreciate I actually get to have problems than having not existed at all. I do have my moments. Sometimes, like a psychopath, I choose to make my moments out of nothing.

You know what? It’s all worth it. Every single problem is worth it. Because I get to be alive.

You might ask, what are the most important things in life? Glad I assumed you asked.

For starters, the other day, Ryan Holiday gave me a much-needed wake-up call from the book The Daily Stoic:

How often are we asked a simple question like “Who are you?” or “What do you do?” or “Where are you from?” Considering it a superficial question — if we even consider it at all — we don’t bother with more than a superficial answer.

But, gun to their head, most people couldn’t give much in the way of a substantive answer. Could you? Have you taken the time to get clarity about who you are and what you stand for? Or are you too busy chasing unimportant things, mimicking the wrong influences, and following disappointing or unfulfilling or nonexistent paths?

OUCH! Let’s start from there. Try to reserve your fucks for all the things that matter in the grand scheme of things.

As I often whisper to myself or sometimes SCREAM at myself (It’s adorable, actually), whenever I inevitably lose the plot at some point during my day:

Memento Mori, dumbass!

Because, after all, life is so short.

Thank you for your time! And you know I mean that more than most. August 3 is my birthday. It’s only fitting I wrote this now. Quite a feat. I know.

If you have never even heard of The Walking Dead, PLEASE DO NOT — I repeat — DO NOT read the below: