Only Miserable People Live Long Lives
As a child did you ever have the experience of going to visit someone and having so much fun at their house that when your parents told you it was time to go home it felt like you had just gotten there? The time passed so quickly because you enjoyed yourself so much with those people and enjoyed the things you were doing. You could have been there three hours but you would inevitably ask your parents for “five more minutes please”.
During those enjoyable times time passed very quickly but it was still the same number of minutes. This may seem obvious, but we’ve all had the experience of having to do something we did not want to do and it seemed like it took much longer than usual and the time passed very slowly.
Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.
-Benjamin Franklin
Miserable people live their lives in this way; they go through their entire lives doing things that they don’t want to do. Regardless of how long they actually live, they live very long lives because the time passes very slowly for them. They never really “live” and enjoy themselves.
Then there are other people who enjoy their lives and the time passes very quickly. It doesn’t matter if they live to be 100 years old, it would have been a short life for them because they found it so enjoyable and lived life to its fullest.
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
-Marcus Aurelius
Now it is certainly true that we can’t go through our entire lives doing only the things that we want to do and avoiding our responsibilities, however if we can have more enjoyable experiences, often with friends and family doing things we want to do, that will make our lives go much more quickly but much more enjoyably.
And then at the end of our lives, regardless of how long we lived, the time will have seemed to have passed very quickly, and we might be hoping to have five more minutes.