“From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult, “a sort of personal affront, a taking-away of one’s time,” in the words of one scholar. **There you were, planning to live on forever**—as the old [[Woody Allen]] line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment—but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours. “Yet, on reflection, **there’s something very entitled about this attitude**. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, **because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born**? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given—as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. **So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all**. --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[gratitude]], [[momento-mori]], [[character]], [[personal-values]], [[discipline]], [[attention]], [[counter-intuitive-thinking]] **Source** -- [[202410130434 - B - Four Thousand Weeks]]