“A person who doesn’t know what the universe is, doesn’t know where they are. A person who doesn’t know their purpose in life doesn’t know who they are or what the universe is. A person who doesn’t know any one of these things doesn’t know why they are here. So what to make of people who seek or avoid the praise of those who have no knowledge of where or who they are?”
—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.52.
“Time is gonna change for me. And it’s gonna run more slowly. And when we get back, we’re gonna compare. By the time I get back, we might even be the same age.”
—COOPER, INTERSTELLAR.
WHAT IS TIME? WHAT IS LIFE?
The average human lifespan now equates to four thousand weeks. And that’s only if you are lucky enough to make it to 80-years old, which is approximately two billion, five hundred and twenty-four million, six hundred and eight thousand seconds. Our universe is around 13.8 billion years old. And that equates to about 436 quadrillion seconds. The odds of your existence is virtually 0%. As there is also a 4 trillion to 1 chance of you existing as a biological organism. Yet, as you do, your lifespan has also doubled in just the past 100 years. We are literally the first generations in the history of humanity to be granted a whole “extra life”. And in order for you and the other 8 billion humans on Earth at the time of writing (2026) to have succeeded in getting here, that means 3.9 trillion x 8 billion = 31,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 (31.2 sextillion) all tried to get here at the same time in this generation, but were not as lucky to make it. And this only accounts for us born into this time, never mind the endless variations and further possibilities we could account for if we were to continue deducting all the way back to our ancestors.
Now consider this massive expanse of collective time for a moment, with the absolute certainty then of random chance, that, if anything had occurred in the history of the entire universe even a second from each person’s life related to us in our past, then the circumstances since the beginning of time what not be the same. You, as you are right now, would not be you. You would never have even been. Never experienced life on Earth. Therefore, it has taken the entirety of this time for every human who has ever existed, living their entire lives in the exact way they did, all the way back in time through your genetic line, spanning billions of years in evolution which has all accumulated to finally arrive with: you.
Your existence then is infinitely greater than a person winning the same lottery several times over in the same lifetime. The probabilistic chance of you is closer to impossible than anything else in this world could be. What this means is you are extremely unique. And you have been put here for a reason. Now is the time for you to narrow down and zero in on that reason.
After discovering your life’s purpose, selecting the best problem to solve and devoting your life committed to its achievement, the next step is starting to work on it, exploring and investigating research to your maximum capacity, in order to reach and stay inside flow. Having fully committed to this idea and the process, you will arrive at the peak of its completion some day, achieving your life’s task and fulfilling your potential becoming far more than what was assumed or expected you were destined to be.
The month of March is all about finding flow, starting the process of change and becoming the possible version of yourself.
Your life right now is filled with more hope and opportunities that our ancient ancestors could have only ever dreamt. And almost all of this change has just happened in the past half century. Think about that for a moment: humans have been walking, fighting, struggling, suffering, and surviving since they appeared roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa. Compare this to the average lifespan, which has significantly increased – at the turn of the last century, human life expectancy was 32-years old – so anyone reading this now past that age, if you happened to be born only 100 years earlier, it is almost certain you would already be dead.
This of course has been influenced by modern medicine and technological advances, in our healthcare systems, working conditions, diet and sanitation. We now have access to better quality living standards. In addition to this remarkable and perhaps not always appreciated system we have in place to look after us around the clock, what radically altered our lives and evolved our minds in recent times has been thanks to technological abundance, and in more recent times: artificial intelligence. Now, every human being with a smartphone and WiFi connection is on the cusp of becoming for the first time in history superintelligent.
Technology has a lot to be thanked for in the success in the evolution of our consciousness. However it also has a lot to blame for the way many use it leading to the decline of their mind. Social network tools have found their way to contain and keep the masses endlessly entertained. Knowing exactly what you want, they know how to keep your attention engaged in a deadly endless stream of passive information that is actually deteriorating the neurons our ancestors spent hundreds of thousands of years working hard to build for us, so we could acquire greater skills, further possibilities and advanced thinking for using our hands and imagination to continue this chain reaction feeding it into each next generation.
However, this exponential rise in technology which was supposed to make our dreams come true has only led many into a worldwide depression epidemic. Teenagers are now needing counselling far younger than any other time in history. The rise in young people committing suicide correlates perfectly in time to the rise of smartphones and social media, which means this problem has fallen into our hands, and is now our problem to solve, before it gets worse.
Smart technology has two applications in our lives. And these are:
1: Passive Application: we engage with technology but it doesn’t require any sort of physical or mental effort on our part. We simply allow it to have our attention. And we give as much of it away as possible. We do nothing and simply absorb whatever comes our way. Like skipping adverts, always fast forwarding to adverts that catch our attention and make us stop to watch. Doing whatever technology wants us to do. You don’t really know what to do with yourself so you do the easiest thing: nothing and watch other people. You give your mind over to technology which tracks your online behaviour in order to keep giving you more of what they know you will stay for, keeping you addicted to their service: your mind which is the product for their service.
The more we give ourselves over to this passive state, the cells in our brains diminish, then rapidly die off too soon. If we continue this cycle for long enough we may even start the process for neurodegenerative diseases too soon in life, self-inflicting wounds into our own mind, wasting our potential letting what will naturally happen to an unchallenged brain: slowly close and die away.
Mental inactivity creates brain instability.
Our ancestors would be devastated to see what current state of affairs we’ve let ourselves get into here. After spending their whole lives cultivating the roots of productivity, laid down by past generations so our minds could continue to grow, we’ve allowed this rapid progress to flip into decline by simply giving our attention so freely and so cheaply away to things that don’t matter.
Give this passive state enough time and you may discover that too much was given away, wasting our one and only opportunity, even with double the lifespan, and perhaps damaging those of future generations to be.
REVERSAL
2: Active Application: you hold in your hands right now the power to access a vast source of education that even kings of past times could have only ever dreamt of; an endless stream of tools and information to possess whatever skills of the mind you wish to acquire. We have apps for arranging and organising our lives, when used creatively, and productively, proactively, that can lead us to all kinds of higher states of advancement and accomplishment. We can literally elevate our consciousness to a condition of superiority and superintelligence. This is exactly what our ancestors would have wished for and wanted us to do.
The stream of content and information is now endless, and so, the problem is no longer that we can’t access this higher power but rather, what should we ignore and mainly focus our minds’ attention to absorbing. We have apps that can house libraries with instant keyword search tools for finding whatever we want, whenever we wish. The average smartphone now can also keep open 500 web tabs on a browser allowing you to keep track of every thought and idea you have each day, with services for backing up these thoughts and all the contents of our mind to clouds, allowing us to be able to remember and access everything forever.
Knowing what to look for, and perhaps more importantly then, what to avoid is the first level problem. If we do not know what we want then it would be pointless searching for an eternity, for we are never going to find what we don’t know we are looking for.
The first step then is knowing exactly what we want to know, so when we start this process of looking we might actually begin to find it. Having a goal therefore is always better than not having any at all. If we don’t strive towards a North Star then it will never matter which direction we go.
The Active Application mindset therefore is whenever no activity is done without purposeful engagement, careful and considerate contemplation for which communication sources are best to allow into our minds and why, before just allowing anything at all to come into our minds. Everything you do must only be done in order to serve a greater, far higher, practical purpose.
This is how to achieve a better, higher-quality mind and life: do not engage with anything that does not serve this practical higher purpose. This makes it very easy what to say no to, in terms of invites, or worse, meetings. All formal extreme wastes of personal productivity that do nothing but drain valuable resources from the people who know where their mind and attention is best being and better spent. Choose to engage only with these higher level activities that elevate the storehouse of your imagination.
Anything else is waste. And therefore also easy to say no to and ignore.
FUTURES PROBLEM: BUT NEVER YOURS [AS YOU’LL BE FAR TOO ENGAGED TO EVEN NOTICE]
The singularity may occur if not in our lifetime, perhaps in our children’s. And nothing will be the same again after. Human minds are not prepared for what that level of change is going to mean, and to the meaning of their lives. Because no human has ever been put to the test. Countless lives will be experienced as lost, as many will struggle to find meaning to their existence.
Take a look around. It’s already been happening for quite some time. It’s going to continue. It’s up to you then to find something worthy of your time and attention, that doesn’t rely on external forces providing this balance for experiencing meaning. We create the conditions ourselves by providing tasks and goals that feel intrinsically motivating to accomplish and freely wish to invest our physical and mental energy into for its own sake.
And for no other reason than simply the joy doing so brings to the experience of being engaged with one’s own life.
One day you might wake up to discover that your tiny little world no longer wants or needs you for the thing it only needs you for now. Then what? Because in the future, just like software, much will be obsolete. And the things you were once needed for may fade away then disappear forever. And no one is coming to save you. You are on your own. So it is up to you to discover the purpose of your own life and how to make it worth living. Find activities that cause peak experiences.
Choose your actions carefully. Create your own game. Make sure to have strict rules. Give yourself serious deadlines. Require every part of your cognitive capacity. Force yourself to push and stretch. In other words, the human mind will not fail but grow in active application time. This can also be in the form of physical exercise in order to spur the mental on. It’s never a bad idea. In fact, a great way to actually make yourself more creative is to deliberately engage in endurance exercise.
So if you have fallen off the wagon, now is the time to get back on it. It is never too late to start learning how to live your best life.
And you can never begin too early.
Turn the tables now. Make this a new start for radical change in your life today. Start what you want to start. Invest in mastery. You are capable of far more than you realise. You have more to offer than you are even aware. And it would be a terrible shame to waste this opportunity. How you managed to get here has been nothing short of a random accidental fluke, yet at any other moment in history had one event gone differently, you perhaps simply had never been. You are a walking miracle. Do not hide for any longer. Begin this process. And you are already on your way to achieving radical change and altered states of consciousness.