Eternity: vast and unsympathetic, big but meaningless, awesome in scope but profoundly empty

My life on Earth: just for me, connected to many others of equal specialness, meaningful because of its finite nature

Think of that from another perspective.

Assuming human lifetime to be 70 years:

• 0.4 lifetimes ago, the term “smartphone” was first used

• 0.5 lifetimes ago, Internet became a thing

• 1.7 lifetimes ago, first airplane rose in the sky

• 3 lifetimes ago, we got the first Turing-complete computer

• 6 lifetimes ago, we started discovering electricity

• 8 lifetimes ago, Middle Ages came to a close

• 20 lifetimes ago you’d be at the end of what we now as antiquity.

• 75 lifetimes ago you’d be at the beginning of Ancient Egypt and the early Bronze Age.

• 105 lifetimes ago you would witness the beginning of first human civilizations.

• 150 lifetimes ago people invented agriculture

• 4300 lifetimes ago humans as we know them appeared

History is speeding up, and today one human life is enough to witness a change our ancestors wouldn’t see in a millennia.

Sure, we are, as always, grains of sand in the desert of eternity, but we are grains that matter. That make a change. Every day.

It took only 8 lives to rise from medieval times to where we are now, and less than one lifetime to transform…everything.

Is this some religious bullshit that I’m too woke to understand?