I’ve been thinking about time lately, especially how much of it is available. The strange thing I keep coming back to is that life feels both incredibly long and incredibly short at the same time, depending on which angle you look at it from. Both things can be true at the same time. It reminds me of the coastline paradox: a coastline wraps around a perfectly finite patch of land, yet the closer you measure it, the longer its edge gets, running off toward infinity the finer your ruler. It’s both finite and infinite at the same time, depending on how closely you look.

Life is long

Life expectancy in the United States is relatively long compared to 100 years ago. You can expect to live 76 years for males, 81 for females, and even these statistics are skewed downwards because of COVID deaths and drug overdoses, so if you’re a generally healthy person, you can expect to live 5-10 years longer than those baselines.

I’ve watched people have full-blown renaissances when they hit 40 or 50, and when you look closely it’s almost never out of nowhere: it’s compounding on a lifetime of work and learning that finally found its moment.

There’s a long list of people who started their best-known company after 40: Eric Yuan (Zoom), Chip Wilson (Lululemon), Tony Fadell (Nest), Joseph Lubin (Ethereum). And in fact, most unicorn founders are actually in their 30s, and the average one has 14 years of industry experience before founding, up from 8 years in 2010. Experience and network seem to be key components of making something very important, things you can only get from age.

To me, it’s exciting because there are many examples of compounding in practice. The most famous example is probably Nvidia: Jensen Huang had been running Nvidia for 30 years before the LLM revolution, and he had spent that time quietly amassing a team and company filled with expertise and focused execution. That compounding was really unleashed when the AI revolution occurred and he was able to put Nvidia in exactly the right spot to capitalize on it’s expertise and moat.

OpenAI looks similar, though on a shorter timespan. I remember when OpenAI was most famous for OpenAI Five, an AI system that played Dota 2 and defeated world champions. It was a toy at the time with no practical application, just like what they could GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 would be. They were only focused on developing great AI models, and that allowed them to compound their research advantage.

My takeaway from this view is simple: keep learning and keep building. The runway is much longer than it feels in any given year.

Life is short

But the paradox is that even though life is long, our perception of time speeds up as we age. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, usually attributed to two things a) the decreasing novelty of day-to-day life and b) the shrinking proportion of current time relative to everything you’ve already lived. A year is a tenth of a ten-year-old’s life and a fortieth of a forty-year-old’s, so of course it feels like it’s flying by.

This means that if you’re only halfway through your life expectancy by the calendar, you’re actually much further than halfway through your perceived life. The clock and the felt experience are running at different speeds.

Time also compresses when you’re heads down on something. Michael Siffre did a famous experiment where he lived in a cave cut off from sunlight and clocks for months, and he experienced enormous time compression: he thought only about 150 days had passed when it had actually been closer to 180, and at one point counting to what he believed was 120 seconds took him 5 minutes. You can see a gentler version of this when a child is lost in coloring or when you surface from deep focus and realize hours are gone.

Another reason why life is short is because the quality, health, and vigor you have at any given point of time declines. Your raw life force is generally strongest in your 20s and 30s. People in their 40s and 50s tell me constantly that they used to have way more energy. I didn’t want to believe it, but then I remembered that in my 20s, the 30-year-olds kept telling me my body would hurt more and injuries would take longer to heal, and I didn’t believe that either until it turned out to be completely true. On top of the energy curve, it generally gets harder to learn and grow into entirely new paths as you get older. Not impossible, just more effort than it took when you were younger. So you can have multiple things working against you at once.

I’m in my 30s now, and I still have an incredibly active mind with more ideas than I can act on. But I’m just more tired than I used to be. It’s harder to stay up for long stretches, and a bad night of sleep hits me much harder than it once did. I suspect that only continues.

Enjoy it

So life is both long and short, depending on the angle. Long enough that it’s never too late to start, and that compounding will reward patience. Short enough that the years you have the most energy and the most novelty are finite, and they’re quietly accelerating past.

For me, I’m focusing on working on building things / working on problems I genuinely enjoy and continuing to learn from incredible people. I just hope to stop to smell the flowers every now and then.