Living on Borrowed Time

Inspired by this recent thanksgiving post.

I’ve just finished 25 years of living on earth*. Based on a historical view, I should be on all counts be dead by now — extremely dead. In fact, my life from now onwards is borrowed time.

I narrowly missed dying at birth. An emergency c-section was required. A fairly standard procedure in the USSR in the 1980s — but for at least 99.9% of human history (and for maybe 30-40% of people today) this would have meant death for my mother and I.

I narrowly missed being killed in my first few days. I was a very sickly child. In Sparta, I’d have made friends with Exposure Hill very quickly. Given that infanticide was pretty common for much of human history (and sometimes still is), other settings would have been no better.

I narrowly missed dying of disease in my first 5 years. Before the 20th century, it was common for less than half of babies to survive past 5. (In the Congo, 20% still die before 5). From my constitution, I would not have made it in an “organic, non-genetically-modified, all-natural, drug-free” environment.

I missed starving to death. Being born just a few thousand kilometres away (or a few decades ago and an hour’s drive away) would have placed me inside some terrible famines, whether accidental or planned. For most of human history, I’d be in a world where getting food required something I might not have had.

I narrowly missed being murdered. A few decades before and a few kilometres south and I’d have been stripped naked and shot, the force of the gunshot propelling me into a mass grave. A few centuries before (or a few thousand kilometres away) and my chances of dying from murder would have been much higher still. A few millenia before and it’s higher still.

When I go bushwalking, national parks often have outhouse toilets where a seat sits over a ditch of excrement. The thought that countless Someones had to jump into a ditch just like this to escape from soldiers crosses my mind. But that Someone’s not me. When I leave the outhouse, the thought flees from my mind. Not only have I never experienced this but I even have the luxury of being so insulated that I don’t think about it too much.

An then there are fractures, other little medical things, colds and infections, minor surgeries that still couldn’t have been done without modern medical sterility — just an annoyance today but they’d have put me in the grave through infection 300 years ago (or a few thousand kilometres away).

Living thusly on borrowed time, I know that it has been entirely a matter of luck and had nothing to do with merit. How’s that for an undeserved-salvation of the real kind?

If we don’t get ourselves extinct, if things go well there may be a time in the not too distant future where (due to a growing population and improving living standards) most humans who ever existed will have had the same cushy conditions. This tirade will become obsolete — since based on a historical view I should have lived well past 25. But until then, it at least seems clear to me that we should stop romanticising the past — and in the words of a TED speaker I don’t remember, start romanticising the future instead.

*I don’t mean I’m an alien who has only stayed on earth for 25 years — if you know me personally you might have read it that way…