Up: [[Experiencing Time]] Created: 2022-06-12 I’ve always been fascinated with timelines. I remember doing some stuff with my students from a book called *It’s About Time*. I don’t recall all of the details, but I think it was something like all of recorded history has happened in the tick of a clock from 11:59 to 12:00. And somewhere in a James Baldwin novel that I can’t find no matter how hard I try, there was a short paragraph about a bird pecking at a rock and if the bird pecked for all of our human lifetimes, only one second of eternity would have passed. Update: I found it! See [[Birds, Rocks and Time]] Now I’ve found another wonderful example. This one is from *Four Thousand Weeks* If we think of 100 years as a lifetime, and there are plenty of people who live that long, - Egyptian pharaohs were 35 lifetimes ago - Jesus’s birth was 20 lifetimes ago - The Renaissance happened only 7 lifetimes ago The number of lives you’d need to span the whole of civilization is 60! (p. 209) > [!Orbit] [[Oliver Burkeman]] in *Four Thousand Weeks* >To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place. (p. 210) This is more than just some fun trivia. It matters because overvaluing the significance of my existence is what put unrelenting pressure on me to have a huge [[Calling]] and do something really impressive in the world. But as Burkeman points out, even Steve Jobs’ desire to *put a dent in the universe* ultimately fails because the iPhone, from a cosmic point of view, is a mere blip.