| The logic behind the author's central thesis seems to be: 1. Humans live about 100 years.
2. The highest human ambitions, like writing a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if that life lasts more than 1000 years.
3. By definition, our life is absurd because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest ambitions. She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to 1000 years -- this I disagree with. The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire life to that one pursuit. We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead, consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's mathematical ambitions. Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000 years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music will be now our new target of ambition. The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field. If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to accomplish anywhere near their level. The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do. |