I'm reminded of the lyrics from Pink Floyd's Time:
"And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
no one told you when to run
you missed the starting gun"
The longer you live, the more tiny little mistakes you make. Things that at the time you could have done better, if you'd known, if you'd been a bit more careful. And these weigh on you, emotionally, pretty consistently.
And while it's pretty absurd, in the story, such tiny mistakes having such outsized consequences, the story reminds us that such severe consequences are well within the realm of possibility. People do lose limbs off of little, careless mistakes. Doubly so with all the incredibly concentrated sources of energy we have in the modern world - power tools, automobiles, explosives.
Would one really lose ten years trying to pick out a single Netflix show? No. But could one wake up one day and realize that they'd accomplished nothing of note for a decade, that all their free time was dumped into Netflix shows that weren't even that good?
So, what do you do with all that? Memento Mori, I guess.
And while it's pretty absurd, in the story, such tiny mistakes having such outsized consequences, the story reminds us that such severe consequences are well within the realm of possibility. People do lose limbs off of little, careless mistakes. Doubly so with all the incredibly concentrated sources of energy we have in the modern world - power tools, automobiles, explosives.
Would one really lose ten years trying to pick out a single Netflix show? No. But could one wake up one day and realize that they'd accomplished nothing of note for a decade, that all their free time was dumped into Netflix shows that weren't even that good?
So, what do you do with all that? Memento Mori, I guess.