I’m sure you’ve gotten the question along the lines of “if you had one month to live, what would you do differently tomorrow?” A typical question the deserves some serious thought. Understanding our time here on this earth is short, what kind of an impact that makes. What kind of life you want to live and what legacy you want to leave for others.
But what if this question is turned on its head. What if you didn’t have to worry about dying tomorrow? What if you were guaranteed to live 10,000 years?
What would you do? How would you live your life differently? Would it make you lazier because you knew you had a long time to make a difference or would it make you more eager to learn and grow so that you could become the greatest influencer the world had ever seen?
The experience and knowledge that could be gained from 10,000 years of experience would be crazy. The wisdom and clarity you could bring to current situations but also the insight on history from someone who lived through it.
What would you be in it for? Would you be in it to have the most enjoyable 10,000 years you could? Or would you be in it to have an impact on the world? To help the world? To use your time to influence others in the things you believe are right?
Flipping the script on the usual “die in a month” question presents a whole new series of questions, which some might deem as useless since we won’t live to be 10,000 years old, but it is plausible that we could have only one month to live.
To some extent, I agree, though I like to ask these kinds of questions simply to get the mind thinking outside the box. I also think there is some application to this question depending on what you believe happens after death.
If you believe it’s this life then blackness or nothing, then this world is everything. You would want to have the best experience or impact possible. Because that’s all there is. This world is it.
But if you believe in an afterlife, some questions might need to be answered differently. If the things you do in this life have an effect on the way your afterlife goes, the things here in this world become important for a whole different reason.
Especially if you believe the afterlife is eternal. This life would be so short in comparison. Why would you care about anything here?
So the initial question can be flipped once again. If you knew you would live forever, what would you do tomorrow?
But the catch is, the very first tiny part of the forever is this life. And in this life, we have the ability to invest in things that will last for eternity or we can invest in things that will pass away as soon as we die to this world. What would we invest in?
Not to get too into the weeds of religion, but now comes the question. If you knew that everyone lived forever but some didn’t know and were living their lives in oblivion to the impact the life they are living in this world has on their eternal life, would you do anything about it?
Would you not try and tell everyone you could about this? To convince them by any means possible to live lives on this earth thinking on things eternal, not getting caught up in the things thrown from this temporary world.
If you knew you would live forever, how would you live differently?