Imagine that your life began about 300,000 years ago as one of the first humans on the planet. Right now, you live in Africa, near modern-day Morocco, and your life isn't too different from that of your sympathetic parents.
You make crude tools, hunt, and gather food and materials until, eventually, you perish. But this is only the beginning. Because after you die, you travel back in time to be reborn as another living human. Although you do not remember your past life, your past actions affect you.
And after dying again, you come back as a third person, then a fourth, a fifth, and so on—living the life of every human being who has ever walked the earth.
These lives last about 4 trillion years.
Because you only remember the life you are currently living, your psyche does not carry the full weight of human history.
However, everyone in your life still has a profound effect on your future. Sometimes your impact on the world is obvious, but these important historical figures make up only a small part of your experience.
Instead, your existence consists mostly of ordinary lives, filled with everyday tasks like eating, laughing, working, and worrying.
For about a tenth of your 4 trillion years, you've been a hunter-gatherer. For 60%, you are an agronomist, developing the tools and techniques you use to work on farms for about 800 billion years.
During your lifetime,
you spend 1.5 billion years having sex and another 250 million years giving birth. In total, 20% of your existence is spent raising children, to whom you impart various cultural values that influence the course of generations.
In some lifetimes, you subvert these cultures through invasion and imperialism. In others, you suffer as your lands and loved ones are taken away. In more than 1% of lifetimes, you suffer from malaria or smallpox, while, in others, you cure these conditions—saving countless versions of yourself.
In the early days of humanity, the average lifespan was quite short. There are fewer lives to live, and your influence is usually limited to those physically close to you.
But as humans live longer on average and the Earth's population grows, you start spending more time reliving the same process-filled years. A third of your existence comes after 1200 AD, and a quarter after 1750.
At this point,
technology and society begin to change more rapidly than ever before. You invent steam engines, build factories, and generate electricity, which powers the everyday machinery of all your afterlives.
You live through revolutions in science, the deadliest wars in history, and dramatic environmental catastrophes. On average, each new life lasts longer, but the pace of your existence continues to accelerate.
Conversations that used to take months to surface now happen in minutes. Business plans you've built over generations change overnight. You enjoy luxuries that you could never sample before, even in your past lives as kings and queens.
After more than 100 billion lives,
you are finally reincarnated as the youngest person alive today. But 300,000 years into human history, your actions today have more impact than 99% of your past lives.
Fast air travel allows you to transport infectious diseases and treatments across the ocean in hours. And the Internet makes your personal influence global, allowing you to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, without even leaving your home.
In recent lifetimes, you have invented tools to rewrite the genes of organisms, permanently changing their future generations. And in this lifetime, you can create even more technologies that make the world safer, kinder, and more equitable for countless lifetimes to come.
However, a careless invention can just as easily be disastrous. Between nuclear weapons, lab leaks, climate change, and other existential threats, humanity's threat to its own extinction has never been greater.
In this fast-paced, interconnected world,
it is frighteningly easy to undo all of humanity's progress, or possibly, to curtail all of its possible future. There is no way to know what will happen next. But what is clear is that your potential is limitless.
So how to live this life? And what can you do to work toward a better future for all your lives to come?
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