I had a funny thought the other day. How would one live their life if a whole life were to fit into only 24 hours? If each day we woke up and it marked the beginning of a brand new life, in which our attachments to the past were but severed, and any events happening within the day would not carry over to the next? Life would remain a chain of events in the span of 24 hours, isolated from other chains that could play out in whichever way without the restraints of “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or anything beyond these. There are a few possibilities for this hypothetical scenario:
For one thing, the limit artificially placed on the duration of a “life” would urge each of us to view time differently. Just like in any of those accounts of people nearing their demise and mulling over their rues, having a cap on how long you can remain in this world often gives a dramatically different perspective on life and the value of time. Surely a scenario in which a life were to last for a day prior to renewal wouldn’t mean that our chances at another life were entirely null. At the same time, it would strike us as unwise if we just went on to treat a life, no matter how short, as just something trivial to waste. There is no standard idea for what then would be a wise way to spend one’s life, but drawing from the lessons and regrets of those who have a limit in life, we could recognize a few things that most folks barely give enough attention to in their long day-to-day existence. In other words, the little time granted in day shall be dedicated to spending it intentionally and without fixating on just one among the numerous activities that could give us joy and meaning.
I could see the reverse argument that since all the days, or rather, lives are separate from one another, it wouldn’t matter so much if we just let one slip by harmlessly right? This is indeed true, and it would be another possibility of the hypothetical life-within-a-day universe as I expound below. Once again, reconceptualizing time in the context of having only 24 hours in a life wouldn’t be so much about maximizing productivity while seeking to eliminate what we (or worse, society) deem futile or wrong. Rather, it could serve as a reminder that life could easily be what we chose to make of it, according to how we would appreciate and rejoice in it.
The second possibility is this: our mind would not wander to the unrelated realms of the past and the future, since each day exists as a standalone event free from all ties to others. All the 5-year or 10-year planning for the future we are encouraged to engage in today would look comical, and so would all the mourning and lamenting over the past. Yesterday and tomorrow are exotic, unknowable realities which would bear very little significance in our mind, as we could only reasonably take in one day/life at a time. Regrets are hardly a thing, and even if they existed for an event from just hours ago, they would magically dissipate when the day restarted. Anxiety and worries about the future could only take our mind as far as a point before midnight, which wouldn’t accumulate to much as the chain of consequences would break off. Errors, mistakes, and any feelings of shame or regret that come with those would just vanish into thin air, as our mind remained blissfully confined to our day-length life.
Lastly, our understanding of and relationship with the “self” would experience a transition as well. In certain schools of Eastern philosophies, particularly in Buddhism, the “self” is considered a transient, inconsistent construct rather a permanent, rock-solid identity which appears to matter so much to each of us in today’s world. While we go about our day slapping all these fancy terms around to illustrate a seemingly significant part of our personhood, we might as well be trapping ourselves into a false sense of a whole, continuous, and permanent self. Of course society nurtures this notion of identity to facilitate the process of simplifying social interactions and management (occasionally to the point of essentializing and promoting simplistic interpretations). Yet, when one reflects on the absurdity of trying with all our might to uphold an ambiguous and otherwise made-up sense of identity, while amplifying our defense or aggression against anyone who seems to compromise it, one ought to realize how perpetuating a strong upkeep of the self could do more harm than good. The scenario of the life within a day’s length could perhaps relieve this desperate urge to go from day to day without ever jeopardizing the identity one is given or naturally picks up on. The transiency of the self would be highlighted by the isolation of each day, and one could be free to choose their own actions unencumbered by the burden of any lasting identity.
This is all nonsense imagination from a random thought. This alternate reality would certainly have way more implications, some more detrimental than beneficial in my mind. But for now, I’m entertaining these three points as possible suggestions for how I could perhaps make my own continuous, day-after-day to year-after-year life somewhat more pleasant and enjoyable.
An afterthought: I started this entry with “I had a funny thought the other day”. It might actually be impossible to recall something “from the other day” if my life couldn’t carry over past 24 hours. And so this blog entry wouldn’t even exist unless I had written it exactly on the day the thought came to me. Ah and I would even have to start an entirely new blog every single day too? That would be quite ridiculous tbh.