Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years. Will Durant
I who strolled eternity And walked among the timeless dead, I tell you this: Duration is not the question. It never was. The damned have endless time— Does it make them blessed? They stretch across millennia. Repeating the same movement, The same thought, The same empty ritual That defined them in life. Immortality without purpose Is merely a longer Hell. Your age dreams of extension— Adding years to the ledger, Decades to the sum, As if the quantity of days Could substitute for the quality of living. But I have seen what comes When time becomes abundant: Not automatically wisdom, Not necessarily meaning, But the crisis of the unfilled hour. For centuries, humanity organized itself Around necessity— The need to labor, To survive, To earn bread through the sweat of the brow. Work was the scaffold Upon which identity was built, The answer to the question: “What am I for?” But what happens when the scaffold falls? When the machines do the labor, When survival is no longer the organizing principle, When you wake with a thousand mornings ahead And no obligation to fill them? This is the test your descendants will face— Not the challenge of scarcity But the burden of abundance. Not “How do we live?” But “Why do we live?” I have strolled through Wonderland And seen souls Who spent eternity in contemplation, In creation for its own sake, In the pure joy of understanding, Of connection, Of becoming more fully What they already were. This is the model: Life not as production But as expression. Time not a commodity But as a canvas. The next age will divide. Not between rich and poor, But between those who know What to do with freedom And those who are crushed by it. Between those who can answer “Who am I when no one needs me to be anything?” And those who dissolve In the absence of an external definition. Your purpose will not be given— Not by an employer, Not by economic necessity, Not by the demands of survival. It must be discovered. In the interior landscape, In the question: “What calls to me When nothing is required of me?” Will you create? Will you explore? Will you deepen your capacity For love, for wonder, for understanding? Will you become the artist Of your own existence? Or will you fill the emptiness With distraction, With the manufactured urgencies Of trivial entertainments, Stretching a meaningless life Across an even longer timeline? The gift of time Is also the burden of choice. Every additional year Is another year to answer Or to avoid answering The fundamental question That has haunted every thinking soul Since consciousness began: “What is the point of me?” Work once answered this for you. In the coming age, You will have to answer it For yourself. And that answer— Not the length of your days But the depth of your purpose— Will determine whether Your extended life Becomes Paradise Or merely a more comfortable nowhere, Where souls exist Without truly living, Endure without truly being, Accumulate time Without ever transforming it Into meaning.
