Thought I'm Wrestling With: Is Life Short or Long?
Why the best answer might be “both” — and how health, rest, and risk make each day worth it.
The other night I planned to tune out the stress of my recent move and life problems with a new Netflix movie, My Oxford Year. Full transparency — I wasn’t drawn to the plot or teaser. I just have an eye for the main actress, Sofia Carson, and figured my brain wouldn’t mind seeing her for the next two hours. But the movie sparked a much bigger reflection than I anticipated.
Sofia’s character takes a gap year, after finishing her finance degree at Cornell, to study her lifelong passion — Victorian poetry — at Oxford University. Of course, the crux of the film is the growing romantic tension between the two leads. Hollywood has endless ways of creating clever hooks and friction that make you think every great love should start that way.
Early on, she attends her first poetry class, and I caught myself thinking, One’s life must be more than adequately sustainable to have the time and money to study poetry. Not with snobby disdain, but as a reflection on how far society has evolved.
Economics teaches that farming allowed early civilizations to produce surpluses, freeing people to do more than hunt and gather. That shift made specialization — and eventually the study of the leisure creations of past generations — possible.
Sofia’s character is the daughter of U.S. immigrants who worked tirelessly for her to have this chance. So when she clashes with a young grad-student professor radiating privilege, she correctly guesses his wealthy upbringing smoothed his path — as if to say, You know nothing about the realities of life, and your interpretation of poetry is shaped by that.
I’ll admit — that confirmed my earlier thought: It must be nice to have the luxury of teaching your interpretations of poems for a living.
Then comes the plot twist: he’s undergoing treatments for a rare, incurable cancer.
On a dime, past resentments shift into empathy.
This reminded me of a thought experiment I’ve heard on podcasts:
If given the choice to be 80 years old and a billionaire, or 20 years old and broke, almost everyone picks the latter.
We instinctively value time over money, and health over materialism.
Bill Perkins, author of Die with Zero, recapped the impact the book Your Money or Your Time had on his understanding of the utility of money over time. One of the tools it preaches is to calculate your hourly wage after tax and began analyzing costs of the world not in terms of money, but in terms of your time. Bill said this really helped him get in touch with his values. Money was no longer this arbitrary medium of exchange, it was a direct connection to the person he was.
When you align with your values, you clarify the life you want — how you spend your days, the goals you pursue, the masterpiece you’re building.
(Full disclosure: there are flaws to viewing the world purely in hours-for-money, but it’s a useful lens for understanding the trade-offs you’re making.)
Most people drift into working for money on autopilot, assuming freedom will come later. Perkins — and others — warn that’s a dangerous gamble: you’re exchanging youth and health for wealth. It’s like running a marathon on a treadmill. You cover the distance, but the experience is miserable.
Run that marathon outside instead, and you’ll still hit 26.2 miles — but with fresh air, unexpected conversations, and maybe a new way of seeing the world.
Too many of us treat life like the treadmill version — heads down in our youth, expecting a grand payout later — only to find the equation of health, time, and wealth has shifted when we get to ‘later’.
Naval Ravikant puts it succinctly:
“When you're young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you're middle‑aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you're old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health… By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.”
Time is a finite commodity, and bartering it is a high-risk game.
My Oxford Year leans into the idea that life should be lived now — to “eat cake every chance you get.”
The first poem the professor assigns is by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.”
A well-lived life might come at a cost, but nothing is permanent. Our passions, loves, and lives are fleeting — which may be exactly why we should embrace them fully.
It’s easy to get caught up in longevity-optimization culture: avoid cigarettes, track sleep, guard against dementia. This advice isn’t wrong — but Millay would argue that sometimes the richest moments come when you throw caution to the wind. Always preparing for tomorrow means you never live in today.
Maybe you’re a soldier in a foxhole under artillery fire. Your buddy offers you a cigarette — not to take the edge off, but in acknowledgment of the absurdity of life. Do you calculate the seven days it might shave off your life, or think, The hell with it — this is a story I’ll carry for whatever life I have left?
The professor tells his students, “Life has a way of derailing the best-laid plans,” and “The best bits of life are often the messiest.” A cancer diagnosis sharpens that lens of course, but the film invites the viewer to consider it without waiting for tragedy.
But here is where I see another side to the coin.: scientifically speaking, life is the longest thing you’ll ever experience. We’ve absorbed the idea that we must make every year count — which creates a subtle pressure to always be doing something worthwhile.
I know, because I’ve believed it. I trace it partly to my college reading habits. I devoured military autobiographies that condensed decades of someone’s life into a few hundred pages. Highs and lows came rapid-fire: training, missions, achievements. You finish thinking, They lived more lives than I ever will.
What those books don’t show are the slow months: six-month rehabs, mundane work, and the quiet in-between. Those moments don’t sell. So we compare our balanced mix of action and rest to their highlight reel and conclude we’re behind.
George Leonard, in writing about mastery, reframed this for me. Progress, he said, is mostly plateaus — long stretches with no visible improvement, punctuated by brief surges. Eventually, he learned to welcome plateaus as the surest sign another breakthrough was coming.
Life is like that. The “boring” stretches can be the most fertile.
Author Oliver Burkeman helped me shift my mindset from serial productivity to something with more grace — and, frankly, more oxygen. Not because I was burning out, but because science and experience both show that rest isn’t the opposite of productivity; it’s the catalyst.
Efficiency isn’t the same as effectiveness. You can be hyper-efficient and simply make room to cram in more work — which leaves you with less of the life you actually want. True productivity is producing the life you’d be proud to live.
This is where “doing nothing” comes in. It’s not wasted time — it’s the mental equivalent of recovery days in training. In downtime, your brain’s default mode network quietly stitches together ideas, makes unexpected connections, and solves problems in ways you can’t force. That’s why the best ideas come in the shower, walking the dog, or staring out the window.
Burkeman warns that if you only rest when “everything is done,” you’ll never rest — because the “everything” list is infinite. Rest has to be scheduled, guarded, and defended — not as indulgence, but as infrastructure. The irony is, respecting that space makes you far more effective.
Dr. Peter Attia takes a similar stance on the physical side of life. He champions lifestyle choices that maximize healthspan — not just lifespan. Healthspan is the stretch of life where you remain physically capable, mentally sharp, and free from chronic disease, so you can keep doing what you love late into life. It’s living in a way that lets you extract what you want from the world for as long as possible — without the world dictating what you can and can’t do.
This is all to say, life is both long and short. Long enough to spend years refining your craft, resting on plateaus, and savoring unhurried days. Short enough that tomorrow isn’t promised. The challenge — and the privilege — is to live in the overlap: to protect your healthspan so you can keep doing what you love, to defend your downtime so you can keep loving what you do, and to seize the small, messy, cake-filled moments that give the whole thing meaning.