life expectancy

Born in Zambia your life expectancy is 39 years, and I would be living on borrowed time.
In Japan, it's 81, and I'm not half way there yet.
In Neolithic times 20 was a decent average. Not leaving much time to discover your inner child.
Classical antiquity, in spite of busts of bearded ancients, had only upped that figure as far as 28. Sufficient time to discover your inner philosophy.
By 1800 the figure was creeping up to the life expectancy of a Zambian today.
By the early 20th c, a half century was your target.

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Futurologists predict that soon we will all live to 150. And before that generation is done, immortality might be available upon request. Which may well be the death of humanity as we know it. Already it seems as though there's too much time, too many days to amble through aimlessly. The day must have come when the great struggle for the survival of the human species was won. No more need to procreate fanatically. No more worry that in your 20 year span, you'd see the whole fragile order of man obliterated by killer bees, werewolves, dinasours, aliens or some arachnid virus. Which allowed time for stargazing, carving ideograms on walls, turning twigs into telephones, drugs, recreational sex, cooking and circuses. All the joys of modern living.

Now mankind is here and we're stuck with it. But sometimes the suspicion dawns that the whole order of things has been misunderstood in the quest to live longer, further, more comfortably. It's forgotten that humans are the impoverished species, the most conscious and damned of them all. Our earliest ancestors longed for the chance to escape the shackles of evolution; welcomed their saviour death; rejoiced at the notion of being reborn as a butterfly, an ant, a cheetah, a snowy barn-owl; any one of a million species whose spell upon this earth is more vibrant, as valuable, less problematic than our own.