What Time Is It?
You either have all the time in the world or no time at all.
It all depends on whether you’re a qhaog or a jellyfish or a person.
Someone who lives in constant pain and knows the end is in clear sight could hope for it all to end. A baby has it all ahead of him or her and time means nothing.
A person nearing the end of his or her stay may not be in no hurry to leave and may rue each passing day that shoots by like a comet. To the teenager, a day is like a century and it can’t pass too quickly for entrance to adulthood and freedom.
It’s like considering the size of the planet. If you’re on it, it is huge. If you’re way out in the universe, the earth is the relative size of a small pimple. Another way to put is: One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.
There are factors to consider when looking into how long people live around the world.
First, consider the country you come from. In the U.S., the average life expectancy is 79.11 years. That breaks down to an average of 81.65 years for women and 76.61 years for men. We like to think we’re the healthiest on the planet. If longevity is the yardstick, uh uh.
Remember it’s an average and the likelihood is if you share a room with rats, shootings are commonplace and your health care is zilch, your life expectancy will be much lower.
Another factor is where you’re born. Natives of Mississippi are at the bottom, where they live an average of 71.6 years. Here are the top 10: New Hampshire, 79.9 years; Washington, 80.2 years; Colorado, and New Jersey tied at 80.2 years; Massachusetts, 80.4 years; New York, 80.5 years; Connecticut, 80.8 years; Minnesota, 80.8 years; California, 80.9 years; and the place to live the longest, on average, Hawaii, 81.3 years.
Considering the planet, you might consider moving to Hong Kong where people live an average of 85.29 years. That would be 88.17 for women and 82.38 for men.
The place to avoid: Central African Republic. The average life span is 54.36 years. Men live an average of 52.16 years and the average woman doesn’t give it up until 56.58 years.
I don’t think anybody compares their expected life spans. Central African Republicans probably think they live long lives. And they’re right.
And Americans believe their lives are long. And they’re right, too.
In Hong Kong, people probably don’t go around gloating that they live longer than anyone else, on average. Some might even complain.
And probably the universal feeling is that life goes by too quickly.It doesn’t matter whether its Hong Kong or Central Africa Republic.
And then there is the matter of when you were born. Chances were from slim to none for a long, fruitful life for someone born in the mid-1300s. The Black Plague had something to do with it.
And compared to many animals, humans are downright immortal (immoral, also).
Jellyfish are probably the longest living creatures on the planet. But then again, jellyfish are made mostly of water and they have no eyes, ears, mouth, heart or a brain. Jellyfish live for many, many years unless they’re eaten by a predator, which is entirely likely, leaving the average jellyfish longevity at around 10 minutes.
Of course, right behind the ageless jellyfish is the ocean quahog. Quahogs, an edible hard shelled clam, have been calculated to have live for more than 400 years and “Ming,” a Qhaog found in China, lived to the ripe old age of of 507. That is a lot of candles. Personally I would not like to live in a windowless shell for four centuries.
The Galapagos giant tortoise can survive well past 100, with the oldest recorded at 152. Bowhead whales live for an average of 200 years. Greenland sharks can hang around for two centuries and one was found to have lived for 400 years.
Red sea urchins have been known to live for more than 200 years. Koi fish generally won’t live past 30 but “Hanako,” a koi in Japan was determined to have been 226 before she croaked. Hanako was born right around the time of the American revolution.