In Time: Does Death Serve a Purpose?
Does death serve a purpose?
The movie In Time is set in a world where time is the currency instead of money. Everyone is genetically engineered to look 25 years old forever, but once you hit 25, you only have one year left to live unless you earn more time. Not surprisingly, the poor live day to day and minute to minute. The rich live forever.
Will Salas lives in the poorest time zone. He saves the life of a rich man, with over a century on his arm, who wants to die.
“The day comes when you’ve had enough,” the rich man says after revealing he’s lived 105 years already. “Your mind can be spent, even if your body’s not. We want to die. We need to.”
While Will sleeps, the rich man gives him all his time and dies. Will ends up accused of his murder and runs for it. He travels to the richest time zone, where he wins almost 1,000 years in a poker game. The man he loses to doesn’t need that time, but his pride is wounded, so he invites Will to a dinner party where he hopes to win it back in another game.
At the party, Will meets his host’s daughter, Sylvia Weis.
“What do you do, Will?” she asks.
“I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”
“Yes, why bother?” she says in a dry voice. “What’s the hurry?”
“Right. Why do today what you can do in a century?”
As they dance together, Sylvia tells him she doesn’t believe his story of “coming from time” (their way of saying old money). She saw him at a restaurant earlier in the day where he was eating a little too fast. When you don’t have much time, you try to fit as much as you can into every second.
“Sometimes I envy them,” Sylvia says, referring to the people who live in the poorest time zones.
Will frowns. “You don’t know anything.”
“The clock is good for no one. The poor die, and the rich don’t live. We can all live forever as long as we don’t do anything foolish. Doesn’t that scare you? That maybe you’ll never do anything foolish, or courageous, or worth a d*mn?”
Death is terrible and sad (even if, like me, you believe in an afterlife), but perhaps facing death teaches us things we couldn’t learn otherwise.
Death imposes a deadline on us that we can’t cheat or extend. It forces us, if we’re wise, to make the most of each day.
If we want to achieve something, we’re motivated to start and work toward it rather than putting it off indefinitely.
We learn to value those we love. We cherish our time with them, celebrate each birthday. We apologize and say I love you because we never know if the words we say will be the last ones they ever hear.
We have the saying “You only live once” for a reason. It reminds us to sometimes spend a little more to go to that fancy restaurant for our anniversary. To take the trip to Europe we always talked about. To leave a lasting mark for good on the world with whatever time we have.
And I wonder if the people who do that, who live each day as if they’re not sure they’ll have another, aren’t able to meet death at the end without fear, knowing their time has been well spent.
Do you think death might serve a purpose? Are we only meant to be on this earth for a limited amount of time?
Jul 30, 2012 @ 13:47:21
I suppose it does. One of the more interesting theories out there (and I don’t know what it’s called) is that we live in dimensions and this is simply one of those. It’s a really interesting concept I can’t explain, lol. I do know it’s vital to accept our own mortality AND embrace it. Don’t off things you can do today, and try not to have regrets.
Jul 30, 2012 @ 14:02:37
You hit on two things that I think are key–not putting things off and living so we don’t have regrets. I believe that after we die, we’ll be called to give an accounting for our actions. That alone is a good motivator to me to think before I act and to try to live without regrets.
Jul 30, 2012 @ 15:30:51
Love this post. I believe death absolutely serves a purpose. Like you said, it imposes a deadline and can force us to make the most of each day. Not knowing when that deadline is makes living each day as fully as we can even more important. I have to remind myself of that when I get bogged down in the small things that feel like big things but really aren’t.
Jul 30, 2012 @ 15:49:24
I think we might feel that deadline more the older we gets as well (at least I know I do). Since I feel that deadline more, it’s a stronger reminder to me about what is and what isn’t important in each day.
Jul 30, 2012 @ 15:43:28
There was a similar message in the movie A.I where the alien visitors bring the kids mum back to life. But only for one day. The reason they offer, if I remember correctly, is that all energy in the universe has a finite limit, and once it is used up to must return to a source so it can be recycled. That was the gist of it anyway.
I like that idea and because I’m not all that religious it makes sense to me that everything has energy, and life forms such as ourselves only borrow it for a time, then it must be relinquished to something else can exist.
Even so I think 200 years would be a nicer limit to human life, instead of around 100, so we’d have a little extra breathing room to truly enjoy our time on the planet.
Jul 30, 2012 @ 15:48:15
I certainly wouldn’t argue with a longer lifespan. I think about the people in the Bible who lived 500 years or more. That sounds much better to me 🙂
Jul 30, 2012 @ 15:50:58
Great insight here, Marcy.
I do think death serves a purpose, but I think that many times it’s up to us to give people’s passings meaning. In other words, the loss of a love done is tragic and painful. We can choose to dwell on the pain and loss or search for beauty and lessons.
And knowing that life is precious and fragile can certainly prompt us to live our lives more fully—as long as we don’t turn “I’m gonna die someday!” into an obsession. 😉
Jul 30, 2012 @ 19:17:47
I recently lost a friend to cancer. She had beat breast cancer 10 years previous, and diagnosed with MS. She was already in a wheelchair when I met her. What she said she wanted most was to see her boys grow up. She didn’t quite get to see them married, but she met each other their fiances. She said she’d been given a reprieve and lived each day like it was a gift. Her life was truly inspiring. She became a motivational speaker and was absolutely hilarious. I miss her very much, but her joie de vive lives on in everyone she knew.
Jul 30, 2012 @ 21:22:56
I liked that movie, even if I found the visuals a bit disturbing. It’s very odd not to be able to tell who is the mother and who is the daughter since they both look 25 lol. That aside, I thought the main purpose of death would be to avoid overpopulation of the planet. Resources are finite, and if the creatures living on them don’t die off we’d quickly overwhelm them. But I suppose in a society like that one they’d have the ability to move on to other planets. Still.
I agree, 500 years sounds a lot better. It’s just not fair that by the time we figure it all out, our bodies can’t keep up and we die. I can only hope that we get to take that knowledge on to somewhere else and move forward from there instead of starting over from square one with no memory of how we got there (as a baby, for instance).
I also think this topic might be slightly too philosophical for me today…not enough caffeine! lol
Jul 30, 2012 @ 21:27:11
Sounds like it’s time for a coffee and some chocolate 🙂
In the movie, the reason the people in power gave for not equally distributing time was that they wouldn’t have room if everyone lived forever (so I guess that means they still didn’t have technology advanced enough to colonize Mars). Will and Sylvia became futuristic Robin Hoods because they felt it wasn’t fair for some people to live forever while others died young.
I’m with you on the confusing visuals part. It was disconcerting not knowing if someone was 26 or 126.
Jul 31, 2012 @ 00:04:45
I absolutely agree there is a purpose in death, and like already mentioned, it’s to maintain balance with nature and the earth. Without the balance there would be an over population and a depletion of natural resources. A problem we already face.
I haven’t seen this movie yet, but will have to add it to our Netflix queue.
Jul 31, 2012 @ 01:58:18
Once again, a movie I’ve never heard of. Guess I really will have to start watching a little more television.
First I have to say that I’m glad people don’t know when they’re going to die. I suspect most of them would spend that last year being afraid, rather than enjoying it to the fullest (and I’d probably be one of them).
I also believe we’re going to be giving an account of what we’ve done here on earth…and am kind of sweating that.
Does death serve a purpose? I don’t know. I do wish we had longer lifespans, though I’m not sure about the whole 500 year thing. If our health and vitality were still going strong 475 years in, that would be fine. But if 250 was middle age (as 50 is now)…that’s a long time to be old. 🙂
Jul 31, 2012 @ 11:57:09
I just saw the first part of this movie. (Big mistake to start it in the morning before work.) I’ll have to finish it now!
The visuals were creepy, I agree–everyone looked the same age.
I think time is relative to thought. An extra long lifespan would give me more time to do all the things that I want to do and learn.
Aug 12, 2012 @ 11:31:17
We get older and die because it had an evolutionary advantage. It works much the same way for cars. If cars didn’t deteriorate how many of us would be willing to spend a large part of our earnings on a new one even though modern cars are more efficient. Withoput death the original versions of humanity would still be around and walking on all fours, covered with hair e.t.c.
Having said that we’ve been trying to extend life ever since the first doctor acted. Finally, since the sequencing of human DNA we are beginning to have some success. One well qualified scientist thinks the first human to live to 1,000 is probably alive today!
It’s quite possible that the immortality my wife and I write about in our book series will be achieved very soon. If you were hoping that that means ‘forever’ though then you will be disappointed. Accidents will occur which limit your lifespan. Insurance tables indicate a probable lifespan of 1,729 years if you are ‘immortal’.