Imagine this. Terrorists hijack a Boeing 747. They shoot a dozen passengers and take the rest hostage. A heroic traveller in a business suit makes a stand. He stows away in the cargo hold and kills the gunmen one by one before throwing their leader out the loading bay, yelling: "Get off my plane!" Who is this hero? None other than the President of the United States of America. Amazing! You can stop employing your brain now — no need to imagine this exciting scenario. You can sit down, switch off and watch the 1997 Harrison Ford mega-blockbuster Air Force One.
It's a gripping, tightly plotted political action thriller which features some of the least convincing special effects ever put to film.
What percentage of your life would you spend watching something like Air Force One? I had already seen it five times when it popped up on Netflix account last week. My kids hadn't, so I made them watch. Popcorn and blankets on the couch, a lovely entertaining night in. As the credits rolled, I thought to myself: "what the hell am I doing with my life? I could die tomorrow, and I am spending the precious moments I have on Earth watching Air Force On for the sixth time? We should be walking the Routeburn."
As we get older, life feels like it's speeding up. It races by while we do the same things over and over again.
In 2012, during his "Death and the Present Moment" speech, American neuroscientist Sam Harris put it this way: "There's going to come a day when you'll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you will look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention, and you'll think: 'What was I doing?' You know this, and yet you'll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you'll live forever. Like watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There had better be a heaven if we're going to waste our time like this."
