Thought Experiment: Living Every Human Life

Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived.1 Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa.2 After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that second person dies, you are reincarnated as the third person, then the fourth, and so on. One hundred billion lives later,3 you become the youngest person alive today. Your “life” consists of all of these lifetimes, lived consecutively.

Your experience of history is very different from what is depicted in most textbooks. Famous figures like Cleopatra or Napoleon account for a tiny fraction of your experience. The substance of your life is instead composed of ordinary lives, filled with everyday realities— eating, working, and socialising; laughing, worrying, and praying.

Your life lasts for almost four trillion years in total. For a tenth of that time, you’re a hunter-gatherer, and for 60 percent you’re an agriculturalist.4 You spend a full 20 percent of your life raising children, a further 20 percent farming, and almost 2 percent taking part in religious rituals. For over 1 percent of your life you are afflicted with malaria or smallpox. You spend 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth. You drink forty-four trillion cups of coffee

You experience cruelty and kindness from both sides. As a colonizer, you invade new lands; as the colonized, you suffer your lands taken from you. You feel the rage of the abuser and the pain of the abused. For about 10 percent of your life you are a slaveholder; for about the same length of time, you are enslaved.6

You experience, firsthand, just how unusual the modern era is. Because of dramatic population growth, a full third of your life comes after AD 1200 and a quarter after 1750. At that point, technology and society begin to change far faster than ever before. You invent steam engines, factories, and electricity. You live through revolutions in science, the most deadly wars in history,7 and dramatic environmental destruction. Each life lasts longer, and you enjoy luxuries that you could not sample even in your past lives as kings and queens. You spend 150 years in space and one week walking on the moon. Fifteen percent of your experience is of people alive today.8