So the title may be a bit misleading, but trust me that this is not a blog about math. Please continue to read on without being worried about having to dig up your high school calculus skills. A growing trend that I’ve noticed with how society functions in 2016 is this idea that we are living in a world that can never run out of resources. Whether that resource is time, money, other people, etc… we take for granted that this planet and all of us are finite.

Take for instance: dating in 2016 – we have never had so many options of meeting new, potential partners in the history of mankind. All of us are exposed to a wide array of options from apps like Tinder, websites like OKCupid, and traditional means like friends of friends or randoms at bars. In a perfect world, we’d find our ‘one’ fairly quickly right? Wrong. Since it seems like there is almost an infinite amount of ‘matches’ or ‘connections’ we could make, we constantly search for that next person even after getting connected with someone perfectly suitable for our dating needs. We keep swiping right. We continue to talk to more people while going on dates with our existing potential partners. Even further, this type of thinking stretches into existing relationships when we fight with our spouse. It’s becoming easier and easier to give up and find another partner rather than actually work out the problems as we feel there’s always going to be another person ready and waiting to replace our boyfriend/girlfriend. The truth is, while there is definitely more than one person out there who you are compatible with, we aren’t allowing ourselves to build stable foundations with the people already in our lives. This is leading to more and more breakups, which leads to more and more people in the dating pool, which is causing a vicious cycle of never being able to fully love someone as we just rinse and repeat the neverending search.

This mindset also affects how we treat the environment; as it’s clear that climate change is a very real problem that is going to affect us and future generations for years to come. The reality is, this earth does not have infinite water, minerals, and food for us to keep living as we do. There are a ton of countries out there already feeling the effects of how greedy a civilization we’ve become, and it’s starting to hit home as well. At the rate we’re going, I don’t feel confident that humans will be around to roam around Earth in the next few hundred years. We need to start realizing that our current greed and selfishness are not allowing propserity for those to come as we’re consuming more resources than the Earth can replenish.

There are a ton of ways we allow infinity to affect our lives, but I figured I’d end this talking about how we deal with it in general. A lot of us walk around life being ignorant to the fact that we aren’t going to live forever. It feels like we have all the time in the world but really, the clock is ticking. Due to this, we don’t go out and do the things we want to because we feel like there will always be ‘later’. We don’t say the things we want to because again, we can do it ‘later’. Truth is for a lot of us, that ‘later’ never comes or is too late by the time we finally decide to do it. What happens then? Regret. We often get into the habit of thinking about things we could have done differently, or the different way scenarios could have unfolded rather than just accepting what is and making the best of it. We think about the infinite amount of alternate realities rather than living in the one we’re actually in.

Basically what I am trying to get at with this post is that we need to start realizing that we don’t have all the time in the world to live our lives. Make sure you spend the time you do have being with people who you care about, and doing the things you love. We don’t have all the resources in the world (whether that’s personal finances or actual planetary resources). Make sure you live within your means, and consider other people are also living on this planet with you now and for years to come.

To be fair – I realize that my perspective is very biased by living in North America and being a male in my mid-20s, but I do believe that certain mindsets transgress the boundaries of culture/gender and are a global constant.