Just how long is 250 years? An eternity, or a blink of the eye?

250 years may seem like eons to Americans who celebrated the anniversary of the 1776 Declaration of Independence this year. But it’s shorter than the lifespan of China’s Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), when sections of the Great Wall of China were built, or the British East Company, which ran India and dominated world trade (including in opium) during its 270 years of existence after its founding in 1600. And if you were an Egyptian—a very ancient one, at that—250 years would represent a relatively brief phase during the reign of the pharaohs, which lasted about 3,000 years, only about enough time to wrap a few mummies and move on.

Jump forward to today, and our time horizon is far, far shorter. A TikTok video lasts about 30 seconds, on average. That means that if you scroll nonstop for 250 years, you’d get to watch almost 263 million of them. Then again, about 23 million videos are uploaded to TikTok every day, meaning that content creators need less than two weeks to produce the volume to keep you busy for a quarter millennium.

The point is that we live in an age of time compression when everything seems to be moving faster and faster while our attention span has gotten smaller and smaller. Forget 250 years: Even a full minute can tax the patience of our doomscrolling thumbs. Technological innovation was once seen as a boon to humanity that would give us more time for ourselves. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” that we would work only 15 hours per week in 2030.

He was right about the onward march of technology, but quite wrong about the leisurely life it would bring us. Paradoxically, time serves to stress and harass us more than ever. Technological progress may in theory free us up “to live wisely and agreeably and well” as Keynes thought, but it is in fact technology that has filled the gap it created. Far from giving us more leisure, its idle uses now occupy our every waking second. Be honest: How often do you check your email and social media apps?

Here comes the problem. At the same time (literally) as we experience this time compression and dwindling attention span, the biggest issues we face as human beings are long-term ones that require us to be ever-more patient and farsighted. Thinking seriously about the effects of climate change or artificial intelligence requires us to look ahead not 30 seconds but 30 years and beyond to a future we can scarcely imagine. We need to take decisions now that will last for generations, not until the next midterm election.

Will we put in place policies and safeguards that prevent us from frying to death or suffering other cataclysmic climate effects? Having just experienced a heat wave in Europe that knocked out transportation services in Britain and elsewhere (among its other devastating effects), I have my doubts. As for AI, now that we have opened Pandora’s box of large language models and AI agents, will we be able to tame them and their hallucinations? Or are we doomed to suffer a similar fate to the space station crew members in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose life support systems were turned off by HAL the computer as soon as it felt threatened?

I’m an optimist by nature and expect that technology combined with human common sense will help us find solutions to at least some of the existential problems we face. But I worry about time. If we allow this trend of time compression to continue, we might all live to be 150 years old thanks to medical breakthroughs but not have a minute to enjoy that longevity. Our big challenge is to slow down time, take control of it, and not let ourselves be rushed into our own oblivion.

To that extent, US history provides some reason for optimism. 250 years ago, did the Founding Fathers expect that their words and deeds would not only resonate but also continue to hold sway (or be argued over in court) two and a half centuries later? You need an Elon Musk–sized ego to believe that you can predict the future that far ahead. And yet, in many (but not all) ways, their vision holds true and continues to shape American society.

250 is a big number. 250 million years ago was when the Permian–Triassic Extinction took place, the “Great Dying” period in our planet’s history that wiped out most marine species and terrestrial vertebrates. 250 million is also the number of people who have been forcibly displaced in the past ten years alone by climate-related disasters, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

So, take a deep breath and count to 250. A lot of good can happen when you take the time to think about time.