The Time We Have Left

A commentary for FLUX Media

There's a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching two clocks run at once. One is the clock of technology, which now moves so fast that a tool I learned last quarter is already the "old way" of doing something. The other is the clock of a life — mine, my friends', the people I grew up with in Singapore who are, one by one, starting to disappear. Lately I've been sitting with both clocks running at the same time, and I wanted to write down what that feels like before the feeling passes, the way feelings do.

The machines are doing our remembering now

I run a small studio. Most days that means juggling client decks, shoot schedules, and increasingly, prompts. AI has quietly become the thing doing the first draft of almost everything — the treatment, the rough cut, the translated article, the mood board. It's not that AI replaced the work; it replaced the warm-up. The blank page isn't blank anymore, and that's a strange kind of relief mixed with a strange kind of grief. I used to sit with an idea for a while before it had to become anything. Now the idea has to become something within minutes, because the tool is waiting, and if I don't feed it, someone else's prompt will out-produce mine by lunchtime.

What unsettles me isn't the efficiency. It's how normal it's all become, how quickly "AI-assisted" stopped needing the word "AI" in front of it. A year ago, using an AI video tool for a client pitch felt like a small confession. Now it's just Tuesday. I think what we're actually adjusting to isn't a new tool — it's a new pace of life, one where the gap between having a thought and shipping it has nearly disappeared. Some days that pace feels like power. Other days it feels like something is being taken from me that I haven't found the words for yet — maybe the right to be slow, to sit with something unfinished.

The other clock

Somewhere in the middle of learning to work at machine speed, I've started hearing about the deaths of people my own age. Not close friends, not funerals I've attended — just news that reaches me secondhand, a mutual contact, a post, a name mentioned in passing. Not many, but enough that it no longer feels rare. Enough that when a name pops up on my phone that I haven't heard from in years, there's a half-second of dread before relief, or the opposite. This is new. It wasn't supposed to start yet. We were the generation still figuring out our careers, our relationships, our five-year plans — and now some of the people I once ran in the same circles as simply aren't here anymore.

I don't think there's a clean way to write about this. It doesn't resolve into an insight. It just sits there, a fact that reorders the furniture of how you think about your own time. It makes the AI-speed of everything else feel almost absurd by comparison — I can generate a hundred variations of a video ad in an afternoon, but I can't get back an afternoon with someone who's gone.

Producing my own reminder

This collided in an unexpectedly literal way when I was producing The Final Destination — not in an edit suite, but backstage and in the house during live performances, listening to fellow presenters share their own thoughts on life and death between sets. There's something different about hearing mortality talked about out loud, by people about to walk on stage, than about editing it into a timeline. It's not staged for an audience the way a cut scene is — it's someone genuinely working through what they believe happens when time runs out, minutes before they perform. I'd be running the show, half-listening backstage, and then catch a line that stopped me mid-task.

I won't pretend the production traumatized me. But it did something quieter — it made the subject impossible to keep at arm's length. You can't spend a run of shows surrounded by people rehearsing their own relationship with death, night after night, without it leaking into how you think about your own. I've caught myself being more careful crossing roads. More prone to calling people back the same day. It's an odd gift, if it is one — a project about mortality quietly recalibrating how present I try to be.

What retirement even means for us now

And then there's the question of what all this is for. Singapore just moved the retirement age to 64 and the re-employment age to 69, on the way to 65 and 70 by 2030. The CPF payout age stays put at 65, so the real shift isn't about when we get paid — it's about how many more years we're expected, and increasingly funded, to keep working. For people my age, the retirement our parents had — a clean stop, a pension, a garden — is basically gone. What we have instead is a longer runway with more turbulence: higher CPF contributions in our fifties funneled straight into forced saving, a bigger gap between when we stop earning and when the payouts start if we leave early, and an economy that wants our experience for longer than it used to.

I find that oddly appropriate, given everything else. AI is compressing how long it takes to produce a piece of work. Mortality is reminding me, more often than I'd like, that the work isn't the point. And the state is telling me I'll likely be doing some version of this work into my late sixties regardless. Three different systems, three different clocks, none of them agreeing on how much time I actually have or what I should do with it.

I don't have a tidy conclusion. I think the honest version of "growing up in this moment" is holding all of it at once — building faster than ever, grieving more than we expected to at this age, and planning for a retirement that keeps receding the more we plan for it. The only thing that feels true across all three is that presence is the scarce resource now, not output. The machines can make more of almost everything. They can't make more of that.

— D.T., for FLUX Media