The best question I've been asked all year

On Sunday night I went to Talking Heads, an event which was part of the Spier Performing Arts Festival's infection of the city. Brett Bailey and Jay Pather found 40 interesting people who were experts in various fields, put them at tables in the Centre for the Book and randomly allocated them to 100 paying participants, two at a time for 20 minutes of conversation, four or five times over. A kind of speed dating with direction -- excellently curated and put together, and most of the speakers were well prepared. I was initially disappointed to see the laptops, notepads and other evidence of preparation -- I thought it would be more fun to chat at random -- but it turned out to be far more satisfying to engage with people around their real areas of expertise; things might have turned aimless otherwise.

My random draw pulled up Anne Schlebusch from the provincial department of education, Zayd Minty talking about Goemarati!, Annelie Rabie of Business Against Crime, and Dave Duarte, whom I'd been hoping to meet anyway, with a high-speed tour of the attention economy. The best question of the evening, though, came from Peter Becker, whose table I joined, also at random, when I should have been on a break (they didn't sell all 100 tickets --how sad is that?).

Anyway, this was his question: Imagine you're the victim of a freak medical accident which means you're going to live for a thousand years. Just you. How will that change what you do?

Think about it. It's a great question. We're all used to being challenged about what we'd do if we had only ten days or whatever left to live, but this one was new to me. Working on a time horizon of 1,000 years instead of a few months can make a dramatic difference.