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- The number of breaths before you die
The number of breaths before you die
Plus, the AI bubble is over... for now...
Adam Zulawski
August 21, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
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Hi,
Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.
3 things worth procrastilearning over
via Leonardo.ai
1. Every living creature gets the same number of breaths
The theory, popularised by Dr Andrés Escala, goes that most mammals, from tiny shrews to massive whales, live for approximately 1 billion breaths. So maybe stop doing all that cardio, huh?
The basis behind it is the so-called metabolic theory of ecology, which says that an organism's lifespan is inversely proportional to its mass-specific metabolic rate (that's why smaller animals with faster metabolisms tend to have shorter lifespans, while larger animals with slower metabolisms live longer).
I really like this idea, but it does seem like an oversimplification. There's also genetics, diet and environment effects to consider - eg. there are plenty of studies about twins which show they die at different ages because their environments aren’t exactly the same.
But the reason I think it's worth mentioning is that however simplified it may be, the theory forces us to think about life, energy and the fundamental trade-offs that govern all living things. And that maybe it’s worth keeping an eye on when you’re stressed and breathing more erratically…
Sidenote: when looking into the theory, I also found out that oxygen was basically a poison until mitochondria started living in animal cells and dealing with it 🤯
2. The AI bubble might be over
In June, Apple published a paper called The Illusion of Thinking explaining why they are not so fussed about making their own Large Language Model (like ChatGPT or Gemini). And it seems more and more people are starting to agree with them.
A year ago, many assumed that when the inevitable new GPT-5 model arrived, it would basically be a sentient AI overlord. But since it finally appeared about a week ago, the general consensus has been "yeh its ok i guess".
Sure, it's smarter and faster, but only incrementally compared to previous AI models. And it seems the reason is that AI is a power-hungry beast, and there simply isn't the infrastructure to provide AI advances with all the electricity it would need to suddenly make a supersonic leap forward.
"The problem isn’t that the models stopped improving. It’s that the improvements we need are measured in orders of magnitude, not percentage points. Every step up the scaling laws now demands a city’s worth of electricity and a sovereign wealth fund’s worth of GPUs. You can still squeeze clever tricks out of mixture-of-experts or chain tiny specialists into something that looks like agency; that keeps the demo videos cinematic. It just doesn’t get us to super-intelligence. For that we need either an architectural miracle (unforecastable by definition) or a civil-engineering miracle (a decade-long sprint to build nuclear plants and 2-nanometer fabs). The first is luck. The second is politics. Both are scarce."
So rather than the sudden jump into terror predicted a few months ago, for now we'll just have a more polite Microsoft Excel asking us if we'd like it to make a graph out of our sums for us. No need to panic just yet…
Elsewhere, there is a movement to bring back Microsoft's paperclip character Clippy (it’s something to do with the increasing attempts by government to spy on and control the Internet, as seen with the recent Online Safety Act)
3. Divorce rates are different for same-sex marriages
When comparing straight, gay and lesbian marriages, it turns out that of the three groups, married gay men are the least likely to divorce, while lesbian couples have the highest rate for calling it a day.
Yes, data for same-sex marriage is not going to be as old as traditional marriages, but the stark difference is still intriguing. Some point to the fact that in heterosexual marriages, the woman is statistically more often the initiator of divorce (eg. the UK’s ONS says that in 2021, women initiated 63.1% of opposite-sex divorces), so there does seem to be a logic that when both parties are of the sex more likely to initiate, the chances of divorce go up.
It just goes to show that that famous old saying still applies, especially for lesbians: “Happy wife, happy life!” 😅
2 quotes to keep in mind
The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.
If you are conducting a one-hour meeting at your company, you have effectively stolen one hour from every person in the room. If there are twenty people in the room, your presentation is now the equivalent of a twenty-hour investment.
It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that you do not waste the hour by reading from PowerPoint slides, providing information that could have been delivered via email, lecturing, pontificating, pandering, or otherwise boring your audience. You must entertain, engage, and inform. Every single time.
1 simple tip to organise your tasks
Just use pen and paper or a basic .txt file to list your to-dos.
We live in a world where Asana, Clickup, Monday, Jira, Trello, Notion and all those other productivity apps are urging you to make cards, submit tickets, build databases, draw up boards and all that other stuff to keep track of what you’re meant to be doing. They are admittedly quite fun to use, and often pretty.
But they are a time suck. Get back to work.
You just need somewhere basic to quickly note down your to-dos and then get going. And yes, it can just be a notepad and pen. If you need somewhere to keep important info as it enters your day, use the same piece of paper / .txt file, as recommended by productivity daddy Cal Newport.
Sometimes the most obvious advice is all you need. So don't forget to drink water either.
That's all for today. Many thanks for reading.
Adam
Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff
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