Lucky 7s

The longest any of your cells live for is seven years. That’s what I’ve been told since I was 7. But I’ve been burnt by facts like this before. The kind that are Gospel truths passed down by Sacred Word of Mouth which then turn out to be complete fabrications, and solely exist as means for those with superior intellects to laugh at us morons and the truths we hold dear*.

Well fukkit. The whole premise of this article rests on the fact that the longest a cell lives for is seven years. If this turns out to be false, I don’t care. I’ve lost too many childhood truths, I’m not going to lose this one. I do have faith in some things. Besides, what follows is more full of cod than an illegal Spanish Fishing Armada so it matters little. I’m too weary of ‘actual’ facts nowadays…

Moving on. The longest any of your cells lives for is seven years. This means that nothing about you is physically the same as it was seven years ago. Everything about you has grown, reproduced and died in seven years. Which could cause one to wonder what it actually is about ‘you’ that’s so fucking special, but the self is not my concern here as I fear it may get in the way of my point…

Like that.

This whole Lucky 7s theory does have some weight to it. If you’re the kind who’s convinced by Chapter and Verse Citations then Shakespeare talks about the Seven Ages of Man in a play*. The number seven can be found everywhere in society. Things like Seven Samurai remake, The Magnificent Seven, serve as poignant portraits of the changes that occur when cells are replicated and …altered… slightly. And that’s just one example out of many*.

Seven is a reasonably consistent yearly period between significant moments in life too. Oh yes. Let the facts do the talking:

1st Regeneration – 7 Earth Years
By age seven, the death of the last first born cell, most people have a pretty good idea how to eat, shit and sleep by themselves and so are deemed ready to be shipped off to have whatever passes for an education in these parts so that the next two sets of regenerated cells are suitably saturated with information.

2nd Regeneration – 14 Earth Years
The 2nd Regeneration brings with it a whole new load of cellular energy, activating hormones, rebuilding structures, readying the whole pink blob cell mass thing for genetic replication with another collection of suitable cells.

Socially it is a significant age where humans move out of childhood and start getting the ‘orn. Obviously.

3rd Regeneration – 21 Earth Years
Physical growth, sexual maturity and any other odds and sods are usually in place by now. Satisfied with a job well done each cell starts a self-destruct sequence.

A time associated with the death of immaturity and taking on complete self-reliance along with the world. And lots of fancy parties.

4th Regeneration – 28 Earth Years
A lot of particularly prodigious cell-types often self-destruct on the cusp of the 5th Regeneration. SIGNIFICANT*.

5th Regeneration – 35 Earth Years
Probably a hugely significant social event associated with this age in some non-Western culture. Saturation levels dangerously low.

6th Regeneration – 42 Earth Years
Nothing obvious but I still think there might be something to this.

7th Regeneration – 49 Earth Years
Ar ha! See, that’s kind of close to 50! Which is half a century! Ha!

8th Regeneration – 56 Earth Years
Self-destruct sequences begin to kick in,

And so forth into kerrrffflaaaaaahhhh. The fact that the system spirals out of significance is fine. We only live past our mid-30s cos we’re so gorram smart now at tricking Nature out of her fertilising bounty of corpses. Like most things in life we aren’t meant to go beyond a 5th season*.

Anyway, here I am just on the other side of my 3rd regeneration. The parties are sadly thinning out and the realisation is dawning that my 4th regeneration seems worryingly close and I should really be worrying about where I’m going to be at that point. I worry about whether my future cells will be financially secure. I worry if my unhealthy habits will cause them to be born slightly crippled. I worry if the memories passed on to my 4th Regeneration will be ones of happiness; of seizing the real world, the one outside this faux-world bubble of education that has shielded me for two Life Cycles, by its literal horns and steering it straight and true to the abattoir.

But I shouldn’t worry cos technically ‘me’ as I am right now will be dead by then.

And there are so many options open to us! So many frickin’ options! Everyday we’re bombarded with exactly how every 1 in 6 billion chance in the world has gone. Mainly if it’s gone badly. We all have these images presented to us everyday, of how the whole world is living*.

The threat of all those 1 in 6 billion chances, the billions of ways a life can go at any moment, the constant streams of information we have about what other people are doing, what they should be doing, how everyone thinks everyone else should be doing means it can be daunting for a species that until Google had been used to just about processing the empathic information of the Nation as some homogenous country blob and acting hostile to anyone who ain’t from round these parts. Now the different truths of opinions, ideas and beliefs of 6 billion people can be shared and accessed, everything can be argued against and questioned by someone.

It’s an amazing time for anyone who isn’t threatened by questioning their own beliefs every time a cell dies. And also capable of living in a relativist coma without their brain exploding. So no one. Soon we’ll just be flattened into apathetic pink jellyblobs.

So I’m going to use my 3rd Regeneration to find the 7 people in 6 billion who believe all this bullshit about 7 being a significant number*, form a cult and be re-born aged 28. Who knows into what world I shall emerge… I’m holding out hope for flying cars and robozombie armies but I fear seven years is just too short a time for one individual to make a difference.



Oh yeah, and there are seven days in a week. That's gotta be significant, right?

1. I’m looking at you, Fry.
2. Homework is to find out which play it is.
3. I can give you other examples. Probably.
4. Caps lock sincerity is binding.
5. Or album.
6. [Insert paranoid delusions of some evil media God in your contemplations here if so desired].
7. I’ll start with Dan Brown fans.