how many heartbeats do we have?

A quote one from of my favourite authors, Theodore Zeldin (lifted from here though)

"The wider the choices before them [in this case dissatisfied wealthy French people but in truth many more of us] and the more numerous their desires, the less time they had to give each one. Leisure has become organised, and so full of opportunities too tempting to miss that it does not necessarily offer freedom. The wish to live as intensely as possible has subjected humans to the same dilemma as the waterflea, which lives 108 days at 8' Centigrade but only 26 days at 28'C, when its heartbeat is almost four times faster, though in either case its heart beats a million times in all. Technology has been a rapid heartbeat compressing housework, travel, entertainment, squeezing more and more into the allotted timespan ..."

Do we have a limited number of heart beats? If so, is it better to live, as the saying goes, one day as a tiger than a thousand as a sheep?

Does the search for meaning in intensity miss the point of life? Which is not to say one should sleep walk through life, but will we still have time to hear the grass grow as we hurtle along at the hyperspeed of modern life?

Strangely i feel pleased that we may share something with the humble waterflea....