Elastic Measuring System

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, 1931

Engineers and scientists are miserly perfectionists. They have absolutely no idea how dull and empty are their boring lives, filled with the eternal quest for perfectionism. They don’t know how much fun it would be to let loose and forget the rules, just like politicians and economists do. Let me explain.

Problem
Engineers and scientists think that a meter must always remain one meter long. They think that what was set up to be a meter in 1791 must have the same length today. In the future, they think, a meter must remain precisely one meter long. They want to build bridges and buildings using the same boring fixed measure, want to compare each other’s research results, and want to re-measure things again and again for time series’ analysis.
Engineers and scientists also think that minutes and seconds are to be measured at a constant duration so that all clocks work in sync. They think it is weird when a child is older than the parents, or when a week lasts longer than a century. They think that all hours, days and years have to have the same lengths throughout history, and that any changes to these are somehow improper.
They also want to measure temperature in degrees that are constant. They think it would not be polite if water boiled at a temperature below its freezing point, or if the snowy and windy winter days were somehow sweatier than midsummer heat with the Sun in zenith.
Engineers and scientists also want to measure mass so that little babies are not heavier than their mothers, or so that a gram of Gold today equals a gram of Gold tomorrow or the day after.
It is unfortunate that perfectionists have conspired to apply their pompous and utterly boring mindset to everything surrounding us. Now we all suffer having to adhere to these, alien to us, perfectionist ideals, living our lives by something fixed and unchangeable.
The perfectionists have probably never heard that everything in life does not need to be so hard and difficult. They probably never imagined that life could be much more fun, that they could look at things with open mind and heart, and not have to worry so much about things being always constant. They should take the example of economists and politicians who have mastered the magic of fluently changing yardsticks. Economists and politicians have fun living and interpreting the universe around them with an elastic yardstick so that it fits the mood of the moment, never trying neither for accuracy nor completeness.

Proposal
To conclude the above discussion, my modest proposal to the world is to introduce elastic yardsticks everywhere. Just like the politicians and economists have done with the field of economy. Life should not be dull and full of limits, people should be free to choose for themselves. There should not be fixed units of length or time or temperature or anything.
If a woman wants to be 20 years old, she should have the freedom to be 20 years old, and not only as a polite compliment, otherwise known as a lie. She must have the right to have her desired age, 20 years, to be stamped right into her passport! With elastic yardstick for measuring time, this will be a piece of cake to accomplish and will become a truth, not a lie.
If an athlete wants to run a marathon without exhausting himself, he or she should have every right to that. Because why should marathons be so long as to torture the participants? 42.195 kilometers could be custom-fitted to each participant if the meter was as elastic as money supply. Everyone could participate and everyone would win!
And think about all the implications to science and technology itself where all the fixed, perfectionist ideas originate from. Want to build a Perpetuum Mobile and rid yourself from the rest of your worries and troubles for the rest of your life? With an elastic measuring system, with all its units of measurement tune-able to satisfy the moment’s need, that insurmountable task would have been accomplished long time ago!
Please listen to me now, all scientists and engineers, politicians and economists! Elastic Measuring System will effectively solve all the world’s problems once and for all! Nirvana, Enlightenment, Heaven on Earth, whatever you want to call it, all will be achieved instantly with the introduction of the Elastic Measuring System! People all over the world need it and want it! Let’s introduce it now!