I mean, don’t forget the earth’s about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

The speaker juxtaposes the immense age of the earth with the smallness of individual human time, using cosmic scale as a rhetorical shove toward present-mindedness. The line’s breezy logic—if the planet is billions of years old, “who can afford” nostalgia—suggests a defensive, even comic refusal to dwell on memory, regret, or historical responsibility. In a Pinter context, such apparent common sense can also read as evasive: a character may be using grand facts and glib wit to shut down uncomfortable inquiry into the past. The quote thus balances existential perspective (time dwarfs us) with psychological strategy (avoidance disguised as pragmatism).