I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

The speaker meditates on mortality as the one universal condition that makes every human exchange—everything “everyone ever says to each other”—feel both urgent and fragile. By compressing lifespans into a range from a “millisecond” to “76.5 years,” the quote stresses that the difference between long and short lives is ultimately quantitative, not qualitative: all lives end. The skyscraper-on-fire image turns existence into a shared emergency: people occupy different floors and the “smoke rises at different speeds,” but no one is exempt. The metaphor suggests existential claustrophobia—being “trapped” by finitude—while also implying a grim solidarity in the face of inevitable loss.