live on borrowed time

Idioms  

1. see on borrowed time.

2. Outlive reasonable expectations, as in Our twenty-year-old car is living on borrowed time, or The vet said our dog is living on borrowed time. This expression alludes to time borrowed from death. [Late 1800s]

---

Example Sentences

She talked about how we, people in developed nations, made decisions to throw things away and live on borrowed time while they, people like the Fijians, had to live with the outcome.

From Washington Post

Now the Santa Monica lions, the only apex predator operating within a megacity, live on borrowed time.

From Scientific American

I was reading again, recently, the autobiography of one of my favorite novelists, Graham Greene, and was struck by this sentence: ‘Perhaps, until one starts at the age of 70 to live on borrowed time, no year will seem again quite so ominous as the one when formal education ends and the moment arrives to find employment and bear personal responsibility for the whole future.’

From New York Times

Could it be that the Party’s ability to live on borrowed time is finally running out? 

From Time

Jeff Malec, chief executive of  Attain Capital Management in Chicago, pointed out, “The alternative calculation methodology functionally allowed MF Global to live on borrowed time — presenting themselves as more stable than they really were until the clock ran out.”

From New York Times