A calendar that puts everything in its place in life

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

All the value of the time allotted to us is in a few poignant pictures from the author of the Wait But Why blog Tim Urban.

In one of the past materials, we considered the duration of human life. On years:

Monthly:

And by week:

While working on this article, I also made a daily schedule, but it turned out to be a little larger than necessary, so I put it aside. But to hell:

The daily chart is as powerful as the weekly chart. Each of these points is just another Tuesday, Friday, or Sunday. But even the person who is lucky enough to live to the 90th birthday can easily fit all the days of his life on one sheet of paper.

But while I was writing about life in weeks, I was thinking about something else.

Instead of measuring your life in units of time, you can measure it in some actions or events. I'll give myself as an example.

I'm 34 years old. Let's be super-optimistic and say I'll be spending time here doing sketchy drawings until I'm 90. If that's the case, I have a little less than 60 winters ahead of me:

And maybe around 60 Super Cups:

The water in the ocean is cold, and being there is not the most pleasant life experience, so I set a limit for myself: to swim in the ocean only once a year. Therefore, although it seems strange, I have to go into the ocean no more than 60 times:

Apart from research for the Wait But Why blog, I read about five books a year. Even if it seems to me that in the future I will be able to read an infinite number of books, in fact, I will have to choose 300 books from all possible and admit that I can travel to eternity without knowing what happened in the rest:

Since I grew up in Boston, I went to Red Sox games every time. But if I don’t move there again, I’ll most likely go to Red Sox games about once every three years, which explains such a short string of my 20 remaining visits to Fenway Park baseball stadium.

During my life, the president was elected eight times, and there are still about 15. I have seen five different presidents, and if the pace remains the same, I will see nine more.

I usually eat pizza once a month, which means I have the opportunity to eat pizza 700 more times. An even brighter future awaits me with dumplings. I eat Chinese food twice a month and usually eat at least six dumplings at a time, so I've put together a schedule of dumplings that I look forward to:

But these are not the things I thought about. Most of the above events occur with constant regularity during each year of my life and therefore, to some extent, are evenly spaced in time. And, if by now I have lived a third of my life, I also went through a third of all actions and events on my way.

What I thought was that a really important part of life, unlike all these examples, does not spread evenly over time. About why the relationship "already done - to be done" does not work, no matter how far I have progressed in life - about relationships.

I thought about my parents, who are now over 60. For the first 18 years, I spent time with my parents on at least 90% of my days. Since I went to college and moved from Boston, I usually see them five times a year, an average of two days at a time. Ten days a year. This is only 3% of the number of days that I spent with them during my childhood.

Since they are now in their seventies, let's continue to be optimistic and say that I am one of those incredibly happy people whose parents will be alive when I turn 60. This gives us about 30 years of coexistence. If we continue to see them 10 days a year, it means that I have 300 days ahead of me, which I can spend with my mom and dad. This is less than what I spent with them the year before my 18th birthday.

When you look at the reality, you realize that even though you are far from dying, you may be very close to the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I make a schedule of the days I spent and spend with my parents - assuming that I am as lucky as possible - it becomes obvious:

It turns out that by the time I graduated from school, I had already spent 93% of my time with my parents. And now I enjoy the remaining 5%. We are at the very end.

A similar story with my two sisters. After living together in the same house for 10 and 13 years, respectively, now I live equally far from both of them and with each I can spend no more than 15 days a year. Hopefully, we have another 15% of the time spent together.

It's the same with old friends. At school, I hung out with the same four guys five days a week. In four years, we were going to hang out together about 700 times. Now, scattered across the country, with completely different lives and schedules, all five of us are in the same place for about 10 days every 10 years. Our company is in its last 7%.

So what does this information give us?

Leaving aside the secret hope that technological progress will allow me to live to be 700 years old, I see three main conclusions here:

1. It's important to live in the same place as the people you love. I spend about 10 times more time with people who live in my city than with people who live elsewhere.
2. It's important to prioritize. Your remaining personal time with a particular person depends on where that person sits on your priority list. Make sure you make this list yourself, and not unconsciously move by inertia.
3. The quality of the time spent is important. If you have less than 10% of your time with someone you love, keep that fact in mind when you are with them. Spend this time remembering what it really is: tremendous value.