I find it interesting to see how our perspective on life changes based on how you count it.
Think about the ways that we count our span of life.
So of course, the most obvious way is by years.
So, you know, we’ve all learned that OK, what’s an average life? You know, if you make it through any kind of accidents or real unluckiness you get through to 60, and then probably 70, and then, you know, maybe you’ll die somewhere in the 70s.
If you’re lucky you make it to 80, and then really anytime through the 80s, and, you know, 90 is like really far, a really, you know, very successful in terms of length of life, and then, of course, a few make it to 100, and that’s like the top of the pyramid, you know, in terms of pure lifespan.
Now, of course, the length of life can be easily very overrated as an important thing, since of course it is the quality of the life that we live, not the length of the life, that really matters.
But this is just to get an idea of what is kind of the range of expected life.
So we learn OK, 70-80 years.
That’s a typical lifespan.
That’s what I maybe have to look forward to if I’m lucky in terms of avoiding unlucky incidents.
OK.
So we’re all used to this number as a number of years, and I wonder, how does that seem? How long does that seem? Well, you know, it doesn’t seem like a very high number, but each year is a fairly long time.
There’s so much happening in a year.
So that when you think of it as 70-80 years, yeah, sometimes it can seem short, but since each year is itself a lot of time, OK, maybe that’s just a baseline of how long we expect life to be.
Now imagine that you look at life by counting something other than years.
And OK, well, you could count months.
And, you know, not a normal way to count long periods of time, but imagine 1000 months is a bit over 80 years.
So we can expect maybe 1000 months would be a good lifespan.
And yeah, 1000 is a pretty big number, but then, on the other hand, a month is a much smaller length of time.
It has that sense of finiteness to it, so that one month, yeah, OK, I can kind of feel what a month is.
Every time a month goes by, that’s maybe at least 0.1% of a lifespan.
OK, life still seems kind of long again.
Maybe it even seems longer that way, you think 1000 months.
You know, if you really live each month to the best you can, 1000 months seems pretty good.
OK, and then let’s count maybe weeks.
And now you get about 4000 weeks, and that’s about 77 years.
4000 weeks.
OK.
Well, now it’s starting to seem a little bit more limited.
Even though 4000 is a big number, a week is not very long.
And so we only get so many of those cycles.
Now, what really started this for me is when I heard it in days.
Now, it is 30,000 days is 82 years.
30,000 days.
Now, I remember when I first heard this number, it really kind of shocked me into a different perspective on lifespan.
Because even though it is a big number, that is in days.
We all know how short days are.
So it started to feel very finite.
Not only is 30,000, that is, you know, you’re 82 years, you know, if you’re full adult, you probably have least 10,000 days or so behind you.
And, you know, maybe you have 10,000 days, the final 10,000 of those three, if you have these 30,000, you divide that into three sets of 10,000.
You have 10,000: that’s like your childhood, growing up.
That’s probably done.
Most of my listeners already past that.
And your final 10,000, if you’re lucky to have the full span of 30, that would be, you know, over your 50s-60s-70s.
So really, I started thinking about, you know, I have less than 10,000 days until, you know, for any kind of youth, whatever that means, to be gone.
For, you know, my prime to be finished, and for me to be old, will be in under 10,000 days.
And even though it’s still a big number, because a day is so short, it really starts to hit like wow, that is finite.
Every day that goes by is that little piece of my life that is completely gone.
That is it.
So I find thinking about lifespan in terms of days helps me to focus, to remember wow, OK, let me make the most of each of these days.
#numberofdays #countingdays #lifespan