Over the past few years, and in particular the last year I have begun to question the how and when life ends. In some conversations – for myself and many other times – in a more generalized sense. In fact, on a recent sabbatical this was a topic of an extended conversation that will likely trigger a post or two in this series.
Death is uncomfortable as a topic for me, and likely for many of you too. Dying is even more uncomfortable. I have been blessed to dodge it a few times, and many of those closest in my life remain with me today. Yet, we all know it is a moment away.
So about a year ago, I discovered an incredibly jarring blog post located here.
The post is incredibly simple, so simple that it was able to fit an entire lifespan on one piece of paper.
This visual in particular was the one that got me thinking:
Check that out for a second, and imagine that you are actually fortunate enough to live 90 years. You could get your crayons out and start filling it in, for me – I’m nearly halfway home to that end point. Talk about absolute thinking – 90 the grid ends. Goodnight.
Well, the blog original / cited post then swerves into a way more useful set of thinking beyond time only, and begins to frame it up in terms of events and relationships. He even goes into the % of time remaining in some of the relationships.
Given the holiday weekend, I bring this idea of a lifespan forward – not to bum you out, as was my reaction when I first swallowed this down and threw it back up.
Rather than making you sick – I offer this as a way to kick yourself in the ass. Many of us and many in our lives will NOT live until 90. So why do we take things like our days, relationships, and so much else as a casual matter of course? This is likely a worthwhile question to revisit too.
So let’s use my personal situation here as a basis for some proof point questions:
So I have 48 years and 7 months left to live if I live to 90 years old. That looks like this:
Okay, that hourglass does not look so bad, right?
Well what if we start, instead to look at this in terms of time spent with my sons. It is Father’s Day this weekend after all… To keep this simple, I’m going to go with the age of my youngest – he’s 8. I’m going to assume that he’s going to live with me until age 20, and on average I have my sons 3.5 days a week with me given the divorce. After that, I’ll estimate that I will see my sons an average of 5 times a year for 3 days each time – for 15 days per year.
Quick math here:
I’m 42 – in 12 years, I’ll see my boys 3.5 days per week for each week = 2184 days. That’s the amount of time I’ll have while they live with me.
In 12 years, I’ll be 54 and I’ll drop down to 15 days per year until I die at 90 years old. That’s another 690 days.
Total remaining days is 2874 with my sons.
For simplicity’s sake, I’ll say in the first 8 years I’ve spent 5 days on average with my sons in the same home. This accounts for travel/work earlier on along with the split time schedule from the prior two years of the divorce schedule.
I’ve spent 2080 days thus far.
I have 4954 days total to spend with my boys – let’s round up to 5000 days for simplicity.
Here are some visuals:
Now by the time my boys leave the home at the age of 20, they will have spent 4264 days with me under my roof out of a total of 5000 days.
So the vast majority of my time with kids will have been spent by the time they leave the home at age 20. Now I have three boys, and the two older guys will make this picture look even more sobering. The point has been made I think.
Looking in the other direction in terms of heritage – looking at my parents and the amount of time I estimate I have left with them, it gets much more intense.
I’ll estimate that I will see my parents an average of 5 times a year for 3 days each time – for 15 days per year. Some years it has been better than this, some years it has been worse.
Let’s go with 15 years, and I’m going to do this based upon my father’s age for this one…
My father is currently 71 years young, so that gives us 19 years remaining. 19 years at 15 days per year is 285 days left with my parents.
Damn.
Following similar math from the prior visuals, let’s see how my time spent thus far has played out.
Assumptions: 20 years lived at home, 7 days a week. From the age of 20 until my parents pass at my age of 61 – let’s go with 15 days per year.
Check this out:
So with my parents I have a total of approximately 7900 days total.
I estimate approximately 7600 of those have been spent.
I estimate approximately 7200 of those days were spent by the age of 20 when I knew everything about the world.
I could run a similar analysis for my time remaining with my brother and sister, and the results would be similar in the main point here.
What is that?
Time is precious.
What a cliche.
Let’s just move on, and wish everyone a happy Father’s Day, no?
Here’s the point – if you are open to the notion that time is precious – run your numbers based upon a ‘sunny day’ scenario of life expectancies of 90 years old. I bet once you have the number of days left with your parents, with your kids, and with your own time remaining – you start to see things a little more urgently.
In preparing for this post, I had considered my life events more personally as a lead up to writing the article. To be honest, I’m much cooler thinking about my own mortality rather than those closest to me. This article started off like this originally….I include this here to lighten the mood – just a bit.
If I go to see the Red Sox (the original blog I cited earlier is from a Boston guy too) say once a year (it will be a hell of a lot more if I get back to Boston) I have 48 games left to see.
If I see Aerosmith on each of their next tours, I’m probably in the single digits at this point – maybe 10 times total. That completely sucks, as I have seen them at least that many times already – so I’m 50% at least – through seeing them.
If I see Godsmack (another favorite band out of Boston) on each of their tours an average of 1.5 times per tour over the next 30 years (Sully is in solid shape) that is 45 more shows. I’ve already seen them twice in the past 12 months with another show at least this year. That’s feeling more like it.
How about how many more games in person watching The GOAT play for the Patriots? Maybe 1 more time, saw him twice in the past year though. That’s a major kick in the ass. Maybe I take that drive out to Tennessee or head north this season to the City of Champions…
How many times did I get to watch my absolute favorite footballer of all time, Dan Marino play. That’s a regret…it was goose egg btw. It was a nice try Mike.
How many books will I get to read if I average 1 a month for the rest of my life, which is aggressive…about 576 books.
If I eat pizza two times a month – that’s about 1000 pizzas left. Notice I’m not counting those calories!!!
If I write 1000 words or 1 article a day for the next 48 years… 2.5 million words, and over 200,000 posts. That would be prolific. Holy shit that’s a lot to say.
Coincidentally, that 200k amount is the amount of sunrises, sunsets, and you get the point.
Consider running your numbers, we can talk about what to do with this information in a future post. This was incredibly slanted towards things running out, perhaps we flip it around in the next conversation to aim at how we fill up what we have left instead of running it out?
