Reminder: You're not going to experience or accomplish anything in your life
Here's why that's wonderful news
Have you ever wondered how many experiences there are?
I mean how many possible experiences there are. How many different things are available for a person to see, do, hear, or feel in our universe?
Let’s zoom in on just one example.
It’s estimated that there are roughly 250 million recorded songs publicly accessible. With an average song length of 3.5 minutes, that’s 875 million minutes of recorded music.
The average lifetime is 43 million minutes long.
So if your parents slipped little baby headphones on you the moment you were born, and you did nothing but listen through the history of recorded music from that moment to the end of your natural life, how much of humankind’s musical creation would you have experienced for yourself?
5%.
But in fact, this assumes that no new music was made in your lifetime. Around 1.5 million songs are written and released every year, amounting to an additional 5 million minutes of music. With just over 500,000 minutes in a year, that means that if all you did was listen to music every moment of every day (and, by the way, I’m including while you sleep), you would actually end each year 4.5 million minutes further behind than when the year started.
Now add in all the world’s art. All the world’s natural beauty. All of the potential relationships you might have with all the world’s 8 billion people. Every sunrise viewed from every point on the planet. All the jobs you might have, the creative projects you might pursue. Cities or towns you might call home. Skills you could master, or simple hobbies you could adopt.
And that’s all just here on earth. Once space travel becomes more widespread in our lifetimes, well — the available experiences will only become more overwhelming.
To put it another way:
You could live the fullest, most experience-rich life a human being has ever lived, and the percent of available experiences which you will have enjoyed will still be statistically zero.
On a relative scale, you’re not going to accomplish or experience anything in this life.
Now, exhale.
Let’s talk about why that’s a good thing.
In his book The Coast of Utopia, author Tom Stoppard writes:
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment.
When I became a parent, I operated under the assumption that my mission as a father was to prepare my child for a happy, fulfilling life. I read a dozen self-help books focused on this very subject — one of them literally called Prepared.
(It is, in fact, an excellent book which I highly recommend.)
But with the benefit of hindsight, I recognize one thing that none of these books seemed to acknowledge: that a child is not a future-person. They are a person right now. In fact, and if you’ve ever spent much time around children you know this, a child is as right now as any person can be. Their entire world is right now, and that’s why it’s so deeply upsetting to them when they’re denied a dessert tonight but promised one tomorrow.
To my six-year-old, there is no tomorrow — not in any sense that’s meaningful.
Once we become adults, it seems, all there is is tomorrow. We’re experiencing an anxiety epidemic, and what is anxiety but in inability to pull oneself from thoughts of tomorrow, a tomorrow we can’t control?
Now, our ability to imagine possible futures is a wonderful thing. It’s what makes that big ol’ frontal cortex in our brains so special. People separated themselves from other animals largely on the strength of our ability to look forward, to make plans. To think, X might happen, but what about Y? And what happens if I do Z instead?
And yet this has also led us to become so weighed down by that judgement-making lobe at the front of our brain that it stoops us forward, until we’re staring at our feet. And when we look at our feet we think — which way should I go? What happens if I go the wrong way? What if I devote myself to walking down a path that isn’t right for me?
We want to use our time well, and to us that means making the right plans. Life is impossibly short, and so we have to maximize the time we have by doing as much of the “right stuff” as we possibly can.
But what we fail to realize is that life is shorter than we can possibly imagine. In relative terms, we can’t accomplish anything at all. Reaching our “potential” isn’t about doing as much as we can, because what we can do in the face of what can be done amounts to so very little.
So then how do we measure the quality of our lives?
By doing whatever we do very, very well.
Now on the surface, this sounds like I’m advocating for specialized skills. “Pick a job, any job, and get really good at it.
But that’s not what I mean by doing things “well.” I’m talking about the experiences that make life meaningful.
How do you eat a delicious meal well? Listen to beautiful music well? Walk through the woods well? Spend time with your children well?
There is exactly one parent on earth, out there somewhere, who spends the most time with their child. That means the 3.5 billion or so other parents are losing the parenting game when measured in minutes. Some work more than others. Some have more children to split time between. You quickly begin to realize that measuring how well you’re parenting based exclusively on time investment is a fool’s errand.
But think about the phrase “spend your time well.” Compare it to: “spend your money well.” A person with $10 can spend that money well or poorly, just as someone with $10,000 can.
You spend time well by making it mean something. And you make it mean something by being there for it. Experiencing it. Something is a waste of money if the thing you spent it on doesn’t enrich your life. A waste of time is time spent on something that you don’t actually experience.
And so a lifetime spent in a meaningful career is a waste if you don’t allow it to bring you joy. Even time spent with your child can be wasted if you’re not actually there for it.
To be good at something, in a philosophical sense, is to be good at enjoying that thing.
And so we can set ourselves free from the worry about whether we’re using our time efficiently or effectively, or whether we’re optimizing our hours. That’s like asking whether it would be better to start eating the moon from the dark side or the sun-facing side.
You’re better off focusing on how you’re going to season it.
I think it's amazing how this essay started off kind of depressing and ended with such an optimistic outlook :D
Right now it's summer here, which makes it way easier for me to be present and find joy in whatever I'm doing. Need to think about how I can carry that over to the cold season!