During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. What I’ve been thinking about is a really important part of life that, unlike all of these examples, isn’t spread out evenly through time-something whose ratio doesn’t at all align with how far I am through life: If I’m around a third of my way through life, I’m also about a third of my way through experiencing the activity or event. Most of the things I just mentioned happen with a similar frequency during each year of my life, which spreads them out somewhat evenly through time. I have Chinese food about twice a month and I tend to make sure six dumplings occurs each time, so I have a fuckton of dumplings to look forward to:īut these things aren’t what I’ve been thinking about. I have an even brighter future with dumplings. I probably eat pizza about once a month, so I’ve got about 700 more chances to eat pizza. I’ve seen five presidents in office and if that rate continues, I’ll see about nine more. There have been eight US presidential elections during my lifetime and about 15 to go. Growing up in Boston, I went to Red Sox games all the time, but if I never move back there, I’ll probably continue at my current rate of going to a Sox game about once every three years-meaning this little row of 20 represents my remaining Fenway visits: Not counting Wait But Why research, I read about five books a year, so even though it feels like I’ll read an endless number of books in the future, I actually have to choose only 300 of all the books out there to read and accept that I’ll sign off for eternity without knowing what goes on in all the rest. So as weird as it seems, I might only go in the ocean 60 more times: The ocean is freezing and putting my body into it is a bad life experience, so I tend to limit myself to around one ocean swim a year. 1 If so, I have a little under 60 winters left: I’m 34, so let’s be super optimistic and say I’ll be hanging around drawing stick figures till I’m 90. Instead of measuring your life in units of time, you can measure it in activities or events. Each of those dots is only a single Tuesday or Friday or Sunday, but even a lucky person who lives to 90 will have no problem fitting every day in their life on one sheet of paper.īut since doing the Life in Weeks post, I’ve been thinking about something else. The days chart blows my mind as much as the weeks chart. While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. In a post last year, we laid out the human lifespan visually. We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing.
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