Life is finite, and that’s good. Here’s why.

This comes from a book. From a very good book (in my opinion).

Here’s the basic math.

In the US, on average, we live to be about 80 years old (dudes, sorry, you’re actually expected to live to 74.5 years, it’s the ladies who are 80.2 years but we’re all a positive thinkers on this topic so I’ll take the more optimistic number).

80 years/life * 52 weeks/year = 4,160 weeks/life
(dudes you might be somewhat less ~3,870 weeks/life, all the more reason that this is important!)

Putting aside gender differences, about 4,000 weeks plus or minus.

Four thousand. Half the number of grains of rice in a cup. A bit less than the length of a baseball field in inches. 4% of the number of hairs on your head, assuming you have a full head of hair. (this is a larger fraction if you’re bald)

You can argue four thousand is large or small (to me it feels pretty small) but whatever one thinks about the number, it is assuredly finite. Independent of whether weeks feel like they go past at the speed of a Olympic bobsledder or a glass falling off the counter as you lunge for it in slow motion, they do pass, one at a time until there are less and less & then finally none.

Finite can be depressing, sure, but here is the magic. Finite makes life living.

Firstly, you can never get everything done. Feel free to complain about how “yes you can!” and new time management techniques, or whatever.

But literally, logically, time is finite, things to do are infinite. It is logically impossible to do an infinite amount of things in a finite amount of time. (the only exception is if you could procure a method for doing things at an infinite speed, which it seems would be the ideal of some productivity methods but I’m pretty sure is mathematically impossible) Therefore, you can never get everything done.

So, stop trying. This doesn’t mean stop doing anything, it only means stop doing everything.

And here’s the second part of the magic. So far we have, life is finite and we can’t do everything. It seems to be getting more and more morbid egh? One second, before you go off & crawl into a hole.

Life is finite and we can’t do everything, therefore we have to choose what we do. And this is the whole point.

If we had infinite time to do everything, there would be no point in doing anything now, we could do it later. As it is, we have finite amount of time with which we decide what we want to do. This choice, this allotment of limited resources, our finite time, is what makes the things we choose special (whether we’re yet aware of it or not).

So here is the crux, do we care enough about the things that we spend time on–these activities/projects/relationships to which we are giving grains of our precious life-rice? By giving these things life-rice, it seems that we care about them. Do we? Really truly care about them and acknowledge that we are choosing these things over others because they are what most matter to us? Or do we kinda care and we’ll get to the stuff we really care about sometime later? If “kinda care”, nix them. If “really care”, focus on them. This choice is what makes the things we chose important.

What are you going to choose to do with your less than half-a-cup of rice? What is worth rice?

The logic above is based on the book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I totally recommend for a read or listen.