Before starting any game, it’s important to know the rules. In the game of self, the scarcity of time is the ultimate one. No matter what measures we take, time will guide us ever onwards towards non-existence. This is the very frame of the game of self; the logical foundation for pushing boundaries, maintaining discipline and ultimately accumulating a wealth of positive experience.
The problem is, as we go about our daily lives it is easy to overestimate (or perhaps even ignore) the nature of this scarcity and, subsequently, fail to maintain a realistic sense of the hard parameters of our existence. The result is less effective execution; without an awareness of how much time we have left to play, we are vulnerable to being swept away by currents of distraction, apathy and idleness. In other words, without this awareness it is very difficult to prioritize the things we really want to do and curate the experiences we aspire to have.
The first action we should take before embarking any further is thus to define our parameters. The good news is that just completing this step often creates a natural impetus for behavior; most of us are wired to respond to time constraints automatically, meaning that this first action alone is a great source of momentum.
A vacation illustrates this point well, as it is a situation in which we generally already recognize and behave according to the logic of time scarcity. When we are visiting a new, beautiful city for only a week, it would strike most of us as unreasonable to continue on in patterns of behavior that typically constitute our free time back home (e.g. sleeping in, playing video games or watching Netflix). While these activities may feel relaxing and pleasant under the pretense of non-scarcity, on a week-long vacation our understanding of the opportunity cost of such meandering makes the same activities feel almost unbearably wasteful. Personally, I feel this insistence towards time capitalization on vacation almost the moment I wake up and process the details of my situation – there is an irresistible call to action that serves as a nearly unfailing motivator of movement in some direction. That making good use of a vacation requires some measure of deliberate activity (as opposed to passive leisure) becomes thus an almost intuitive insight by virtue of an active awareness of time scarcity.
The difference in our approach to life on vacation and life in its “typical” form in this context is derived from our recognition of the time constraints inherent to them — the transience of a vacation is palpable, whereby the same transience of life is chronically ignored. Therefore, in order to leverage time scarcity as a motivator to more intentful daily life, we may be compelled to seek tools and techniques that sharpen our awareness of it.
One of the best tools I’ve found for putting the scope of your whole life in perspective can be found on the blog Wait but Why, which breaks down the an average human lifespan in units of weeks. A handy online version will give you a quick sample of this: https://wcoder.github.io/life-calendar/. Simply input your birthday to view your life defined by weeks and see how far you’ve come — and how far you have left to go.
Visualizing life in this way may seem morbid, but it is simple reality. We should, so far as we are able, seek not to avoid truths that may feel unpleasant but rather leverage them to our advantage.
You might also consider some techniques as explained here by entrepreneur Jesse Itzler, which he uses to develop a sense of urgency and fuel the continued growth of an already remarkable list of accomplishments. He suggests using average life expectancy to gain perspective on things we consider important in life such as enjoying summer activities and seeing our parents.
A 30-year-old man living in the United States, for example, has a life expectancy of about 76 years. That means that he has just 46 more summers to enjoy anything tied to that season for him. If he is more adventurous and loves scaling mountains or mountain biking, that number could well shrink to 40 or less. If he first needed to learn mountain biking, he should also subtract the time it takes to become proficient – if that takes 5 summers of consistent effort, the number tumbles to 35.
How about seeing his parents? If they are both 60 years old, he can multiply their life expectancies (76 and 81 respectively) by his average number of visits per year to come up with how many more times he can expect to enjoy their company. If he visits them two times a year on average, he can expect to see his mother about 42 more times and his father 32.
The next time you plan to visit your parents or think about how to spend your summer weekends, it should be instructive to think about it in these terms – this is one of only a precious handful of times you will ever get to see your parents or enjoy the advantages of beautiful weather. How are you going to get the most out of it?
On a smaller scale, it is also motivating to break down objectives into individual units of activities. In my goal progression for the remainder of the year, for example, I dividee the remaining time to goal deadlines into full weeks, each representing a unit of of effort. On a whiteboard in my room, I marked and numbered all of the remaining units (summing up partial weeks and rounding off the difference) before the end of the year and then created a simple visualization to see where I currently am in the timeline. Exactly how you design this is not so important, however, so long as you have a way to divide your efforts into units and visualize moving along the funnel towards goal completion.
However you might choose to implement this concept in your own life, the takeaway is simple – relying on an intuitive frame to understand the amount of time we have remaining in any game will cause us to play less effectively. If we instead seek to define and understand the rules, we take the first step towards making the most of our potential.
In the end, that could make all the difference.
Additional thoughts
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci
One common objection here may be that thinking about our lives in such concrete terms is depressing or anxiety-inducing– death, after all, is not exactly a pleasant concept to grapple with. I would argue, however, that a willed ignorance of the reality of the imminence of our deaths is one of the surest ways to guarantee that we suffer along the path to it. To ignore it is to empower it; to sharpen the pain of loss with regret and missed opportunity.
If we take the opposite approach, and seek to live a good life — to accomplish all we can, enrich the lives of others and master the game of self within the parameters that we were given to play — we put ourselves in a position to not only get the most out of our time on earth, but also to conclude it in tranquility. If embracing the reality of death lays the foundation to live such a life, doing so is, ironically, one of the purest acts of living.
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