I would give my life

I'd like to spend a moment thinking about life in a different way than people tend to think about it, as a finite passage of time. The low end of life expectancy is 77 years (in the developed world), which is 28105 days or 674520 hours. That is a large number, but it's not so large that it's incomprehensible.

I'll look at that number more closely. First off, one-third of it (224840) is taken up by sleeping. That leaves 449680 hours. Let's say that another third is taken up by school and work, or slightly less. That leaves somewhere around 250000 hours of leisure time to do with as you see fit. It seems like a lot.

But let's compare it with some other sets of numbers. Amazon lists over four million books on their website. The actual number of books that are out there is surely much higher, especially if you were to consider alternate editions, translations, and if you really wanted to get specific, particular copies with unusual or meaningful margin notes could create a substantially different reading experience. Probably not, but it could happen. Books have been being written for millennia, so there is a massive backlog still present, even after eliminating the portion of books which had existed but have been destroyed.

Similarly massive, if somewhat smaller, numbers can be found for recorded music, which has been around for a little more than a hundred years. Only slightly younger is the medium of recorded images. The songs and movies out there in the world each number in the millions, almost certainly. And that's not all. If you want to delve into the recent past, you have the internet. There hasn't been a more powerful tool for creating and proliferating information in all of human history.

The point to all this is that while a quarter of a million hours may seem like a lot, the fact is that it is not even close to enough time that would be recorded to ingest the sum total of human history's creative expression. No big loss, I suppose. The vast, vast majority of it is of no interest to the average person. An interesting, and tangential, question is whether or not every bit of it is of interest to someone. Anyway, depending on how varied your tastes are, it is conceivable that you would be able to read, hear, or see everything that you really want to in that quarter of a million hours. At least, everything that is sufficiently important to you that not being able to mentally ingest its contents would be something you'd regret.

Maybe, if you spent the entirety of that time engaged in active absorption of some facet of the corpus of expression listed above, but nobody does that. Because reading, watching, listening, and surfing are only four activities out of all the different things you can do with that time. I won't bother to describe the other things that can fall into that category, because it's too vast.

The point that I'm trying to get to by bringing up these obvious numbers is that there's only so much you can do with your life, and it really isn't that much, in the grand scheme of things. Really, really good concert pianists practice for how many hours in their lifetimes? Thousands, assuredly. Same for the best athletes or chess players or video gamers or writers. It isn't a surprise that skills become honed over time, but it may not be quite so obvious what a large percentage of a person's life must be devoted to their skill for it to reach a really noteworthy level.

Another complicating factor is that not everyone's proficiency increases at the same rate, for any given skill. The best guitar player (for the moment, we'll assume that best isn't a relative term) isn't necessarily the person who's practiced the most out of all the guitar players in the world; it's the person who has practiced a lot and also has the most natural proclivities for the component abilities that make up guitar playing - musicality, manual dexterity, etc. This person not only had all these proclivities, but also had the dedication to practice enough to make him the best. It's quite possible -almost certain - that there is someone else in the world who could have become better, but didn't, because they weren't that interested in it, or they cared about something else more.

You may have some control (depending on your opinions of free will) over how much you practice and what you practice, but you probably don't have very much control over what interests you and what your natural abilities are. In that sense, the people who became famous for their achievements are as lucky as they are diligent.

Of course, most people don't care about being famous for their achievements. Most people are satisfied to enjoy whatever activities they enjoy - if they're really lucky, the things that they enjoy can be turned into a job, giving them over a hundred thousand additional hours to do the thing they want.

I wonder how many people don't have a thing that they want, though. How many people have several, or dozens, or just can't decide. It's a shame for those people, because time keeps going, whether or not you've found out how you want to pass it.

I'm one of those people, I think. But this blog isn't for personal things, so that's neither here nor there. I don't really have a message for this post, other than trying to supply an unusual way of looking at time. There really isn't anything - so far as I know - that you can do with this information in your day to day life, but as for long-term plans, I think this kind of outlook can be beneficial. I'll close with a story I heard once.

"A man goes to hear a pianist perform, who he hears is supposed to be quite good. During the performance, the man becomes absolutely enthralled by the pianist's skill with his instrument. At the end of the night, he is so impressed that he goes backstage to talk with the musician who had such a profound effect on him.

'That was incredible!' he says when he meets the pianist. 'I would give my life to play like that.'

The pianist, an older man, simply nods and says, 'I did.' "

It's just food for thought.