Don’t discount the present

If you’re the 50 year old parent of a teenage child who is about to leave home at 18, and you expect to live to 80, you’ve spent 95% of all the time you’ll ever spend with that child already.

Let that sink in.

Here’s the very simple maths. You’ve had 18 years together, 365 x 18 days, which is 6570 days total. Let’s say that your child visits with you 10 days a year from now on, and you live for another 30 years. That’s 30 x 10 days, or 300 days. So what you have left is those 300 days, out of a total of 6870 days you’ll both spend together. That’s less than 5% of all the time you have together.

Humans are extremely poor at really thinking about the future and the long term. We’re just not very well set up for it. If you start a pension at 45 you have to put much, much more of your income in than if you start a pension at 25. But few of us do. And pensions are a relatively easy thing to understand, they’re just basic maths. Human relations and experiences are much harder to quantify and think about.

But you absolutely should be reminding yourself that your time is finite. If you’re 50 and you like to eat out once a month somewhere nice, well, you’ll eat another 360 fancy meals. If you go on vacation twice a year, you’ll have another 60 vacations. If you read 2 books a month, you’ll read 720 more books. That’s not many, out of all the books there are in the world.

What do you value in life? How do you want to divide your time? Think about it. There’s less time left than you think, regardless of how old you are right now.

But don’t stress about it! It doesn’t have to be this big, heavy burden you carry around. Just enjoy your coffee when you’re drinking it; make time to do the things you love and to spend time with the people you love.