650,000 Hours

A few years ago I read that even if a person lives to be very, very old, the maximum number of hours they’ll be alive is in the neighbourhood of 650,000. That should seem like a lot. One hundred years seems like it should be a lot more hours. Somehow, though, converted to hours it starts to seem like not so very much at all. A blink of an eye, to be trite about it.

It’s sobering to contemplate how many of my hours I’ve already frittered away on frivolous things. Things like watching mediocre shows on Netflix. Or finishing books even though I wasn’t enjoying them. Or vacuuming dog hair off my sofa. Or working at jobs that made me want to bang my head (or someone else’s) into a wall. Hours and hours irrevocably subtracted from my meagre allotment.

I thought about doing the math: calculating how many hours I might have expected rack up before popping my clogs, based on the age of my parents and their siblings when they died, and then doing a brutally honest assessment of the number of hours I’ve wasted and how many more I’m likely to waste. Yeah. I thought about it, but what am I going to do with the results? Create my own personal time-waster doomsday clock? Resolve to never waste another nanosecond of this precious life? Drive myself bonkers with anxiety every time I catch myself wondering what to do and realizing that I’m wantonly sacrificing non-retrievable seconds?

I think the sanest thing to do is just pretend I never read about those 650,000 hours. No counting, no calculating, no panicking. Maybe just a little less time wasting. As Iain M. Banks said in The Algebraist, “We are wasting time. Time wastes itself. Who are we to float in its way?”