This blog will save your life.

This blog WILL save your life. As of right now, you are being Murdered. Not in the physical sense mind you but in a literal sense. Take right now for instance, in this present moment in time I have power over your will because you are reading this blog post. I have got your attention. I assume it was the title that got your attention and made you click on the link to read this blog post. Right now I am murdering you, that sounds a little harsh right but in a way I am. I am stealing away your time by making you read this blog post.

Supposedly this post is meant to save your life. Well dear pilgrim I hope it does in some way. The fact that you chose to click on this link and to spend your valuable time reading this awful blog post means a lot to yours truly. Because you chose to do this means you chose not to do something else with your time. It basically means to choose for something else to be cut off in order to spend time on my blog and read this instead of some other worthwhile pursuit.

Of course, you have the option to stop reading and go and do something else like go down a YouTube Rabbit tunnel starting with watching cute and funny cat videos of them reacting to cucumbers. But I now have you intrigued and you want to see if I have that silver bullet that will save your life and spend your time wisely.

Let me ask you a quick question.

Without working it out in your head or writing down the maths (Oh sorry it’s MATH for you Yankees out there) for this sum. Tell me how many weeks the average human life span actually is. Remember the average human these days lives for eighty years. Our time is finite and there are lots of reminders everywhere we are as well. Have you figured it out yet?

I asked this same question to a bartender yesterday early evening and she came back with a seven-figure timeframe. I then worked it out on the back of a beer mat for her and she was visibly shocked and perhaps even a little bit nauseous. She told me that she felt insulted. Insulted at the fact that our lives are so So SO short.

Given the fact that the average human spends twenty-six years of his or her life sleeping means, we have even fewer weeks than you may imagine. Being a twenty-something bartender you will obviously be full of life and strength and hope for your future. The fact of your demise is so far away that it’s not worth thinking about. Have you worked it out yet? Average Human Life span – Time Spent Sleeping (26 years) = Our waking time.

Still not figured it out yet? Well, let me tell you it’s four thousand one hundred and seventy-one weeks the average human life span is given the fact we potentially sleep for 26 years of it is a further insult, that equates to one thousand three hundred and fifty-five weeks sleeping. Meaning the average human is awake for only two thousand eight hundred and seventeen weeks.

How do you feel Now?

Four thousand weeks. Wow that seems so small does it not and we spend an enormous amount of time whittling it away on useless pursuits like mindlessness scrolling on social media apps. something I eluded to in this blog post about brain hacking. So please tell me how do you feel now that you know that if we are lucky enough to reach the age of eighty we only have a little over four thousand weeks to live before we start pushing up daisies.

My mate fish and his significant other recently had a baby boy together who is now about 6 months old. This kid is fascinated by everything and everyone around him whenever fish brings him to the pub in the afternoon. What strikes me is how happy and full of joy he seems whenever I see him. The concept of time has not proliferated his mind and he is not planning his future to dominate the world just yet. The sense of Wonder, Joy, and Happiness in this kid is infectious and something we as adults have lost.

None of us remember our early childhood and what our lives were like but I like to think that we were like mini fish. Full of joy, happiness, and wonderment. Our lives are filled with time and timetables, schedules, meetings, and appointments. we use apps and physical pieces of hardware on our wrists and in our pockets to get to where we are meant to be at the proper time.

Time to cram it all in.

I suppose you are now thinking that you should be making plans for your future happiness and do all those things you really wanted to do like climb Sagarmāthā, or visit the Grand Canyon. But why bother, really why say to yourself that if you do this and that and spend time planning eventually you will do the thing that makes you happy and in the future, you will be happy and joyful and full of wonderment like mini fish is right now.

My wife Louise and I recently spent a long weekend in London. We did not make any concrete plans or schedules or even timetables as sometimes the universe conspires to put pain to that. This is something that we do quite often, we decide in the morning what we want to do and where we want to go for that day. The only plan I made for that weekend was to visit The Tower of London.

Sunday morning we both wake up and decide to visit the tower. Now here is a perfect example of the universe conspiring against us. Lou had recently had a knee replacement and was wheelchair-bound meaning we could only get a black cab to the tower. We hailed a cab really early and asked the driver to take us to the tower. Unfortunately, it was the day of the London Marathon and most of the streets were blocked off however he told us he would get us as close as possible.

Luckily for us, there were lots of Bobbies on duty (Police officers) willing to help us get to the tower by opening the barriers, and one was even willing to give me a break and push Lou to the main entrance. As it was London Marathon Day the Tower was virtually empty and we had the entire place to ourselves. We even go to see the opening ceremony and we had our own Beefeater (Yeoman Warder) show us around for the day. On top of that, there were no queues to see the Crown Jewels whatsoever and the Jewel House was virtually empty.

As I was climbing the white tower to see the priceless suits of armour of the “Line of Kings” exhibition and the famous codpiece of King Henry the Eighth something hit me. Everyone else there was wandering around with their smartphones taking pics and videos of the exhibition.  Why? I think it’s some misguided thought that by taking these images that can experience “Being there again“. Personally myself I was taking it all in as I had left my mobile device with my wife in a cafe having a glass of wine and some danish nibbles.

Why do we do that? Why are people obsessive about taking images of something of importance in order to experience it at a later date on Facebook. That’s defeating the object. I went up the white tower to experience wonderment, Fascination, inquisitiveness maybe even joy from it (Although can you really experience joy from looking at medieval pieces of metal that adorned some long-dead king from history?). I took it all in and at the time I felt something akin to happiness not having to worry about getting pictures of every piece of armour including king henry’s codpiece.

Saving your Life & Time

This leads me onto the main crux of this blog post and that is simply to recommend a book I am currently reading, something called “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman.

I am still reading this book as I type this but it has inspired me to write up this blog post and try in some small part make you realize that you are amazing and that time well spent is the way to live a happy carefree life.

I have become somewhat obsessed with my hobby of book reading these past couple of years since covid his us with devastating consequences. This is the fifteenth book I have read this year alone. My original goal was to read fifty-two books for this year but it looks as if I may surpass that figure.

The Definition of Madness.

Mini fish is living his best and happiest life at the moment as we all have when we were firstborn. The concept of time is alien to him at the moment but unfortunately in the near, very near future that will all change. Clocks, Watches, Timetables, Schedules, Meetings, and Appointments will become part of his life and will dictate what decisions he needs to take in order to secure and guarantee his future.

Unfortunately for us, the time we are living our very best lives is the time all of us have no memory of. That time is from birth to nursery where we have no concept of time but just joyfulness wonderment. Just look at a child and see how happy they are. The definition of madness is that as we grow up into adults we are taught by the rule of keeping good time, and we are ruled by timetables, we spend years at school between 9 and 4 then when we leave we then spend the next fourty plus years doing the exact same thing working for the man before retiring and hopefully spending a couple of years doing the stuff we dreamed we could do during the time working for the man.

Unfortunately, by then we are too knackered to do anything like climb Sagarmāthā or visit the Grand Canyon, and we inevitably think to ourselves “What the fu** have I done with my life.”

The time is NOW guys. Go and enjoy it and to save your life go and read Four Thousand Weeks.

Conclusion

I hope that I have not murdered you too much by stealing away eight minutes of your precious time but I do hope that in some small way I have made you realize that we all have a finite amount of time and that we should not always squander it by mindlessly scrolling apps like Facebook, tictok, and Instagram.

Your time is your time and it’s down to you how to spend it. It’s up to you to be either productive or to be lazy. Sometimes I feel like being lazy and spend all day in bed snuggling up to my missus or vegetating on the setee watching cheesy eighties movies with a bag of Doritos and a bottle of  Malbec, and that’s ok. It’s OK to be lazy because it’s still time well spent and because it’s yours to do with however you see fit.

I would love to know your thoughts on this post.