Time Is Weird
Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: The Marshall Plan by Benn Steil
Listening: Beyond Contact by Vivian Koch
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Time Is Weird
If you live to be 77-years-old (the average lifespan in the wealthy world), you will have lived about 4,000 weeks.
That's...intimidating, isn't it? It's not a small number, but it also seems impossibly minuscule to encompass everything we'll ever do—no second time around, no take-backs.
I think about that number sometimes, because although I hope to live beyond this average (it's a bit higher for women than men, a bit lower during pandemic-times, and varies by several years between wealthy countries—but it's also been trending upward over time) I'm also aware it could all end at any moment, and maybe I'll only get half that, or two-thirds.
If I live to 40, each week of my life will have represented about .048% of my total lifespan. And once again, the objective scale of this number doesn't quite line up with the subjective resonance of knowing how much of my total existence a single week tick-tocks away.
This way of thinking is both useful and fraught, because although it's potentially valuable to keep our finitude in mind as we make decisions and as we determine how to spend the years and days and seconds we have, it's also potentially debilitating: each moment might seem so precious that we clutch the whole lot of them to our chests and hesitate to ever spend a single one on anything beyond the predictably "good."
It's possible to use this time-oriented framing to justify lifestyles that are focused to a harmful degree, to the point that we perceive anything not overtly meaningful as unworthy of the expenditure of our scanty chronological currency.
This is partly the consequence of miscalibrated value-metrics: if we don't value psychological flex-time, don't value calm moments in which we're not accomplishing anything monetarily or socially celebrated, and don't value the quiet coiling of our internal springs between more visibly active periods, then of course time devoted to such things will seem wasted rather than invested (a perception I would argue can cause one to miss a lot of what life has to offer).
I've been thinking about time even more than usual, of late, because of how it seems to compress and expand without cause or reason as the world shifts around us and our personal lives are disarrayed and upended by the ongoing pandemic and other chaos-variables like climate change, ideological extremism, and economic volatility.
Some of my weeks seem productive and experience-laden, but others dissolve away with little evidence of their passing, and I wonder—myself now two birthdays and many other milestones deep into this bizarro-version of the world—how I'll feel, on the theoretical "other side" of all this, about the not-insignificant percentage of my total lifespan I've spent in this baffling and worrying period of disorder and disconcertion.
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Projects
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: Money Stuff
Brain Lenses: Brandolini's Law
I Will Read To You: Man of Distinction
Let’s Know Things: Debt Ceiling
Never Not Curious: October 5, 2021
One Sentence News: October 6, 2021
Understandary Lab: Info / Subscribe
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Interesting & Useful
Some things to click.
The Airstream Funeral Coach, ca 1980s
In 1981, Airstream introduced a modified motorhome known as the Funeral Coach. It could transport 14 family members, a casket, and up to 20 baskets of flowers between the funeral home, church, and cemetery.
The Underground Atlas Of the District of Columbia.
This Osborne Fire Finder is used in the High Point Lookout Tower on Palomar Mountain in the Cleveland National Forest, San Diego County.
When America Had an Atomic Mecha Warrior Robot
27 feet tall. 77 tons. Lead, steel, and glass armor almost two feet thick. A 500 horsepower supercharger engine. Able to withstand 3,000 times more radiation than a human. Mighty claws able to tear, rend, and shred steel with 85,000 pounds of force…yet nimble enough to balance an egg on a spoon.
Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications.
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Outro
No significant lifestyle updates today: it's nice and pseudo-chilly here in Milwaukee, and I'm planning to go for a run, to eat some leftover curry I made last night, and to do a little reading and audio-producing and doodling and writing.
In other words it's a fairly standard day, and although such days do still alarm me somewhat, as they often fade into the memory-background—blending with most other such days through the lens of retrospect—I'm reminding myself that it's okay to enjoy predictability for what it is, rather than devaluing it for the crime of not being something else.
If you've got a moment, consider sending me a quick hello and telling me something about yourself. I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
You can reach me by replying directly to this newsletter, or at colin@exilelifestyle.com.
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