What to do with life-minutes

📍Chiang Mai, Thailand (Issue 207)

Looking west from Koh Yao Noi, Thailand

Every morning we wake up and 480 minutes have skipped by.

It doesn't seem so much, but that seepage counts up. Can you feel them vanish? They sort of leak away. We've lost 4% of this year's minutes already. Gone! In 2024 over five hundred thousand minutes slip by.

The UK's average male lives to 80. I do not wish to brag (and it's a weird brag), but I have a high VO2 max according to my Garmin watch so GPT tells me I might live until 95. I am glad GPT is as optimistic as I am.

But let's be conservative when we run these numbers and say I survive to 90. (I was pretty cruel to my body at university and in London, so even this may be too much.) In the end we never know what’s around the corner, but ninety is a ripe old age; it's also a round number and easily divisible, so great for our calculations.

Ninety years is 47,335,428 minutes, and now that I'm thirty I have 31 million minutes left.

How we spend our minutes is how we spend our lives. I know it’s obvious, but I need to remind myself.

Should we spend our minutes in acts of service, sitting and meditating, on a bicycle, confronting various conditioning, making our beds, looking at ourselves in the mirror, taking selfies, shopping, eating, building SaaS, tweeting, writing, or maybe having hedonistic sex and eating chocolate and smoking dozens of cigarettes?

With 31 million life minutes left, I should feel wealthy. If I had 31 million of anything else, I'd feel rich.

And yet, I don't 'have' much of anything. In any second, we can only access our lonely minute—this vanishingly brief present moment.

My 31 million are as far away and inaccessible as the sixteen million I've carelessly spent. I wish I could regain some of those early teenage minutes, and those innocent childish seconds, and play among them again.

Worse: I missed so many! I was stroppy and bolshy; later I was drunk or high or thoughtless and ignorant. I was frequently angry and self-involved. I was rude and dishonest.

I overlooked my precious minutes, literally millions of them.

Writing, like all art, is a way of re-living an instant. I can go back and almost feel what it felt like to drink mint tea or stare at some hot orange sunset. And yet writing captures hardly the faintest essence of our inexplicable experience. The sky is a 'chemical blue'—I would have written lamely a dozen times—but does such a description justify the sky's distant numinosity? Scarcely. Even words like numinous and luminous and mysterious leave just a shallow footprint on whatever they attempt to describe.

I am sitting in a co-working space in Chiang Mai, looking dreamily out of the window at the branches of Rain Trees stretching up into the night. Behind them glows the moon, high and crisp and white against a black starless sky. I'm surrounded by people silently typing. To them, I'm another nameless, slouched, laptopped, digital nomad.

I’m mulling things over. I’m watching the clock snap. Minutes! Decades!

I think to myself: If I did nothing else but write to you every hour for the rest of my life, I'd publish another half a million blog posts—some 310 million words. I'd become an excellent writer, too. If I decided to sleep and eat as well (and do nothing else but write a stream of consciousness, six hundred words an hour, twelve hours a day, for sixty years), I'd do 150 million words. This is my upper limit.

The other nomads work diligently while I'm obsessively watching the minutes tick on as if they are rudely running away from me.

My minutes! Please don't go.

Amos Tversky famously wrote, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

And here I am, not wanting to waste even a minute.

I wonder, how can I live years without wasting hours?

Writing may be the answer to my dilemma. And art in any form, I dare say, may be the answer to yours.

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PS. This was inspired by this excellent essay by Alexandra Franzen who explained why she doesn’t use social media. In the essay she explains the perspective of her future 100-year-old self:

I will calculate all of the minutes that I spent coming up with thousands upon thousands of tweets — thinking about those tweets, typing those tweets, editing those tweets, publishing those tweets, tracking to see who “liked” and “re-tweeted” my tweets, and then re-sharing my witticisms on various other platforms — and I would probably come to the grim conclusion that it was somewhere in the realm of 1.8 million minutes spent on Twitter, alone.

1.8 million minutes of my life.

1,250 days. About 3.4 years.

At that point, I will probably cry.

I will mourn my lost life-minutes, never to be recovered.

I will fantasize about all of the things I could have done with that time.

The kisses, the walks, the rich conversations, the sunbathing, the moongazing, the books, unwritten.

I will desperately want to claw my way back through time for a chance to do it over.

I will not be offered that chance.

So that is why I no longer use social media and why I probably won’t use it again.