Wrapping your mind around your life is pretty hard, because you are up to your neck in it.
It's like trying to understand the ocean while learning how to swim. On most days you are
busy just keeping your head above water. So it is not easy to figure out what to do with
your life and how to spend your time.
There are a million distractions. Your family, friends and romantic partners, boring work,
and exciting projects. Video games to play and books to read. And then there is your
couch that somebody needs to lie on. It’s easy to get lost. So let us take a step back
and take a look at your life from the outside.
The average Kurzgesagt viewer is around 25 years old. Which is a pretty good time in
the life of most people: The insecurities of the teenage years have begun to recede.
Maybe you find yourself in a job or a long term relationship. Maybe you’ve started
a family, or are working on an advanced degree. Maybe you are not doing any of that and still
want to enjoy life, whatever that means to you. Or maybe you feel stuck and don’t know
where to go yet.
About one in twenty people watching this video will get to live to 100. Let’s assume you
are one of the lucky ones, which means you had a total of 5200 weeks of life at your
disposal when you were born.
You spent the first 600 weeks of your life being a kid and 400 being a teenager. During
this time you were pretty useless for society and also not very free to make your own decisions.
As a payoff, you were somewhat spared from the consequences and responsibilities of adulthood.
Mostly because well meaning adults protected you by cleaning up your mess and giving you
time to find yourself. This time is necessary to make you, at least in theory, a functioning
human. Although most people probably don’t feel like that after puberty. In any case,
by the time you are 20, over 1000 of your 5200 weeks have passed.
Depending on what you aspire to, at this point you are either working already or have entered
further education. The amount of fun you can have in this phase of your life varies a lot.
If you pick up a trade or need to work to support yourself or others, the serious side
of life begins earlier, if you go to university you get to push back work life a bit longer.
In any case, most people start working for real in their twenties at the latest. Which
begins the productive or potentially grindy or soul crushing period of your life. People
tend to work until the age of 65. Which means that you’ll spend at least 2000 weeks of
your life, with serious adult work – hopefully in a job that makes you feel good and appreciated
or that makes the world better. This is such an important thing that we’ll look at work
and how you can try to find a satisfying career in another video!
This is the main block of life for most people – The time when you might have kids and
travel a bit and climb the career ladder and build a house, may get divorced and fall in
love again. In this phase you transition from being young to middle aged to old – not
old, old but the “young old” of your sixties. At 65 you have used up 3400 of your 5200 weeks.
The last phase of your life begins. If you’ve managed to acquire enough wealth to retire,
in theory you are now free to do whatever you like, for up to 1800 weeks. But of course,
this is not how it works for the majority of you watching this video. 19 out of 20 people
will not live to one hundred. The average lifespan in the US is 79. In Germany it is
81. In Japan 84. In Brazil it is 75.
If you die at age 80, which is still not bad, you only have 780 weeks of freedom after you
retire. That’s roughly as many weeks of freedom as an old person as you spent as a
child. Unfortunately disease and the tiredness of age trip you up here, because with old
age the human body begins to decline sharply. For example the vast majority of cancer related
deaths occur in people over 70. If you bet all your fun cards on being free and happy
in your retirement you might be bitterly disappointed.
And all of this is still assuming things work out and you even get to grow old. You can
drown in a pool at age 7, get cancer at age 32, die in a car crash at age 48. You can
fall from a ladder at age 60. Every day the universe rolls a bunch of dice for every human
– and everyday, someone somewhere on this planet, rolls a critical failure and their
life ends that day. The older you get, the more dice are rolled for you.
Usually when you swim through the ocean that is your life, you do not think about all of
this too much and that is fine. Life is engaging enough by itself and the future is this undefined
weird thing. But thinking about it from time to time is helpful in refocusing on what you
want to do and to minimize regrets you will have when you look back. And to remind you
that if you don’t use your time today, you might not get a chance to use it tomorrow.
Life is complicated and it is hard to make decisions between all the things and people
that are important to you.
This has become painfully obvious to billions of people during the Coronavirus pandemic.
If you respected social distancing, so many things that we took for granted were not available
anymore. Traveling and public places and eating out and seeing friends and meeting new people.
Spending time together became limited and precious. But actually, the time you have
with the people you love is already precious.
Think of your parents. As a child you spend basically every day with them. Your time spent
together begins to decline as you transition and become a teenager and fight to develop
your own identity. But as teenagers you probably still see them regularly, which changes as
you enter your twenties, when most people move out. For university, for work or just
to be on their own.
If you are making an effort to be with your parents for two full weeks each year for the
rest of their lives, which covers the main holidays, birthdays and a bit extra you still
have already spent more than 90% of the time you will ever spend with them, even if they
grow pretty old. If they die earlier or if you see them only a few days each year this
number shrinks even more. So in all likelihood, the vast majority of time you will ever spend
with your parents has passed.
The same holds true for your siblings or old friends that moved to the other side of the
country. You are at the tail end of the time with some of the most important people in
your life. One day you will see them for the last time. And it is actually the same with
everything else. The concept of doing something for the last time feels eerie, like something
that you should only experience when you are on death row or extremely old or something
like that. But it happens all the time.
Is there a hobby you have been lazy about for a long time? Maybe you still have those
Warhammer minis that you wanted to paint? Did you always want to revisit that place
where you had an amazing time a decade ago? Is there someone you wanted to reach out to
for a long time but haven’t yet? Or pick up that sport again to meet new friends? Maybe
you will never do any of these things again, because life gets in the way and at some point
it is too late.
As the global Pandemic begins to wind down, we will all soon be able to be with each other
again and do fun things together.
It is never a bad time to reach out to a friend, or a potential friend and let them know that
you are looking forward to hanging out.
But no matter when you are watching this: our life is an incredible gift and there are
so many fun, engaging and fulfilling things to do. And you get to decide what and who
matters to you. But what matters the most is that you actually make decisions from time
to time.
This video was based on and inspired by an article by our friend Tim Urban of Wait but
Why, the best blog on the internet. Be sure to check it out to get more new perspectives
on things.
Also, if you want a reminder about the things we still want to do in life, with Tims permission
we created a kurzgesagt version of the “Calendar of Your Life” that lets you track how many
weeks of your life you have spent already and how many you have left. You can also color
in the weeks to keep track of exactly how you are spending them. If you are just looking
for a visual reminder to put things in perspective, we’ve made a “Timeline of your Life”.
It is printed in vibrant neon colors on high quality paper and will look great as an art
piece on your wall.
Like all of our products, these posters were designed with love and produced with care
by us here at kurzgesagt. Getting something from our shop is the best way to support our
channel while getting something beautiful in return. Because of you we can keep making
elaborate videos like the one you just watched, and release them for free, for everyone. Thank
you so much for your support!