The Number

You are watching the final episode of a TV show you have mostly enjoyed. It’s late. The plot is doing the thing plots do near the end – everyone converging, the music swelling, two people who have spent a whole season hurting each other finally sitting still long enough to say something tender and true. And one of them says it. Almost as a throwaway. The kind of line a writer drops in and then moves past, because the scene has somewhere else to be.

“You’re gonna make fun of me, but I heard a podcast that said the average human only has 960 months to live.”

You do the math, because of course you do. Eighty years. Twelve months a year. Eighty times twelve. Nine hundred and sixty. The number checks out, which is somehow worse than if it hadn’t.

You sit with it for a minute. Meanwhile, the story comes to its logical conclusion, the credits roll, and you go to bed.

Here’s what’s strange. You already knew life was short. Everybody knows life is short – it’s printed on coffee mugs, it’s the closing line of every graduation speech, it’s the thing your uncle told you on that fishing trip you two took that you nodded along to without hearing. Life is short. Sure. Noted. Carpe Diem. Pass the coffee.

You’ve even seen the careful version of the warning. Oliver Burkeman wrote a lovely book a few years back – Four Thousand Weeks – same exercise, with weeks. Four thousand of them in a life. There are apps for it now. Wall calendars. The TED talk. It’s good, and it’s true.

It also never worked on me. Four thousand weeks always felt like – plenty.

So here’s the part nobody puts on the coffee mug.

You don’t have nine hundred and sixty months. You spent some. If you’re in your twenties or thirties, you’re looking at six, maybe seven hundred. Forties, four-eighty. Fifties – and I am, and typing that still feels like a clerical error – the number is around three hundred and sixty.

Three hundred and sixty.

That’s the whole remaining envelope. Every summer left. Every birthday you’ve still got to be present for. Every visit home to see your parents while they’re still your parents. Every conversation that actually matters. Every idea you keep telling yourself you’ll get to. Every quiet Tuesday. Three hundred and sixty months.

I have more random notes in my Apple Notes than that. More photos in my camera roll from one trip. The number that’s supposed to represent everything I have left – every place I still mean to go, every person I still mean to call back, every book I still mean to read (let alone write) – is smaller than the pictures from a single week somewhere in the mountains.

That’s the number. A few hundred. Not a feeling. A count you can almost see the bottom of.

Most of us know life is short.

The question this whole book is going to keep asking you – and it’s not rhetorical, I want you to sit with it – is a different one.

Can you feel it?