The Number

I’m watching the final episode of the second season of Beef, a TV show I’ve mostly enjoyed, on a warm evening in May. It’s late and 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 on, 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.”

Of course I do the math: Eighty years, each year has twelve months. Eighty times twelve is nine hundred and sixty. The number checks out.

The credits roll, and I go to bed.

Here’s what’s strange: I already knew life was short. Everybody knows that 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 ski trip you two took when you were in college, that you nodded along to without hearing. Life is short. Sure, noted. “Carpe Diem!” Pass the coffee.

I’d even seen the careful version of the warning. Oliver Burkeman wrote a good book a few years back – Four Thousand Weeks – which made the same observation, just with weeks. Four thousand of them in a life. There are mobile apps for it now, wall calendars, and, of course, a TED talk.

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

Here’s the part nobody puts on the coffee mug: You don’t actually have nine hundred and sixty months – you already spent a bunch of them. If you are in your twenties or thirties, you’re looking at six, maybe seven hundred. At forty: Four-eighty. At fifty – and I’m past it, and typing that still feels wrong – three-sixty.

Three hundred and sixty.

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

I have more random notes in my Apple Notes than that. 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 in my camera roll from a single week somewhere in the mountains.

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

Most of us know life is short.

The question this little book is going to keep asking you – and it’s not rhetorical – is a different one.

Can you feel it?