960

Four thousand weeks always felt like plenty. Nine hundred and sixty months does not.

Hi friend –

It’s been a hot minute since we last spoke. Well, since I wrote, to be more precise…

I just finished the second season of the TV show Beef. It’s good. Not as good as season 1, but different and interesting enough to make it worth the time investment. In the last episode, during the story’s climax, one of the characters reminds the other one that life is short – so short, in fact, that the average person only lives for 960 months. 960. Sounds short – but do the math and you’ll see it: 80 years times 12 months equals 960.

Oliver Burkeman wrote a lovely book five years ago, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” It’s an insight you have, likely, heard of and seen before – map your life on a weekly schedule and you realize that your precious life equates to about 4,000 weeks. There are apps to track your passage through time, calendars you can mark, and TED Talks to be watched.

But 4,000 weeks, despite its absurd shortness (yes, life is, indeed, short), always felt… long? Expansive? Incomprehensible to me. The problem is the thousands. Thousands is the drawer my brain files anything too big to actually picture – likes on a popular Instagram post, steps on my fitness tracker, the unread count on some people’s inboxes. Hundreds, I can hold. I know what a few hundred of something looks like – pages in a book, songs on my summer hits playlist, people at an event. A number in the hundreds stays human-sized. A number in the thousands turns into a feeling – “a lot” – and a feeling is exactly the thing you can’t plan against. So 4,000 weeks never landed as time for me. It landed as “plenty.”

It also lulls you into a false sense of safety. Four thousand is a big enough number that even at retirement – the age when a lot of the wild, hard, strange things you still meant to do start quietly slipping off the table (our bodies failing us in the predictable ways, and a few unpredictable ones) – you can tell yourself you’ve got the better part of a thousand weeks left. Plenty. But count those same years in months and it’s barely 180 – and 180 is a number I can see the bottom of.

And lastly, I always found weeks a very weird measure of time – often too short for measuring actual progress, too easy to dismiss (“I had a bad week, next week will be better”, “I didn’t get to it this week, I’ll do it next week”, …). A month is different – it is a unit of measure I have control over. A month is long enough for me to feel accountable to it; it comes in seasons, and I not only know but feel that there are only twelve of them in a given year. And each month is different enough from the month which comes before and after that it feels different. June is different from May and will be different from July. Unlike calendar week 23 – which is largely the same as the week before it and the week after.

Which brings us back to Beef and the 960 months. Even if you are in your twenties and thirties, you don’t actually have 960 months left. You have 600-700. If you are, like me, in your (gulp) fifties, that number is a precariously small 360. I have more random notes in my Apple Notes notebook than months left to live… which is, quite frankly, a scary thought.

I don’t need to tell you that life is freakin’ short. Most of us know this – but can you actually feel it? And if you can – are you making sure you live your life accordingly?

Here’s something I started doing. I could never make daily journaling stick – tried it for years, never took. So I went monthly: one text file per month, and I add to it whenever I feel like it. Then I did the thing that sounds dark and, frankly, morbid – and turned out to be the opposite: I made an empty file for every month I’ve got left. What’s left of my life is less than 350 files. Fewer than the photos on my phone from my last vacation.