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Michael Wriston's avatar

I turned 39 the other day. Every year since I turned 25, I've listened to Pink Floyd's "Time" and reflected on those haunting lines: "Every year is getting shorter / never seem to find the time / Plans that either come to naught / or half a page of scribbled lines." The verse famously ends with: "The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say."

I'm not yet in my "midlife crisis" window, but I found myself doing some math yesterday after reflecting on a particularly joyful afternoon spent on the lake with my family. We were there for two hours over Memorial Day weekend, kayaking and soaking up the sun. I've been alive for roughly 342,059 hours as of this writing. In about fifteen minutes, that means our joyful lake outing will have accounted for just 1/171,030 of my entire existence. For my four-year-old son, those same two hours represent 1/18,750 of his life so far—nearly ten times more significant than they are to mine. Every hour that passes makes it a smaller fraction still for both of us, until—anti-climactically—those ratios freeze forever at the moments of our deaths. They will become part of the final equations of our lives; "all our lives will ever be."

But does the math of our existence grant our lived experience emotional weight and resonance solely as a function of joy or sorrow divided by time on earth? Does my son's lake afternoon carry ten times the impact simply because it represents a larger percentage of his brief existence? Does that resonance diminish over time as the denominator grows?

This line of thinking has consumed me for weeks now. I blame a mid-summer fever, but it could just as easily be my own mortality tapping me on the shoulder: when all the math is run and the equations simplified, what portion of my existence will I have spent in joy, warmth, love, satisfaction? Will the good outweigh the bad? Am I doing enough to tip the scales? And perhaps most importantly—am I doing it all for the right reasons?

Or perhaps the true crisis isn't the math itself, but the compulsion to maximize it, to record it. The fact that I'm calculating the fractional value of a perfect lake afternoon instead of simply letting it exist as what it was: two hours of unmediated happiness. Or further subdividing it into fractions of a second via shutter presses and keystrokes. Perhaps the observer's paradox applies to more than just art-making—the very act of examining our lives too closely transforms us from participants into performers.

At 39, I've come to suspect that the best hours of my life are the ones I'm too absorbed in living to measure. Now the trick is learning to make peace with that uncertainty, and to stop hanging on in quiet desperation.

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Rob Stephenson's avatar

If it's any consolation, it only gets worse.

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