Thursday, March 24, 2016

The Math of My Life

I just asked Twitter what I should write about, offering to dedicate at least an hour of my life to writing a blog about any good topic suggestions. The offer was significant, and I did the math to explain why.

An hour of my life is quite a bit of time. I'm sure it doesn't seem like much but, honestly, I don't have all that many of those to spare.

The average male life expectancy is 78.7 years, according to Google. So, 24 hours per day times 365.25 days per year times 78.7 years comes to about 689,884 hours in my expected lifetime.

I'm sure that seems like a lot, just as a million dollars sounds like an awful lot until you realize that's not actually enough to retire on. An hour of my life isn't even one in a million, but that's not even the whole story. I've already lived for 30 years, four months, and seven days. Without calculating to the exact hour, we can say I've already used up about 265,308 hours of my life so far. I can't offer hours I've already used up, so what I'm really offering to people is an hour out of the approximately 424,576 hours I have left.

However, many of those hours are already spoken for. For instance, about 1/3 of my life is spent sleeping. So, really, I'm offering one of my 283,050 waking hours remaining in order to research and write about a topic Twitter might suggest. If those hours were dollars, that would be enough to buy a decent house in some areas of the country.

That's still not taking into account the hours I spend working (40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year), eating (~2 hours per day) and other miscellaneous things I need to do each day. Assuming I work until I'm 65, that's about 72,800 spoken for. Probably another 35,600 spent finding, cooking, and eating food. And let's say another 26,700 hours spent doing other important things, like hygiene and such.

That leaves me with only about 148,000 hours of free time left. And, hey, if you have a good suggestion for a blog topic, one of those hours could be yours. Crazy, huh?

Wow, life sure is ticking away, isn't it? I should be spending this time more wisely. Or, I suppose, I could use this time to play about 1,500 more really long RPGs. Either way.

On the other hand, that's about 17 years of free time remaining. That's not too bad, actually. So, y'know, these blog post suggestions aren't really putting me out or anything, either.

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