Are you living or are you just existing?

For the past month or so, I've been thinking a lot about life and when people say that they usually mean what they want to do in life whether that be their career or relationships or entertainment or leisure. But I've been thinking differently, of course I've been thinking about those things, but I've also been thinking about how much of your life is really yours, how much of your life is really being lived to its full potential.

Are you living or are you just existing? On average you're gonna get about 79 years on this big rock called earth. If you live at Monaco it's closer to 90, if you live in Chad you'll be lucky to get 50. Regardless we don't get 79 years of freedom. We have responsibilities and things that we can’t ignore. Most importantly our bodies. Assuming you sleep eight hours a night, on average about a third of your life over 26 years is gonna be spent sleeping. So right away we're down from 79 to 53. But it doesn't stop there. Chances are if you're reading this article, you're going to or have gone to school. In the United States, you'll go for at least 12 years. Eight hours a day, five days a week for 36 weeks a year. This amounts to 17,000 280 hours spent, just inside the school building. But wait, we also have to factor in homework and out-of-school activities among other things. So this is more like 22,000 to 25,000 hours or, about three years of your life. If you had a college or university afterwards make it five years instead.

We're down to 48 years. Well, all this schooling and money you've spent getting a degree has to be put to some use right? Chances are you'll try and get a job in the field of whatever it is your degree is in. It'll probably be a full-time job, so you'll be working 40 hour weeks pretty regularly, if not more than that. Let's say you get two weeks of vacation per year. The average person works for about forty to fifty years of their life, so we'll just go with the average and say forty five. Over your entire life, you'll work on average about 90 thousand hours or about ten years of your life.

We have 38 years left. Wait, depending on where you live your commute to work will vary. You might drive yourself, you might walk, you might use an uber or a taxi. Regardless your commute to and from work, on average, takes about one and a half hours a day. Adding this up over your entire working career, it amounts to 17,520 hours or about two years of your life.

36 years left. All of this work and studying really builds up an appetite, so you should probably spend some time eating. On an average day, we spend about 70 minutes just eating food to survive. In your 79 years of life, you'll spend about 32,000 hours just eating or about four years of your life.

Down to 32. Well after you're done eating you have to clean up and maybe do some chores around the house. On average you spend about one hour a day doing tasks just around your house. Cleaning up after you eat, washing dishes, doing laundry, showering and plenty of other stuff. This amounts to nearly twenty nine thousand hours over the course of your life or about three years.

29 years left. Eventually all of that food and water has to leave your body somehow. You'll spend about three months of your life just sitting on the toilet. We also waste time, and we do it pretty well. Over the course of our lifetimes, we'll spend about one hundred and fifteen thousand hours on our phones or about thirteen years. This of course is just your phone. This doesn't include you watching TV, you playing games among other things.

Sixteen years left. Assuming you can afford to retire at the average age of 62, you'll spend the rest of your life living the luxuries of retirement, if you can still function properly. Over 50% of retired people over the age of 65 have some sort of disability. With 15% of those people having three or more. Chances are if you are one of these people, you'll be in and out of medical care pretty often. So those final 16 years of freedom you have, it's a coin flip that doesn't exactly entail freedom.

So overall you have one year in your 79 year life to really and truly do what you want to do. But despite the age you might be young or old, you may be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. For example while you're young and in school from the ages of 1 to 18, you'll most likely be spending nearly every day in the presence of your parents. After you finish your schooling assuming your parents are in their mid 40s will say they have about 30 years left in their life. The real world starts to set in. Your job, your possible relationships, your important things to do in life take priority. Eventually if you leave your hometown you'll only be seeing your parents around holidays and special occasions. Maybe 10 days a year.

So 300 days left with the people who brought you into the world whereas before you would see them almost every single day. You have already spent 95% of the time that you will ever spend with your parents in the first 18 years of your life and now, you only have the remaining 5 percent for the rest of your life. At the end of the day there's only one thing that matters and that's your own happiness.

Many people don't realize is that they do so many things in life just to try and succeed as opposed to fulfilling a purpose. They work a job they hate for 40 years just to make that extra $30,000 a year, so they can afford a car that they only drive to work. It's temporary happiness not genuine happiness. People who are school to become a doctor because their mom or their dad or somebody else told them to, not because they actually want to. I really hope that every single person reading this article gets insanely rich and famous so that they could finally realize that this isn't the point of life. The point is to be happy with what you're doing while you're doing it.

The 45 working years or however long you're working is going to be hard to get past. But what if you don't hate waking up every day to go to work, what if your work is your happiness. You see life isn't a straight path. You can't map it out perfectly one-to-one. It just doesn't work like that. We spend every day planning on what we're going to do the next, instead of just taking in the day for what it actually is. Sure we have to eat. But what if we spend that time eating with friends or family or just people who make your life better. Your commute to work might be long and tedious sometimes. But what if you spend that time listening to podcasts or carpooling with coworkers and friends. The 13 years we waste on our phones might seem useless. But what if we use that time to build the business you've always wanted to or build the brand you've always wanted or make a YouTube channel to talk to people about the random ideas you get. You'll bring so much value to people that you never even thought was possible. Let's say you take care of yourself and regularly work out and eat decently well. Your chances of being healthy later in life is much more likely and you'll have much more free time to master the things that you really want. Whether that be a skill or just relationships with others. No matter what you or I or any person on this planet does, time doesn't stop for anyone. Time is the one thing you cannot get back. If you lose a lot of money, it's fine. You can get more. If your friend decides to turn their back on you, it's fine. There's millions of people out there in the same situation. But time, you can't get it back. Once it's gone it's gone.

How many days have you spent doing the same mundane tasks that you hate, and more importantly when is it going to end? Life is about choices. Every choice you've ever made has led you to this exact moment reading this article, and given that you only have one life, at least in this universe, why not make your own decisions? So many people live life predicated on somebody else's opinion, which is dumb. People have so many barriers in life. But they aren't really about money, they aren't about time, they aren't about how you look. It's about opinions. Other people's opinions.

Probably about 90% of people are unhappy because they value someone else's opinion more than their own. When you're old and unable to do the things that you could have when you're younger, you'll regret and regret hurts more than any breakup failure or anything else ever could. Life doesn't have to suck, you don't have to regret everything. That FOMO or fear of missing out is a poison. Instead of living trying to mimic people you see on Instagram or YouTube or social media, just live based on your own terms. Instead of just observing and living passively, really start to think about what you do with your time.

Does that mean call your boss and tell him you quit? No. Does that mean drop out of school tomorrow? No. All it means is to truly decide what you want in life and put yourself in the right direction. It's not gonna happen overnight. That's not the point. There would be no journey then. As cliche as it sounds your 79 year journey here is very short. Sure, it's technically the longest thing you'll ever do. But the universe is 13.8 billion years old. If the universe's history was condensed down into 24 hours, the world as we know it with cars and airplanes and civilization as we know it, would only come into existence in the very last second.

Block out any and all negativity in your life and once you can truly realize that the only opinion that matters is your own, life can get pretty clear and the noises inside your head get pretty quiet.