Okay, so the average human on planet earth now lives to 73.8 (women’s life expectancy is 76.4, more than five years longer than men at 71.2). That’s a decent innings.
In Africa it’s only 63, Europe it’s 74, and in Australia it’s a whopping 84!
if you’re reading this, you’re most likely in australia, nz, the uk or the us. and you’re most likely educated and healthier than average. you’re also probably incredibly gorgeous. most emerson black readers are.
So I’m gonna put you at a life expectancy of at least eighty, with the assumption you’re not a lion tamer, am not in danger of getting hit by a falling piece of plane shrapnel, and don’t make a habit of buying and ingesting drugs without knowing their provenance.
Eighty years is a lot of years. The first ten are a waste, right? You’re either shitting yourself, sleeping, or crying. Basically unable to contextualise the world. Let’s count those ten years out.
80 - 10 = 70.
Then, your teenage years are largely out of your own control. You’re time is not your own. You must follow the rules of your parents and whatever education system you’ve been legally required to attend. You’re also full of hormones, insecurity, and an utter lack of perspective about the world and your place in it. These are the years for heartache, experimentation, and feeling a lot.
So, to be safe, let’s count those years out too.
70 - 10 = 60.
At the opposite end of your life, you’ve also got some pretty meagre years. Again, there’ll be a decent amount of shitting yourself, sleeping, and maybe (but hopefully not) crying. Basically losing your ability to contextualise the world.
If you’re lucky enough and smart enough to take care of yourself in the years leading up to your retirement, you can enjoy a pretty sweet life from the age of seventy and beyond, but the majority of us will probably wake up with sore bones and spend more time lamenting the state of the world than enjoying it.
Let’s these years a write-off. Take them out of the equation. For a life expectance of eighty, and saying that from seventy onward you’re not able to live it up as much as your middle years, we get:
60 - 10 = 40.
So, that leaves us with about fifty years of being a full-potential adult.
Fifty years is a long, long time.
Fifty years works out to be 600 months.
600 months is 18,262 days.
Which is 438,300 hours.
That is… a lot of hours.
Granted, you’re gonna be sleeping a third of those hours, if you’re kind to yourself. And you’ll be showering, eating, moving from place to place, cleaning, and generally being a busy-body for a lot of those hours too.
438,300 * 0.66 = 289,278 hours
289,278 * 0.8 (I’m going to assume we spend 20% of our waking hours on maintenance like showering and eating) = 231,422.4 hours.
You have over 200,000 hours of Adult Time in your life.
Maths is over. Let’s talk about Grey Time.
The majority of us squander many of our precious given hours here on earth. We get a job we don’t dig that much, we find ourselves in relationships that don’t nourish us, we spend effort on sucky people who don’t deserve it, and we scroll social media that kindles dissatisfaction and anxiety.
I call these many wasted hours Grey Time. Wasted time.
Grey Time would be better spent doing basically anything other than the aforementioned wasted activities. We could spend it connecting with people, connecting with nature, creating something, learning something, basically anything other than scrolling.
That’s the time we want to claw back.
Because while life is long, most people over forty will tell you that it passes by fast. I’m fast approaching forty and I’m definitely noticing the increasing pace by which the months disappear off the calendar.
The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.
How do we become more present?
It’s simple, but not easy.
All we have to do is remind ourselves that time is passing. That’s it. Multiple times a day. Little check-ins with yourself where you ask: What am I doing right now? Am I content doing whatever I’m doing? Or am I engaging in Grey Time? In a year, will I look back and be annoyed that I let my time pass like this?
How can we do this? Something I’ve done is I’ve set multiple alarms on my phone to remind me to check in. At random times, my phone vibrates and I get a message on my screen that says:
Hey dude, life is happening.
Or
Reach out someone and say hi.
Or
Are You Doing It?
There are plenty of ways to track your time and make sure you’re not squandering too much of it. I went down a rabbit hole of time tracking apps (Rize, ActivityWatch, Timeful) before settling on a very simple Google Sheet (that turned into me building my own app, Juju).
I don’t track my entire day so much as my focus time. I’m able to see how much time I spend focussing, and how big the gaps are around my focus time. I judge whether I’m spending too much time on Grey Time activities.
Things like the gym, cooking dinner, hanging with Julia or friends—every second of those activities I consider 100% worthy. But if I’ve spent an hour getting caught scrolling Instagram Reels or watching Youtube Shorts—I judge myself harshly and shame myself.
If this kind of intensive tracking stresses you out, don’t do it. But I do implore you to find a way to check in with yourself that works for you. Consider how you’ll feel looking back on what you’re currently doing with your time.
Some popular ways to do this that aren’t as insane as building your own app are:
- Keeping a daily journal
- Record an evening voice note reflecting on your day
- Do 10 minutes of mindfulness where you sit and focus on your breath and nothing else
Find that Grey Time and snatch it back.