Depressing Math and Fighting Against Hopelessness

 

Tim Urban

Tim Urban writes (and illustrates) in New York Times article, "How Covid Stole Our Time and How We Can Get It Back."

That’s one box for every week of a 90-year life. It often feels like we have countless weeks ahead of us. But actually, it’s just a few thousand — a small-enough number to fit neatly in a single image.

Once you visualize the human life span, it becomes clear that so many parts of life we think of as “countless” are in fact quite countable.

I love going to the American Museum of Natural History, and I’ve been three times since I moved to New York in 2009. If that rate continues, I’ll step into the museum 12 more times. For an activity I think of as “something I like to do,” that number seems shockingly low. 

Urban goes on to say that this is the Depressing Math of many things, but especially about relationships.  Once we move out of the house and away from high school friends, there are a very limited number of times we'll spend time with them. 

However, he also shares this graphic:

 We think a lot about those black lines: the roads not taken, the opportunities missed, the ones that got away. But most of us greatly underestimate the size of the lush green tree of possibilities that lie ahead of us.

We underestimate future possibilities for the same reason we overestimate the time we have left with those we love: our intuition is not very imaginative. It’s a human instinct to believe the life we’re used to is how things will always be, both the good parts and the bad.

Wallowing in regret carries an implicit assumption that we had agency in the past — that we could have had those other life paths if only we had made better decisions. When we think about the future, though, that feeling of agency often disappears, which can leave us feeling resigned and even hopeless.

He concludes: 

But the life we’ll be living 10 years from now will largely be determined not by our past selves but by our present and future selves. If we imagine what we might regret down the road, it’s very much in our hands to do something about it now.

This is the good news about being a human. The time we have left with family and friends is not a law of nature like the weeks we have left to live. It’s a function of priorities and decisions.

At our current pace of 10 to 15 days per year, my parents and I have at best a couple of hundred days left to hang out. But there’s nothing stopping us from changing that equation. Agreeing upon an additional annual family week each summer would almost double our remaining time together, while moving to the same city could multiply it by 10. Getting together with my friends one weekend a year would triple our pace and leave us with 15 percent of our total hangout time ahead, instead of just 5 percent. If the thought of only 12 more Museum of Natural History visits makes me sad, I can start going once a year and magically transform that number to 50. That big green tree is a reminder that we have the power to change so much of what seems set in stone.

These two delusions — that we have countless time ahead of us and that we can’t change our course — are a recipe for complacency. Shedding them can wake us up and inspire us to live more wisely. The past couple of years has left us with a joy deficit. When we picture a post-Covid world, we imagine having our old lives back. But we can actually go a step further and make up for the missed experiences, flipping the deficit into a surplus. If Covid has given us anything, it’s a rare chance for a reset. Let’s take it.