I don’t know how long I’ll live.

I’m not dying or anything.

I’m just saying that I have an unknown quantity of life to spend.

How can I act today, so that at the end, I can know that I have spent that one precious life on the things that I wanted to?

When we are young, the future seems like an infinite number of “One Days”. And we get used to this idea that there will be this one day in the future to do each of the very important things we want to do.

Alas, we have a limited and unknown number ‘One Days’.

This is a distinct feature of life.

There is the proverbial story of someone who spends his whole life storing up riches for himself and in the end not being able to spend it. Or the woman who neglects her relationships and regret it later on in life. These are things to be avoided. How?

Here are the strategies I’ve seen people employ:

1. Hope and Pray (regardless of an actual believe or hope in a God of any kind)
In this method, you just pick a thing, normally the most urgent and hope and pray that, ONE DAY, perhaps when there are no longer urgent things to do, you can catch up on the important things.

2. Live Forever. In this method, you expend a portion of your resources trying to prolong your life, ideally forever. Nutrition and exercise are the most common tools in this strategy. Although much more extreme methods have been used, such as replacing old blood with the blood of a younger person or attempts to upload consciousness to a computer.

3. Live vicariously. Make a list you wish you did, and find some younger person to act it out. How you do it is you convert your unfulfilled ambitions into advice and dispense it to a younger person or people. These can be your own children. Or you could become a teacher and pass it on to other peoples children. If you have accumulated wealth, another option is to invest into companies and you can act through those.

4. YOLO. Recognising that You Only Live Once, you can do the things that seem desirable now without much thought of the consequences. It’s almost the opposite of the Hope and Pray strategy.

Here is my strategy. I call it;

Days Spent = Life Spent.

Here’s how I see it. While I cannot predict when my life will end, I do know that today will end at midnight. And chances are I’ll be alive that whole time, maybe I’ll even be awake the whole time. So if I can somehow live out my ideal life in one day, in the measure that can be distributed in a day. And if I can do that every day. When you add up all the ideal days, you’ll get something that looks like an ideal life.

This means, that each day I try to do the amount and kinds of activity in proportion to how I envision an ideal life to look like. I divide up my day in exactly the same way as one might wish to divide up their life. In fact I see these two ideas as the same thing.

Which strategy do you employ? Or do you have an alternative? (Email me your thoughts?) 

One of the things that I’d like to do daily is share thoughts like this I’ll post them here. I also draw in my sketchbook everyday and work on some illustrations. I curate my best drawings and writings into a newsletter every week. You can sign up to receive them if you like.