January 2016Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonderabout this. Is life actually short, or are we really complainingabout its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life wasshort if we lived 10 times as long?Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stoppedwondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answerthe question, and the answer is that life actually is short.Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time,into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 yearold. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you onlyget to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it'simpossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantitylike time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity woulddefinitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to knowthat?It has for me. It means arguments of the form "Life is too shortfor x" have great force. It's not just a figure of speech to saythat life is too short for something. It's not just a synonym forannoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short forsomething, you should try to eliminate it if you can.When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the wordthat pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer issomewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit thatit's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit doeshave a distinctive character. There's something fake about it.It's the junk food of experience.[1]If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit,you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointlessdisputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people'smistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.There are two ways this kind of thing gets into your life: it'seither forced on you, or it tricks you. To some extent you have toput up with the bullshit forced on you by circumstances. You needto make money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Indeed,the law of supply and demand ensures that: the more rewarding somekind of work is, the cheaper people will do it. It may be thatless bullshit is forced on you than you think, though. There hasalways been a stream of people who opt out of the default grind andgo live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventionalsense, but life feels more authentic. This could become more common.You can do it on a smaller scale without moving. The amount oftime you have to spend on bullshit varies between employers. Mostlarge organizations (and many small ones) are steeped in it. Butif you consciously prioritize bullshit avoidance over other factorslike money and prestige, you can probably find employers that willwaste less of your time.If you're a freelancer or a small company, you can do this at thelevel of individual customers. If you fire or avoid toxic customers,you can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more thanyou decrease your income.But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, thebullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one'sfault but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harderto eliminate than the bullshit that's forced on you. Things thatlure you into wasting your time have to be really good attricking you. An example that will be familiar to a lot of peopleis arguing online. When someonecontradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes prettyovertly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. Butlike a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world wenow live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most ofthe time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literallytaking your life.[2]Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. There are moredangerous things than that. As I've written before, one byproductof technical progress is that things we like tend to become moreaddictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a consciouseffort to avoid addictions — to stand outside ourselves and ask "isthis how I want to be spending my time?"As well as avoiding bullshit, one should actively seek out thingsthat matter. But different things matter to different people, andmost have to learn what matters to them. A few are lucky and realizeearly on that they love math or taking care of animals or writing,and then figure out a way to spend a lot of time doing it. Butmost people start out with a life that's a mix of things thatmatter and things that don't, and only gradually learn to distinguishbetween them.For the young especially, much of this confusion is induced by theartificial situations they find themselves in. In middle school andhigh school, what the other kids think of you seems the most importantthing in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrongat that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kidsthought of them.One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to askyourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuffthat matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That'show it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shapejabs into your consciousness like a pin.The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people wouldcall "important." Having coffee with a friend matters. You won'tfeel later like that was a waste of time.One great thing about having small children is that they make youspend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve asyou're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" Andodds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us bysurprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take thingsfor granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always writethat book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realizethe window has closed. The saddest windows close when other peopledie. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'dspent more time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there.And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But anillusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake Idid.The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is tobe consciously aware of it. Back when life was more precarious,people used to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem abit morbid. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't seem the right answerto be constantly reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering ateveryone's shoulder. Perhaps a better solution is to look at theproblem from the other end. Cultivate a habit of impatience aboutthe things you most want to do. Don't wait before climbing thatmountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don'tneed to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait.Just don't wait.I can think of two more things one does when one doesn't have muchof something: try to get more of it, and savor what one has. Bothmake sense here.How you live affects how long you live. Most people could do better.Me among them.But you can probably get even more effect by paying closer attentionto the time you have. It's easy to let the days rush by. The"flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousinthat prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurryof errands and alarms. One of the most striking things I've readwas not in a book, but the title of one: James Salter's Burningthe Days.It is possible to slow time somewhat. I've gotten better at it.Kids help. When you have small children, there are a lot of momentsso perfect that you can't help noticing.It does help too to feel that you've squeezed everything out ofsome experience. The reason I'm sad about my mother is not justthat I miss her but that I think of all the things we could havedone that we didn't. My oldest son will be 7 soon. And while Imiss the 3 year old version of him, I at least don't have any regretsover what might have been. We had the best time a daddy and a 3year old ever had.Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter,and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.Notes[1]At first I didn't like it that the word that came to mind wasone that had other meanings. But then I realized the other meaningsare fairly closely related. Bullshit in the sense of things youwaste your time on is a lot like intellectual bullshit.[2]I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I getattacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me.And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing thenatural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for reading draftsof this.
