Time Dilation for Mortals (or Six Lessons on Time)
“hold every hour in your grasp” — Seneca[i]
Some life lessons are hard won. “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.” Ernest Hemingway wrote, “They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.” When it comes to time, our most precious resource, those looking back on their lives have unique clarity and perspective.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Herman Wouk lived to be 103 years old and wrote “Remember this, if you can — there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven’t. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end — only in the end it becomes more obvious.” Here are six lessons on time from some of the wisest people who have ever lived.
Remember you will die
Mememto Mori is a Latin expression which means remember that you have to die. Sounds morbid, but it reminds us that “the meter is running”. Some artists placed symbolic reminders of their mortality within their art including skulls, hourglasses or wilting flowers. For others, a brush with death brings their mortality into focus. Reflecting on his cancer diagnosis, Steve Jobs said[ii] “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
We should also remember that death isn’t an event, it is happening to us right now. Seneca confronted readers by suggesting that we are “dying daily”, even going as far as writing that “we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed.”
Confront how little you have
Oliver Burkeman opens his book[iii] “Four Thousand Weeks” with the following sentence — “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short”. Confronting as it is, seeing what we have remaining reveals how finite our time is, and how precious. We monitor our financial reserves and we have a fuel gauge in our car. Why not with time ? Learning to see time as finite means we become more careful how we spend it[iv]. Tim Urban’s “Life Calendar” shows a typical human lifespan with each week represented as a box — a page with 52 columns (weeks) by 90 rows (years) showing the brevity of an average human lifespan at a mere 4500 weeks[v]. Still we want to believe that our death will occur at some distant time and deceive ourselves into thinking our time is unlimited. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself “Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able — be good.” and “Don’t behave as if you are destined to live forever.”
“You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or so that the universe is going to be around.” Naval Ravikant reminds us, “Whatever your natural state is, it’s probably not this. This is your living state. Your dead state is true over a much longer time frame … You just have a very short period of time here on this earth.” It is estimated that more than 100 billion people have walked the Earth. Like us, every one of those people had hopes and dreams but they are now gone. Neil Diamond’s “Done Too Soon” is a poignant reminder of this. The song ends with the following lyrics -
“And each one there
Has one thing shared
They have sweated beneath the same sun
Looked up in wonder at the same moon
And wept when it was all done
For bein’ done too soon”.
Guard what is precious
“There is only one true wealth in all the universe” Frank Herbert wrote, “living time.” If we have something we believe is precious we guard it. And yet, Seneca points out “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” Naval Ravikant’s warning is “Guard your time. It’s all you have.” We waste so much time — standing in queues, waiting in traffic jams, watching things we don’t enjoy, engaging with mindless social media, years spent in jobs and relationships that we dislike.
Seneca wrote “On The Shortness of Life” around 49 AD. Even when the average human lifespan was probably less than 40 years, Seneca understood “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” He knew it was about how we use what we are given — “Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
We use KPI’s and scorecards to focus on what is important in our professional lives, why not in our personal lives ? A personal scorecard could include if we are at home for dinner with our family, read to our children, exercise and block out holidays at the start of each year. What score would our family give us ? Excessive time spent at work as stealing that time from loved ones. “Remember too that your time is your one finite resource,” Andy Grove[vi] said, “and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.” We know that time, unlike money, is not renewable. Yet we often make decisions deluding ourselves that we can access more time. Considering these questions can help reassess the relativity between time and money -
· if you were approached by an ageing billionaire, for how much would you sell one year of your life ?
· if you knew you were going to pass away, what would you pay to experience another day on Earth ?
· imagine a beloved family member or friend who has passed away. What would you give to see them again, even for an hour ?
Seneca[vii] wrote “certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.”
Learn to slow time
Time dilation is the phenomenon of time passing more slowly depending on an observer’s frame of reference. “Humanity’s best weapon against time”, Brendon Burchard reveals[viii], is awareness. Those moments when time slows, when we experience an accident or watch a beautiful artistic performance, are when our senses are heightened. Time slows down the more we bring our full attention and awareness to an experience. It is what William Blake meant by -
“Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”[ix].
Busyness is the enemy of awareness because we are thinking about what’s next. “If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
Live immediately
Do not delay doing what matters most. A useful question is “if not now, when ?”[x]. “You are living as if destined to live for ever;” Seneca reminds us, “your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last.” “You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!”
I once heard a person repeat what his mother said when she was confronted with a cancer diagnosis at the age of 50. Filled with regret she told him “I thought I had more time”. Paulo Coelho warns us “One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.” Seneca makes a similar plea — “Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
Savour what you have
Battling terminal cancer in what was to be his final interview[xi], astronomer Carl Sagan explained how he was thinking about his impending death –
Rose: But you thought about what it would be like to die.
Sagan: Certainly, and what it would be like for my family, and I didn’t much think about what it would be like for me because I don’t think it’s likely there’s anything that you think about after you’re dead. That’s it. A long dreamless sleep. I’d love to believe the opposite, but I don’t have any evidence. But one thing that it has done is to enhance my sense of appreciation for the beauty of life, and of the universe, and the sheer joy of being alive.
Rose: You had a healthy portion of that before this, but even you, it happens to: appreciation.
Sagan: Every moment. Every inanimate object, to say nothing about the exquisite complexity of living beings… You imagine missing it all, and suddenly, it’s so much more precious.
Final Thought
After being told he had less than six months of good health remaining Randy Pausch[xii] gave a lecture on time management[xiii]. In the lecture Pausch said that he was “living the limit case right now” because “I really don’t have a lot of time”. The finitude of that diagnosis gave him great clarity and before passing away Pausch wrote[xiv] “We don’t beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully.”
[i] Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1 On Saving Time
[ii] Stanford Commencement Address 12th June 2005
[iii] Four Thousand Weeks, Time and How to Use It, Oliver Burkeman, 2021
[iv] It has been found that electricity consumption is reduced when the consumer has a visible electricity meter rather than when it located in an obscure part of the house
[v] Another more confronting tool is Kevin Kelly’s Death or Countdown Clock which, based on average longevity, counts down the days remaining until his death
[vi] Hungarian born engineer and businessman who was CEO of Intel Corporation from 1979 to 1998
[vii] Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1 On Saving Time
[viii] The Motivation Manifesto, Brendon Burchard 2014
[ix] Auguries of Innocence, from the Pickering Manuscript, William Blake, circa 1803
[x] Attributed to the Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder
[xi] Carl Sagan and Charlie Rose 27th May 1996. Sagan passed away 20th December 1996 at the age of 62.
[xii] Randy Pausch was a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2007 and passed away at the age of 47 in July 2008.
[xiii] Pausch gave the lecture on Time Management at the University of Virginia in November 2007
[xiv] The Last Lecture, Jeffrey Zaslow & Randy Pausch, 2008
