You Only Get to Die Once, But You Get to Live Every Day
Last night I met a guy named Jack at the poker table, and somewhere in the middle of our conversation he told me something I couldn't stop thinking about.
"You only get to die once, but you get to live every day."
Such a simple sentence, but it completely changed the way I was thinking about time. We spend so much of our lives worrying about getting older and eventually dying that sometimes we forget the obvious part. If you're lucky, dying happens once. Living happens thousands and thousands of times. Every morning you wake up, you get another day.
The older I get, the more I realize how strange time is. When you're a kid, one year feels like forever. Then somehow you become an adult and five years can disappear like nothing. You look at a picture from ten years ago and it almost feels like yesterday.
Time didn't actually move faster. A minute is still a minute. But our perception of time completely changes.
That conversation with Jack made me think about how much of our lives we spend trying to control time, save time, kill time or worry about running out of time instead of figuring out how to actually experience more of it.
These are the five biggest things I've learned about time and how I want to live the rest of my life.
1. Why Life Feels Faster as We Get Older
When you're young, almost everything is new. Your first day of school, first crush, first concert, first trip, first relationship, first heartbreak. Your brain is constantly experiencing things it has never experienced before, creating memories that separate one year from another.
There's also a simple theory I love about why each year feels shorter as we age. When you're 10 years old, one year represents 10% of your entire life. That's massive. But when you're 50, one year is only 2% of your life. When you're 99, another year is roughly 1%.
Think about how crazy that is. For a 10 year old, waiting one year is 10% of everything they've ever experienced. Obviously our brains aren't literally calculating percentages, but it's an interesting way to understand why childhood summers felt endless while entire years seem to disappear as adults.
Then you combine that with repetition. Wake up, check your phone, work, eat, take the same roads, see the same people, sleep and repeat. Eventually Monday isn't that different from Thursday, and March isn't that different from April. Your brain has fewer memorable landmarks separating the days.
Maybe life isn't actually moving faster as we get older. Each year is simply becoming a smaller percentage of everything we've already experienced, while at the same time we're giving our brains fewer new experiences to remember it by.
2. How to Make Time Feel Slower
If our perception of time is flexible, one of the most interesting things is that we can change how long life feels. We can't slow down the clock, but we can change how our brain experiences and remembers the time we have.
Novelty. Do more things for the first time. Travel somewhere new. Learn a new skill. Take a dance class. Eat somewhere unfamiliar. Meet new people. Take random side quests. New experiences create more memory landmarks, which helps stop months and years from blending together.
Create chapters. You don't need to constantly travel around the world or have insane adventures. Change your environment occasionally. Rearrange your routine. Spend a month learning something. Take weekend trips. Work on different projects. Give different periods of your life their own identity. Instead of remembering an entire year as one giant blur, you remember the individual chapters inside it.
Practice presence. Sometimes slowing down time has nothing to do with doing more. It's about actually experiencing what you're already doing. Put your phone away. Pay attention to your breathing. Look around. When you're having dinner with your parents, actually look at them. When you're somewhere beautiful, stop for a minute instead of immediately thinking about where you're going next.
Reduce stimulation. I've personally noticed this depending on what city I'm living in. If I'm somewhere where everything closes at 9 PM, the streets become quiet and the only thing open is basically fast food, nighttime feels incredibly long to me. Then compare that with Las Vegas, where everything is open 24 hours a day. There is infinite entertainment, lights, restaurants and something happening at every hour. I can completely lose track of time there. Sometimes boredom, silence and having nowhere to go actually makes time feel slower.
Record your life. Keep a journal. Take pictures. Before going to sleep, write down one memorable thing that happened that day. It doesn't mean every day needs to be amazing. You're simply giving ordinary days an identity so that when you look back, your life doesn't feel like one giant blur.
Maybe slowing down time isn't about trying to make every minute literally feel longer. Maybe it's about creating more firsts, more chapters, more memories and more moments where you're actually present.
If I can make one year feel like three years because I actually lived, experienced and remembered it, that's probably the closest thing humans have to extending time.
3. Time Is Our Most Precious Commodity
I've spent a huge part of my life thinking about money, and the older I get, the more I realize time is infinitely more valuable.
Money can come back. You can lose an investment and find another investment. You can lose a business and build another one. But if you lose ten years, those ten years are permanently gone. There is no amount of money that lets you buy age 25, 35 or 45 again.
And not all time is equal. Having $10 million at 80 isn't necessarily the same as having freedom at 40. Your health may be different. Your energy may be different. Your parents might not be around anymore. Your friends may have different lives. Your body may no longer allow you to do the things you've been waiting your entire life to do.
I think true wealth is having money, time, health, freedom and people you love all at the same time. If you ever reach a period where those things overlap, recognize how rare it is while you're actually living it.
4. Everything Has an Expiration Date
Everything and everyone has an expiration date.Your parents do. Your friendships do. Relationships may come and go. Your pets will eventually die. Your favorite places will close. Your body will change. Your ability to travel, dance, run around and recover will change. Even the version of yourself reading this right now has an expiration date. I don't think that's depressing. I think that's what makes things valuable.
Enjoy your life while you still have the ability to enjoy it. Stop letting temporary chapters convince you they're the end of your entire story. A relationship may end and another may begin. A dream may die and another dream may replace it. A goal may feel impossible, but you'll never know unless you try.
There will eventually be a last dinner with your parents. A last trip with certain friends. A last time you walk into a place you love. A last time you dance somewhere. The crazy part is that you probably won't know it's the last time while it's happening.
Everything you're desperately chasing today may eventually mean less to you than the little moments you barely noticed while chasing it.
Enjoy people while they're here. Enjoy your body while it works. Enjoy the chapter while you're still inside of it.
5. Die With Zero
Bill Perkins's Die With Zero changed the way I think about money and time. I don't interpret the message as blowing all your money and becoming irresponsible. I interpret it as understanding that money is a tool for living, not the final score of your existence.
One of my favorite concepts is memory dividends. If you have an incredible experience at 30, you don't only enjoy it once. You remember it at 40. You tell stories about it at 50. You look at pictures of it at 70. That experience can continue paying you emotional dividends for the rest of your life.
Certain experiences also have expiration dates. Some require youth. Some require health. Some require freedom. Some require your parents to still be alive. Some require your friends to still be free enough to join you. If you keep postponing everything until later, you might eventually have the money but no longer have the right combination of time, health and people to actually do it.
Money is made to be used. Spend it, save it, invest it or give it away. Eventually it will belong to someone else anyway. I want enough money to create freedom and take care of the people I love, but I don't want to spend my entire existence accumulating resources for a future version of myself who may never get the opportunity to use them.
We spend so much of our lives waiting. Waiting until we have enough money. Waiting until work slows down. Waiting until we're confident. Waiting until everything lines up.
Meanwhile, life is happening during the waiting.
The random dinner tonight is life. The phone call with your parents is life. Laughing with your friends is life. Walking around a foreign city with nowhere you need to be is life. Dancing until sunrise is life. Even getting your heart broken and having to start over is life.
You only get to die once, but you get to live every day.
Make money. Save some. Spend some. Take the trip. Call your parents. See your friends. Take the random side quest. Fall in love. Get your heart broken. Start over. Try things you might fail at. Dance while your body still lets you dance. Go to burning man and tomorrowland lol.
Everything has an expiration date, including us.
I don't think realizing that should make us afraid of dying.
I think it should make us much better at living.
Time is just an illusion, and somehow time always comes full circle.
This is basically how my brain thinks about time after doing way too many psychedelics over the years, from shrooms and LSD to DMT. Most people will probably never look at time from this a drug-addict, psychedelic perspective.
So I have returned from the psychedelic universe with a message for humanity and somehow turned it into a blog about time, life, death, money, memories, and why we should actually enjoy this weird human experience while we're still here.
Comments