When This Number Hits 5200 - You Will be Dead
Wrapping your mind around your life is pretty hard because you're up to your neck in it. It's like trying to understand the ocean while learning how to swim. On most days, you're busy just keeping your head above water, so it's not easy to figure out what to do with your life and how to spend your time. There are a million distractions: your family, friends, and romantic partners; boring work and exciting projects; video games to play and books to read; and then there's your couch that somebody needs to lie on. It's easy to get lost.
So let's take a step back and look at your life from the outside. The average KS Zar viewer is around 25 years old, which is a pretty good time in the life of most people. The insecurities of the teenage years have begun to recede. Maybe you find yourself in a job or a long-term relationship. Maybe you've started a family or are working on an advanced degree. Maybe you're not doing any of that and still want to enjoy life, whatever that means to you. Or maybe you feel stuck and don't know where to go yet.
About 1 in 20 people watching this video will get to live to 100. Let's assume you are one of the lucky ones, which means you had a total of 5,200 weeks of life at your disposal. When you were born, you spent the first 600 weeks of your life being a kid and 400 being a teenager. During this time, you were pretty useless for society and also not very free to make your own decisions. As a payoff, you were somewhat spared from the consequences and responsibilities of adulthood, mostly because well-meaning adults protected you by cleaning up your mess and giving you time to find yourself. This time is necessary to make you, at least in theory, a functioning human, although most people probably don't feel like that after puberty.
In any case, by the time you're 20, over 1,000 of your 5,200 weeks have passed. Depending on what you aspire to at this point, you're either working already or have entered further education. The amount of fun you can have in this phase of your life varies a lot. If you pick up a trade or lead to work to support yourself or others, the serious side of life begins earlier. If you go to university, you get to push back work life a bit longer. In any case, most people start working for real in their 20s at the latest, which begins the productive, or potentially grindy or soul-crushing, period of your life.
People tend to work until the age of 65, which means that you'll spend at least 2,000 weeks of your life with serious adult work, hopefully in a job that makes you feel good and appreciated or that makes the world better. This is such an important thing that we'll look at work and how you can try to find a satisfying career in another video. This is the main block of life for most people, the time when you might have kids, travel a bit, climb the career ladder, build a house, maybe get divorced, and fall in love again. In this phase, you transition from being young to middle-aged to old—not old, old, but the young old of your 60s.
At 65, you've used up 3,400 of your 5,200 weeks. The last phase of your life begins. If you've managed to acquire enough wealth to retire, in theory, you're now free to do whatever you like for up to 1,800 weeks. But of course, this is not how it works for the majority of you watching this video. Nineteen out of 20 people will not live to 100. The average lifespan in the US is 79; in Germany, it's 81; in Japan, 84; in Brazil, it's 75. If you die at age 80, which is still not bad, you only have 780 weeks of freedom after you retire. That's roughly as many weeks of freedom as an old person as you spent as a child.
Unfortunately, disease and the tiredness of age trip you up here because, with old age, the human body begins to decline sharply. For example, the vast majority of cancer-related deaths occur in people over 70. If you bet all your Fun Cards on being free and happy in your retirement, you might be bitterly disappointed. And all of this is still assuming things work out and you even get to grow old. You can drown in a pool at age 7, get cancer at age 32, die in a car crash at age 48, or fall from a ladder at age 60. Every day, the universe rolls a bunch of dice for every human, and every day, someone somewhere on this planet rolls a critical failure and their life ends that day.
The older you get, the more dice are rolled for you. Usually, when you swim through the ocean that is your life, you don't think about all of this too much, and that's fine. Life is engaging enough by itself, and the future is this undefined weird thing. But thinking about it from time to time is helpful in refocusing on what you want to do and to minimize regrets you will have when you look back. It reminds you that if you don't use your time today, you might not get a chance to use it tomorrow.
Life is complicated, and it's hard to make decisions between all the things and people that are important to you. This has become painfully obvious to billions of people during the coronavirus pandemic. If you respected social distancing, so many things that we took for granted were not available anymore: traveling, public places, eating out, seeing friends, and meeting new people. Spending time together became limited and precious. But actually, the time you have with the people you love is already precious.
Think of your parents. As a child, you spent basically every day with them. Your time spent together begins to decline as you transition and become a teenager and fight to develop your own identity. But as teenagers, you probably still see them regularly, which changes as you enter your 20s when most people move out for university, for work, or just to be on their own. If you're making an effort to be with your parents for two full weeks each year for the rest of their lives—which covers the main holidays, birthdays, and a bit extra—you still have already spent more than 90% of the time you will ever spend with them. Even if they grow pretty old, if they die earlier, or if you see them only a few days each year, this number shrinks even more.
So in all likelihood, the vast majority of time you will ever spend with your parents has passed. The same holds true for your siblings or old friends that moved to the other side of the country. You're at the tail end of the time with some of the most important people in your life. One day, you will see them for the last time, and it's actually the same with everything else. The concept of doing something for the last time feels eerie, like something that you should only experience when you're on death row or extremely old or something like that. But it happens all the time.
Is there a hobby you've been lazy about for a long time? Maybe you still have those Warhammer minis that you wanted to paint. Did you always want to revisit that place where you had an amazing time a decade ago? Is there someone you wanted to reach out to for a long time but haven't yet? Or pick up that sport again to meet new friends? Maybe you will never do any of these things again because life gets in the way, and at some point, it's too late.
As the global pandemic begins to wind down, we will all soon be able to be with each other again and do fun things together. It's never a bad time to reach out to a friend or a potential friend and let them know that you're looking forward to hanging out. But no matter when you're watching this, our life is an incredible gift, and there are so many fun, engaging, and fulfilling things to do. You get to decide what and who matters to you.
But what matters the most is that you actually make decisions from time to time. This video was based on and inspired by an article by our friend Tim Urban of "Wait But Why," the best blog on the internet. Be sure to check it out to get more new perspectives on things. Also, if you want a reminder about the things we still want to do in life, with Tim's permission, we created a cute version of the calendar of your life that lets you track how many weeks of your life you've spent already and how many you have left. You can also color in the weeks to keep track of exactly how you're spending them.
If you're just looking for a visual reminder to put things in perspective, we've made a timeline of your life. It's printed in vibrant neon colors on high-quality paper and will look great as an art piece on your wall. Like all of our products, these posters were designed with love and produced with care by us here at Kazar. Getting something from our shop is the best way to support our channel while getting something beautiful in return. Because of you, we can keep making elaborate videos like the one you just watched and release them for free for everyone.
Thank you so much for your support.