Your Life is More Over Than You Think

There’s a graph from Tim Urban that I think about often:

It never ceases to amaze me that you can literally see all the weeks of your entire life on a single sheet of paper. You have a very finite number of weeks in your life. [1] Every decision matters.

Time is the one scarce resource that affects everyone equally. Regardless of your background or socioeconomic status, everyone plays by these same constraints. [2]

However, reality is even more pernicious than what this graph shows. As you cross off each week of your life, you falsely believe that you are operating in a linear regime where each week is an equal proportion of your perceived life. In reality, your perception of time in life is better modeled on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one.

At age 5, one additional year is another 20% of your life. At age 50, one additional year is only 2% of your life.

While our perception of time is not perfectly logarithmic, talking to people older than me leads me to believe that this heuristic is at least directionally true.

What should we do about this? How can we maximize our ability to get what we want in our lives?

Career implications

As early as possible, you should develop a thesis for what you want to do given your risk profile, work/life balance, and skillset. Your thesis can and should evolve as you grow older.

Intelligence is getting what you want out of life, and most people complain they aren’t getting what they want without any evidence of even a modicum of effort. You can get ahead of basically everyone in any field by putting in an ounce of effort. No one is even trying.

Don’t spread yourself too thin, but realize that there are unexpected returns to being a polymath and deriving cross-pollination insights. Choose 2-3 areas to do ten times as much in life. Deliberate practice over 2-3 areas for even a few weeks will put you at a massive advantage over the vast majority of the population. Compounding is still greatly underrated in practice, even though everybody knows about it.

Assuming you have some basic education, you can learn most things rewarded by the free market in a very short period of time. Most people dramatically underinvest in “temporal leverage points” – where small investments of time can radically alter the trajectory of your life. Examples include: spending time really understanding how the talent system works in your given industry, learning the basics of probability theory, having lunch with someone 30 years older than you in your field, or starting a podcast. All can be done within a week with unbounded upside.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely stressing too much about exactly what you’re working on. There is such a thing as decision paralysis. Anecdotally, it’s much more important to be able to let the compounding effects occur and reach the frontier of a given field than to always be jumping around and never coming close to the frontier.

Personal life implications

The standard YOLO advice about seizing the day fundamentally misunderstands time perception. The real arbitrage opportunity is doing things that seem boring to others but have massive long-term returns. Learning Portuguese or exploring the Dark Forest on a new chain might seem like wasting your precious weeks, but these detours can yield the highest returns through unexpected recombinations.

Most arguments boil down to different time preferences. Understand your temporal discount factor and find others that match it.

By age 18, you will have spent 93% of the actual time you'll ever spend with your parents. On a logarithmic perception scale, you’ll have experienced 98-99% of your perceived time with them.

Location decisions become increasingly sticky as we age, as social and professional roots grow deeper. The optimal time to experiment with living in different cities or countries is often earlier in life when our perception of time is more expansive (and our commitments are more flexible).

Hobbies and personal interests should be cultivated deliberately, as they often provide the texture and meaning that make our finite weeks feel richer. Starting a creative practice or learning an instrument at 25 means you could have decades of enjoyment ahead, while the same decision at 45 comes with a different psychological weight.

Health investments made early can have large exponential returns. The good habits we build in our youth compound over decades.

[1] I have seen no evidence that immortality efforts such as Bryan Johnson’s will increase your lifespan by more than ~20%.

[2] Sure, billionaires can buy time by flying private, having personal chefs, etc. but they still age at effectively the same rate as the rest of us.