I was going through my notes from a year or so ago and came across a reference to this post from Axxuy on the topic of longevity as measured in blog posts. There are a lot of ways to calculate a lifespan: how many times will I shave before I expire, how many rolls of toilet paper will I use, or how many sunrises will I actually see. All of these calculations start with assumptions about how long you will live.
I’m 62 years old. My family is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of lifespan: some live into their nineties, some pass in their 70s. But I’m going to be generous and assume I’ll live another 20 years. So that is the hard part out of the way.
Next comes the question of how many blog posts and words per year do I write. I could get really fussy and look across all the years my blog has been in existence, but instead I’ll look at a single two year span- 2024 and 2025. In 24 months I wrote 92 posts, so an average of 3.8 posts per month. Let’s round that to 4 posts per month for the sake of simplicity. That’s 48 posts per year times 20 years or 960 posts in total
The wordcount calculation can be done similarly. I wrote 87,841 words in total in 2024 and 2025 for an average of 3,660 words per month. That’s 43,920 words per year and 878,400 words over 20 years. That means I have less than a million words left before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
What is the point of all this?
I guess what I’m saying is: life is short, and no matter how you measure it our time here is limited. I occasionally wonder if I am spending my time in the best way I can. I do know I like blogging and get personal satisfaction from the process of writing as well as from the occasional bit of feedback I get from people who visit this site. That isn’t exactly curing cancer or saving the environment, but it is my own personal joy at stake here.
I also spend a healthy portion of each day enjoying time with my wife. We don’t do amazing things: mostly just sit together, often times watching TV side by side. But that too brings me personal satisfaction and no small amount of happiness. I doubt very much that I will ever regret those hours spent beside Irene on the couch.
What will I regret in 20 years? All the things I might have done that, at the time, we didn’t have the spoons for. Travelling, visiting friends and family, staying in contact with those we love. We have a lot of reasons why we don’t do those things: certainly around our house the cats and dog demand that we stay close to home. Having them in our life is another one of those tradeoffs about our limited time on this planet that we have chosen to make.
Twenty years in itself is a vanishingly short period of time. It is a very understandable span: from this end of life it seems awfully close. Under 1,000 blog posts and less than a million words away.
The header image for this post is AI generated using ChatGPT. I’m a bit freaked out by the fact that it mentions Irene- ChatGPT knows too much!
A picture is worth a thousand words, so put the camera away 😉
I get that you are being funny, Chris, but you identify an interesting factor in this. Some things about our lifespan are ‘fixed’: the number of mornings we will see is limited by the number of years we will live. Other things are variable: I can produce more words in my life (or take more photos) in the same fixed span if I choose to.
My blog calculations, for example, have assumptions around how many posts per month I produce. If I post more frequently I’ll produce more blog posts in total before I expire. That might be a thing I choose to do. But I can’t add more days, just more actions in the days I have left. Somewhere in there is a deeper meaning.