If we live to be 70 years old, we get roughly 613,200 hours to
live. That’s 365 days, times 70 years, times 24 hours. This is
the time we have to enjoy, to love, to weep, to learn and to
cry. The quest for ‘the good life’ for the meaning, for
fulfillment, and purpose must fit into this average number of
hours. But we spend a lot of our time doing other things, things
we have little choice in, and so don’t pay much attention to.
But if we start to look at these things we spend so much of our
time on we might think again about our priorities and even more
about sex. It’s a long story. Here is a list of the top 10
things we spend our lifetime doing.
10. Watching TV
The
declining inventiveness of the modern generation is a myth. In
reality invention isn’t disappearing, it’s just not happening in
the street outside your house anymore. Sad though it might be
for those of us who grew up inventing games that revolved around
a pineapple some had stolen from their home and a roll of tape
found in a bush, kids are turning their endless capacity for
invention to the internet and the cyber world of modern day
wonders. The fact is those of us
left to grumble of the decline of games like
pineapple-leap-frog, are the also the ones wasting away in front
of the TV. Simply put, the younger generations are more able to
balance their TV watching with all the other screen staring
operations of their day. But we get home tired from work, (blah
blah), sit down and zone out to the latest reality TV show no
one likes but everyone watches. So unless you want to spend the
latter half of your life watching the latest cast of
Tool-Academy dating the throws backs from Rock of love in an
epic real time saga where they all try to find each other’s
brain cells, then it might be time to break out the sticky tape
from the desk draw and go find someone who has a pineapple.
9. Eating
Fast
food, no matter how health conscious we have become, defines us.
Our body chemistry, by and large, was originally designed for
snacking. We are not meant to eat three big meals a day. Instead
we are built to eat smaller meals more often. After all no one
ever ate a cheeseburger, leaned back in the seat and said ‘Phew
I don’t think I could eat another bite.’? It doesn’t fill us up,
and it’s not supposed to, it’s fast food. But under our fast
food nature there is a long tradition, (from who knows where),
that revolves around several square meals a day! In fact we
spend so much of our time eating, and snacking in between to
keep our metabolism up, that it’s sometimes hard to see how we
fit anything else in. On top of this we are also starting to get
incredibly health conscious and that only means more time and
energy going into eating! Food is meant to fuel us but, it
seems, we are using most of that fuel looking over vitamin
labels and examining fat contents.
8. That…other thing
Okay, so maybe you don’t go every day, but we all go eventually.
It might not seem like a very long time, but over a lifetime
you’d be surprised how squatting over the porcelain princess
adds up. What’s more, as life rolls around, we also find
ourselves spending extra time in the bathroom, time we had once
spent on something more productive, like pulling girls hair. In
fact as the pressure of life starts in we find ourselves making
excuses to go to the bathroom. Honestly now, how many people
have made up a toilet break so they could finish the last
chapter of a book, or just get some alone time? On top of this
we spend a lot of time on the toilet when drunk, ill, or just at
the end of a really long drive.
7. Talking
Communication
might well be the single greatest invention and advantage of
human beings over the rest of the animal kingdom. We have a
complex and exacting method of transferring information,
thoughts, ideas and scores that have made it possible to
continue to learn, improve and develop upon one another’s
experience. Of course most of us use it for a completely
different reason these days, including updating each other on
our current level of drunkenness and making sure our children
know just how many smiley faces we think of them. But with the
development of technology we have also increased our ability to
communicate constantly. Almost all of us carry cell phones that
can transmit any number of digital signals from voice calls to
twitter blogs and more. As a result we now spend more time
talking then we ever have, and most of it complaining about how
many messages we have.
6. Surfing the Internet
A
growing activity we spend our life time doing is surfing the
internet. This is not the time we use talking on media devices
and separate from the time we spend emailing, or even working on
the computer. This is the amount of time we spend simply looking
at things on the internet. Some of it is a passing fancy, a
wandering question we have come up with, but a lot of it is
actively searching for
things we need to know. This has grown to such an extent that
while people used to be considered ‘well read’ when they knew an
answer, now people roll their eyes and assume you have an
internet connection and an addiction to Wikipedia. Not everyone
spend their lives looking for random, if interesting, pieces of
information but most of us feel the need to gather together
good, funny, and fascinating information. Some of it may come in
handy, we believe, but mostly it is the human urge to explore
and understand that ends up costing countless hours spent on the
internet. Of course there are other natural instincts that drive
people to spend hours trolling the internet, but the less said
about those natural urges the better.
5. Reading
Despite what the prophets are saying, it seems that people are
reading more and more. We have the Harry Potter craze to thank
for the renewed attention in reading, but the internet has also
helped. Books, eBooks and other electronic resources like Amazon
and eBay have made the written word
even more accessible. And much like the video phone fell under
the popularity of text messages, people are starting to remember
that some things can only be done, and done well with written
words. Film, being an art form in itself, is no doubt taking up
a lot of our lifetime, but people are continuing to invest more
hours in reading. Reading a book makes people feel like they
have accomplished something; it is rewarding. But often when
people watch a film it makes them feel like they have wasted two
hours. The ability to read and write separates us from the rest
of the animal kingdom, and may be the source of all our success.
Look at it this way, if a brick can do it, it’s probably not
worth spending too much of your life on.
4. Wishing
We
live in a remarkable time, despite the economy. We enjoy more
freedom, (in our parts of the world anyway),
then anyone has before. We have more opportunities, more
chances, and more equality. There are still battles to win
against racism, sexism and all sorts of other –ism’s but by
large we are now brought up to believe not only that we can do
well, but that we probably should do. With such prosperity we
naturally spend a lot more time wishing and hoping about what we
will and might do. We are brought up with more hope, less
restriction, and a genuine belief that we can accomplish almost
anything. Heck! a man even walked on the moon, and that was over
40 years ago, before they even had flat screen TV’s and cell
phones.
3. Sex
No matter how much we might wish otherwise, we spend
surprisingly little of our 613,200 hours having sex. We do
however, (men especially), spend a lot of that time thinking,
planning, and hoping for it. (It’s called puberty). It has also
been suggested that most of human civilization has been created
in order to attract our significant others, and often times many
insignificant others. It’s hard to disagree with. After all when
we crave fame, fortune and success it mostly comes down to a
bunch of junk about self satisfaction, fulfillment and purpose.
Which is just shorthand for sex, right? The internet, despite
however many other things it has done, has spread and enhanced
our ability to spend time on sex, while never actually
increasing the time we spend on doing it. (Delicately put, or
what?)
2. Traveling
Think
about it, how much time do you spend going from one place to
another every day? It’s a lot isn’t it? But let’s take it
further; let’s say that traveling is almost all we do. Whether
it’s driving to work, flying to Hawaii, walking to your bedroom,
or running to the fridge it’s clear that most of our lives are
taken up traveling. You could even say that most action is
traveling, after all fingers have to travel to the keys in order
to type, legs have to lift for us to kick, and eyes have to move
from one place to another for us to read. Even our chest travels
up and down as we breathe! This is a deeply held fact of life
but as people of the future, (even if we don’t fly around in
hover crafts we are the future), we do see distance as something
negotiable. As a result we never actually stop to say it
anymore. We travel so much it’s a wonder we go anywhere come
holiday time, we should just stay still for a week to catch our
breath.
1. Sleeping
Is
it any wonder we sleep so much considering all the traveling we
do? We need a break after all our eating, our whishing, all our
talking, watching and you know what-ing. Our days are made up of
24 hours. That’s 3 sets of 8, and we are recommended to take one
of these 8 hours and use it to sleep. Whether you get your full
eight hours or not the amount of sleep we get when we are babies
and the amount of naps we take as we get older more than make up
for it. We spend at least a third of our lives asleep,
unconscious and oblivious to the world. Maybe that’s why we
invented whishing and language, so we could do some of our
dreaming while conscious to try and get it out the way. Who
knows? The fact is the single greatest activity we spend our
lives doing, is not living our lives, but sleeping. Our lives
are subdivided into so many different categories, (see items 10
through 9), that we spend most of our time doing things we never
really plan on, but do out of necessity. It’s not like we have a
choice in the matter of either, because you don’t get a great
deal of enjoyment out of life if you try and stop sleeping.
