It's Later Than You Think

A few weeks ago, I posted a thread on Twitter on harsh truths of life.

Contrary to what you may believe, this piece was not intended to be dark or morbid. It was intended to make you think—to hopefully question some underlying (yet flawed) assumptions and spark active discussion with those around you.

It's more emotion-inducing than most of my work—I teared up several times during the writing!—but also arguably the most important piece I will ever write.

My hope is for you to come away from it feeling cleansed, refreshed, and empowered to think clearly and deeply about your time and how you choose to spend it.

Harsh Truth: You'll only see your loved ones a few more times.

In May 2021, I had a conversation with a new friend that changed my life.

We were having a chat—over a few whiskeys, of course—about living in California. He had grown up there and his entire family had settled there, so I was lamenting that it was so far away from my parents and sister in Boston.

My friend asked how often I saw them and how old my parents were...

I replied that I saw them about once per year, and that they were in their mid-60s. He looked me square in the face and plainly said:

It sounds insensitive—but it's just real. It's just…math. If the average life expectancy is ~80 years, my parents are in their mid-60s, and I see them one time per year, the math—however depressing—says I will see them 15 more times before they are gone.

Our time together is finite, but we fail to recognize it until it's too late.

Time is cruel. You'll love it with all of your being, you may even pray for more of it, but the reality is that time doesn't care about you.

Your relationship with time is the ultimate unrequited love.

The morning after this conversation, I woke up and had a very candid conversation with my wife about what we wanted in life. A few days later, we listed our brand new house in California on the market. Thanks to a blazing hot housing market, we sold our house within days, packed up our things, and shipped off to the East Coast to be closer to our parents.

It's been almost a year, and it was the best decision I've ever made.

I'll never regret these tiny moments—of doing nothing in particular—that we'll get to spend together in the years ahead. I'll never regret the moments my parents get to spend with my son once he is born.

When I first shared this story on Twitter, the response was pretty overwhelming. It seemed I wasn't alone in having this painful, yet powerful, realization.

Tim Urban—one of my favorite writers (and an upcoming guest on my podcast!)—wrote about this phenomenon in a recent New York Times op-ed.

In classic Tim Urban fashion, he produced a simple visualizations to capture the sentiment of the entire piece.

Furthermore, as he points out in the piece, this same lesson applies to everyone in our lives, and to the activities we love doing, but rarely get to do—travel, museum visits, special events, etc.

Identify the people and activities you care most deeply about. Prioritize them ruthlessly.

It may be difficult, even painful, but it's a decision you'll never regret.

In his famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs commented on the power of acknowledging his own mortality:

But as Tim Urban points out in his piece, when we visualize an optimistic lifespan in a single image, we realize it is anything but.

Everything we do is in anticipation of the future. When that future comes, we simply reset to think about the next future.

"I can't wait until I'm 18 so I can leave home and go to college."

It's natural, but it's a dangerous game—one that we will lose, eventually.

Time is our most precious asset and the present is all that's guaranteed. Spend it wisely, with those you love, in ways you'll never regret.

And so we'll end where we began, with the lyrics from that famous song by Guy Lombardo…