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Your Life Is More Over Than You Think - Human Invariant

humaninvariant.substack.com · 767 words · saved by 2 readers

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 ab

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…

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