We love countdowns. The last seconds of the year are flashed in a big screen on a New Year’s Eve party. Where I live, we get daily reminders on how many days are left before Christmas Day. In the middle of the work week, we anticipate the coming weekend and silently hope that the days go faster.
But there is something that we do not realize. We are not just counting down towards some event, we are actually counting down towards our eventual demise.
The Stoics teach us that we do not die in the moment of our death, instead we die a little on each passing day. Death is not an event, but a process.
We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day.
For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth.
Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death.
It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process.
Seneca
In his letters, Seneca wrote to his friend about his travel to an island that has this beautiful villa. This villa was owned by a person named Servilius Vatia, who was famed for living a life of absolute leisure, and whom people call lucky. But Seneca thinks otherwise.
Vatia isn’t someone you ought to emulate according to Seneca, but as a reminder on how (not) to live a full life. People envy him for living a life of luxury and ease, thinking that it must be a good life when you have no problems to worry about. But he retorts:
He who lives for no one does not necessarily live for himself.
Seneca, On Vatia’s Villa
The Finish Line
We all yearn for the day we will no longer face any problems or challenges. For employees and workers, this day is what we call our retirement. For some, this is nothing more than a dream, and they resign to the fact that they will work until they die. But for others, reaching this goal requires hard work, sacrifice, and the discipline to delay gratification for some greater reward in the future.
This may seem like a worthwhile goal, but it actually distracts us from living our lives to the fullest. I too fell victim to this thought, after years of reading about financial independence, early retirement, and freedom from work. In our pursuit of retirement, we develop tunnel vision, and we forget that our real life is what is happening in our peripheral vision.
We get so scared and anxious that we will not have enough when we grow old that we deprive our youths on what makes life fulfilling. And when we finally reach our “freedom number” or our retirement age, we find that the reality isn’t as hyped up as it was in our minds. As with everything else, humans have this ability to normalize our experiences over time. Freedom from work feels good at the beginning months or years, but eventually you find that you have no drive and no energy to live. Thus we have countless anecdotes of retirees dying after just a few years of “freedom”.
Diminishing Returns
This is the basic premise of Bill Perkins’ book, Die With Zero. Our physical bodies have increasing limitations as we age. Thus, the things we can experience diminishes too as we grow older. Given this, it is counter-intuitive that we are delaying the things we want to do to a future where it is more difficult to do it. Even if you are in peak health at 60, it is still not the same as when you are in your 40s.
The book also posits that delayed gratification, when done excessively, leads to no gratification at all. We save and scrimp for a future that may not even happen. We are squandering our youth and vigor (time) in exchange for something that is fungible (money). And all of this given the fact that we cannot even know how long we will live.
There comes a point where saving money is actually a waste of your life energy. You exchange your time and effort (aka your life) for a salary. You then save this money in exchange for an assumed happiness in the future. Thus you are essentially denying yourself of happiness now so you can be happy in the future. Why not just take the happiness today?
The Present
This is why I resonate more today with Ramit Sethi‘s concept of living a rich life more than the idea of FIRE (Financial Independence and Early Retirement). These ideas are not contradictory: you can do both with planning and discipline. Do not develop tunnel vision in the goal of a future retirement, be aware that you still have a life to live in the moment. It is ok to save less if it means enriching your experiences in ways that cannot be replicated in the future.
Your joints and knees will start to deteriorate as you grow older. So that hike or a trek that you want to do becomes more and more untenable as you delay it. Are you deliberately delaying it just so you can save some more money for the unknown future?
The time you have with your loved ones are also not guaranteed. Even if you are fit to do the things you want, is it the same for the people you want to share the experience with? Will they even have the free time in the future if you delay things further?
As the year comes to a close and a new year dawns, let us not forget that we have a limited time to experience things. Do not live life on auto-pilot and stop racing to the end.
Photo by Elena Rabkina on Unsplash