Skip to main content

"Maybe next week"

Image
By
Australian singer Guy Sebastian has a new song out and it got me thinking.



It's clearly an ode to a friend whose "book ran out of pages". Now he wishes he could have said "out of all the moments in my life the ones I got to share with you were probably my favourite."

In a later verse he puts his finger on the problem. "We fill up all our days with workin' ... just to make ends meet. Too busy to call, we'll catch up next week. And then it gets to next week and we say maybe next week...". Obviously this isn't good (as the singer now realises).

We don't have that many weeks

All this talk of pages and weeks reminds me of Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks. Tim graphically represents each week in our life with a box. 52 boxes across and 90 boxes down. Shockingly, this grid of our life fits easily on a page.

In the follow-up post The Tail End he did the maths of how many times he'll get to do the things he loves. He includes baseball games and swims at the beach before looking at the time with those he loves.


He estimates how many more days he'll see his parents and it's not that many. Compared to the number of days he spent with them as a kid and as a young adult, Tim calculates that he's in the last 7% of his time with them. And it's not much more for his sisters.

What to do?

Tim has his own suggestions - living near people you love (so you see them more) and prioritising the people (or activities) that are important to you.

I reckon many of us struggle to name the five most important things in our life - let alone match our schedule to those things. It's probably another reason why advertisers get us to buy so much junk. If we don't have a clear idea of what's important to us, it's so much easier for them to convince us that what they're selling is important. Then "we fill up all our days with workin' ... just to make ends meet."

By buying less junk and stuff we don't need, we don't need to be as obsessed with working all the time and we can make space for the people and things we care about.
Read more about:

Comments

  1. Unknown31 July 2019 at 11:22

    Love this reminder! Thank you for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. david2 August 2019 at 09:57

    You're welcome. :) There'll be more tips about happiness coming up. You can make sure you see them by subscribing to future posts (top of the page). :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don't dump on charities

By
Netflix causes mass dumping. Here's an alternative. January is usually a big month for physical donations to charity. In 2019 it's been over-the-top (literally) as charity donation bins have been overflowing with items. The Netflix series "Tidying Up" by famous declutterer Marie Kondo (see her book ) has inspired many to declutter their homes. But in the process they've cluttered the streets. What's so bad about donating? When the bins overflow the extra items are thrown away. Having been in the weather, the rain and on the ground, they are classified as contaminated and cannot be sold. To make it worse, much of what fills the bins is not good enough to sell, and is also dumped. Bad donations hurt charities 13 million dollars. That's how much it costs charities to deal with all the junk we dump on them - 60,000 tonnes a year. Lifeline says half its stores have stopped accepting donations. We might think we're helping, but that's a lot ...
4 comments
Read more

You know what to do. Ignore this ad!

By
Yes, jewellery stores pump out the ads around valentine's day - that's no surprise. After all it's a made-up day designed to sell more stuff at higher prices. But this year they seem extra desperate to sell stuff we don't want, with the "You know what to do" campaign. I reckon the sales team are scared by the number of couples that have realised that love is not in physical merchandise but in quality time. So they've made an ad exactly about these people. The message seems to be aimed straight at guys to say "even if you and your partner agree not to waste money on jewellery, you should buy her some anyway". Apparently in a relationship it's important to ignore what your wife or partner says and do what profit-motivated corporations tell you to do. I tend to disagree. If you're interested have a look - it's interesting to see how transparent it is.
2 comments
Read more

Why millionaires don't "feel" rich

By
We're wealthier than ever - so why don't we feel like it? Australia has gone almost three decades without recession. The stock market recently hit a record high. Our wages are record highs. Home loan rates are at record lows. We live in one of the richest countries in the world at the richest point in history. So what's wrong? Comparison Wealth is relative. So what do we compare to? Where we expect to be? "When your wages growth is only 2 or 3 per cent, you don't feel as well-off as when it's going up 10 per cent. That's that nominal distortion that people often suffer from" , says economist Shane Oliver, and that "expectations have grown a lot faster than reality." We're earning more than last year, but we want even more. So compared to our imaginary situation, we see ourselves as worse off. What we see around us? Shane Oliver again. "If you think about it - Australians today are a lot wealthier. They're living far ric...
4 comments
Read more