I have occasionally encountered people who seem to view life, in particular their working life, as a period to just suffer through. Older colleagues may tell you that they have “only eight years left”, with the implication that their life starts once they enter retirement. This view I have even encountered among much younger people. I recall friends and acquaintances telling me that they would like to write a book or run for office in retirement. Postponing anything you really want to do is probably not the best idea, and not just because your lifespan may be cut short due to illness or an accident. Your life happens now, not in the distant future.

One of my friends works for the government. He is content enough with his job but he sometimes dryly remarks that he will probably do his current job for the rest of his working life. To underline this point, he set up a countdown timer that tells him how many years, months, days he has left until the big day will be finally there. The framing is probably not optimal. Earlier this year, I was in a bit of a slump at work, going through an utterly tedious project. One day, I also pulled up a website to calculate how much time I have left until retirement. The exact number is not so relevant but we can use 250 months for the sake of simplicity.

As I looked at the figure on the screen, my first thought was not that this is a long stretch of time to go through. Indeed, if your work is not great it may feel like punishment. You can normally look for a different job, though, and at least get a change of the environment this way. Instead, I looked at the numbers and thought that this is not even that much time. Realistically, I should not even set the end point at the presumed date of retirement but to an age like 55 or 60 because you will obviously go through physical decline, however minor the effects may feel at the moment. You will simply not be able to do some activities at 60 that you may still be able to enjoy at 40 or 45.

When you have to hold down a day job, it is very easy to fall into a routine. You do your work, do a few chores, eat, squeeze in a bit of exercise, and read some news online. This is your Monday to Friday, condensed. Entire months can easily go by without anything noteworthy happening. Unfortunately, I often feel like this when I am particularly busy at work. Everything turns into a blur and at the end of the week a lot of time has passed, but if I did not briefly write down key contributions I would quickly forget about them. Your brain gives you important feedback this way: your work is not important enough to be remembered. The implication is that you should perhaps also do something else. Some people keep bucket lists for this purpose.

My bucket list is thankfully quite empty. I am surely not the most well-traveled person but I have seen some parts of the world. I have also lived in multiple countries. My experience with the third world is very limited and it seems that I, unfortunately, will not be able to rectify the situation. The only country I am vaguely interested in visiting is Japan but even if this does not happen, I will be fine. Sure, it would be different if I was there but after watching some streams of people walking through various districts of Tokyo or Osaka I think I have gotten a decent impression, and walking around randomly is indeed something I like to engage in when I travel. However, ten to fifteen years ago, such possibilities did not exist whereas today there are endless amounts of high-definition video content to be found online.

Still, as empty as my bucket list may be, I had not mapped it to my remaining active lifespan. In the past, I have mentioned that I rarely play “big” video games. In the last fifteen years, the only AAA releases I played were Red Dead Redemption, GTA V, The Witcher III, and Dragon Quest XI. I have a backlog of games, though. Realistically, I am not going to make a serious dent in it in the next twenty years, certainly not at the current pace. Nonetheless, one change I made early this year was to dedicate some time to play a few more games, in particular skill-based arcade releases. I find this very satisfying, and this year I managed to achieve one-credit clears (1CC) in a bunch of games, some of which I had been thinking for years of “sometimes” properly learning them. Getting a 1CC in the original Street Fighter II with several characters felt great. I also got 1CCs in the three Street Fighter Alpha games as well as in Street Fighter EX2 Plus. This felt meaningful to me because these achievements required some dedication and not just putting in a bit of time. Skill is also important. Now I feel more at ease because in two genres I like, I have reached a decent level of competency in arguably the most relevant titles or at least the historically most significant ones, i.e. Street Fighter II in the fighting-game genre and Tetris The Grand Master in the action-puzzle genre. I still need to clear one classic shmup and I hope to get a 1CC in Dodonpachi at some point. Here, the key point is that focusing on time, or the lack thereof, changed my perspective to be less of a dabbler and play fewer games but take them more seriously.

I also dedicated more time to watching movies. There was probably only one period in my life when I spent a significant amount of my spare time on movies, i.e. when DVDs hit the mainstream, but that was decades ago. A while ago I made a list of movies I remembered and liked, and also wrote down the names of directors and actors whose work appeals to me. There are a few genres I like more than others, such as masculine action and epic crime. Then I went through a few “best of” lists, albeit these you nowadays need to take with a big grain of salt as they normally target normies whereas in the early days of the Internet you had nerds recommending movies (and games) to other nerds, and a product was considered good if there was nerd consensus that its quality was high. These times are long gone. This year, I have watched a few dozen movies, easily more than I have watched in the decade before in total. I also rewatched some classics. Plenty of movies were just tolerable, quite a few were okay, and some I found surprisingly entertaining, like the first few entries in the Fast and Furious franchise. Obviously, watching movies is hardly a high-brow activity, but an immediate effect of dedicating time to watching at least one or two movies a week was that time felt to slow down a bit. There may still not be much happening at work that is remarkable, but at least I no longer look back on the week on Friday, wondering where all the time has gone.

Health is another topic I have started to take more seriously. I should add that I am in pretty good heath, in particular when I compare myself to people my age. Still, last year there was a moment where I thought that I needed to focus on my health a bit more strongly. I was traveling frequently for work back then and frequently got to eat in really nice restaurants. When the food is excellent, you may eat a bit more than you otherwise would. In a similar vein, if you work long hours, you may also just choose the path of least resistance and skip going to the gym. Sometimes it does not even work out time-wise because the gym may close before you were able to wrap up the day.

One evening I looked at myself as I was soaking in the bathtub in my hotel room, and concluded that I was getting flabby. In my physical prime, I was about 80 kg and lean. Back then, though, I had about 86 kg and my pants did not fit so well anymore. This was a wake-up call, and while I was far from being fat, I certainly did not want to further go down that path. Consequently, I began to relentlessly track my weight. I managed to first shed some fat. More recently, I have also started taking the gym a bit more seriously again. Of course, the goal is to remain healthy, first and foremost. I am currently at a relatively lean 77 kg, with clearly visible abs. If I can maintain that, I will be happy. Here, my thinking was that the longer I ignore my health, the more difficult it will be to recover.

I think that we have a lot of time on this earth. However, if we are careless about it, it can easily just slip away. You may find this ironic, but when I was supposedly wasting my time, years ago when I did not work and entertained myself with going out and picking up women, I did not think that this time was wasted at all. Objectively this may have been the case. However, this was a period of my life in which I experienced a lot. There was something interesting happening at least every other day. I have very vivid memories of that time. In contrast, only after I joined the workforce did time start feel as if it was slipping away. As it turns out, if you spend the entire week going through the motions and filling out TPS reports, your brain just throws out these memories. Even if you have 40 years left instead of 20, this time can go by a lot faster than you may think.