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Calculating Lifetime Reserve: Mortality Mathematics by Mark Hatmaker



[Originally offered as "Can You Afford the Time to Read This? Can You Afford Not To." By request, I offer these two pieces as a whole. Those who find this approach to life soul-resonating may find Part 3, "Lifetime Asymmetry" of like value--all available in our book The Frontier Stoic: Life Lessons from Those Who Lived a Life. Available at some fly-by-night store called Amazon.]

How old are you? Me? I’m 58, be 59 in 3 weeks.

Convert your age into months. Me? 696 months and 3 weeks.

The average lifespan of the adult male in the US is 74.8 years, for women it is 76.3.

That’s 897 months and 912 months respectively.

The average human lifespan is less than 1,000 months.

[And that’s assuming we make it that long. There Are NO Guarantees.]

If you are a male and are 38 years old or older, you have already used up over half of your average lifespan reserve.

39 or older if you are female.

Subtract your current lived months from your average lifespan months to get your lifespan reserve.

Me? That’s 201 months remaining.

You have slept for an approximate 1/3rd of your life.

You will continue to do so.

Subtract 1/3rd from your reserve.

For me that leaves 134 awake months in my lifespan reserve.

For most of us work, paying bills, trips to the store, traffic, scrolling your phone, downtime for flu, watching TV, etc. take up another approximate 1/3rd of our lives, so subtract an additional 1/3rd from your remaining reserve.

For me? Well, that drops it to 67 months.

67 months presumably free and clear to pursue aspirations, dreams, goals, hone skills, take up new hobbies, go on new adventures etc.

Keep in mind that 67 months is 5 ½ years.

That’s it.

Do your own calculation from months to years and see how much “free lifetime” is left to you.

And keep in mind these years at the latter half of life are statistically less mobile, less agile, less able as we all fight against the inevitability of entropy.

So, if we calculate it in “free lifetime” alone, me with my 5 ½ years and you with your own “End Date”, ask yourself…

·        Are you using these end times well?

·        Are you squeezing all the juice out of what ya got while ya can?

·        Drinking life to the dregs?

·        Catching all the sunrises, sunsets, moon-viewings, flower smellin’s, cat pettin’, dog hugging, loving and kissing that you can?

·        Or…

·        Are you running out the clock pretending that the Mathematics of Mortality do not apply to you?

I wish nothing but long healthy happy lives for all, but…we all know that is an impossibility in many cases, perhaps our own.

What we do have control over is the right here, the right now. And then the moment after that.

And then the next. It is these moments that make up our remaining months.

Fill them bright and pure, Brothers & Sisters!

Now, I know some of you will find this all dire as hell, others inspiring as hell.

Either way, the math is the math.

Embrace the facts and GO!

HOW TO DOUBLE YOUR LIFETIME RESERVE: Life Reserve Addendum

For those who were/are depressed by the Life Reserve Mathematics.

I offer that “Memento Mori” [“Remember you must die”] is a lop-sided equation.

It is the stick in a carrot-and-stick spur to betterment.

The carrot that is the obverse of memento mori, which is [to my mind] the more powerful and useful is “Memento vivere!” [“Remember you must live!”]

·        Do not let lifetime reserve daunt you.

·        Use the mathematics to say, “Oh, I better get on the stick!”

·        Ask of everything, “Is binge watching Karate Kid the best use of my life?”

·        “Is this meme-sharing, fist-shaking, phone-scrollin’, traffic fuming getting me to Happy with a capital H?”

·        Memento vivere! Asks us to Wake Up to the Facts of Mortality.

·        Sniff each moment for the gift it is.

·        Those who can grasp that “Be. Here. Now. Appreciate. The. Now.” Double their Lifetime Reserve.

How is that possible?

The 1/3rd of life that is not free time the 3rd devoted to work, traffic, trips to the store can become additional moments of “Live in the Moment.”



When the Missus was facing down the barrel of the brain tumor gun, we sat in traffic on stormy rainy winter days headed for Vanderbilt Hospital for more treatment. The worry always lay hard in the pit of the stomach, yet I would look over at her and she at me and this traffic was yet one more moment she was right here—alive and I was right there with her.

If I didn’t have her, I would kick and scream and cry for those moments in traffic, those times “stuck” in line at a store.

So, yes, memento mori, we will die—all of us—some of us sooner than the expected reserve. If not you, someone you love.

This is not a warning; it is an inevitability.

It is the fact of life, the fact of death.

But…

Memento vivere!

Grab it, squeeze it, hug it, use it NOW!

Your Freetime Lifetime Reserve + your 1/3rd Duty Time can double your Lifetime Reserve but…

Only if you use it. Only if you are alive and awake to it.

Only if you live honestly.

Let us allow the polymathic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe express why we should weight the other side of the equation.

“Memento mori! Enough of that,

I’d rather not repeat it;

In the flight of life, why should I

Torture you with its limits?

Therefore, like an old curmudgeon,

I recommend to you, docendo, [Teach by example]

My dear friend, in your own way,

Just memento vivere!"

Lifetime Mathematics requires balance in the equation.

Scare the hell outta yourself with memento mori, now get giddy as F with memento vivere!

All the best my Brothers & Sisters!

Now go Live and docendo to others by your glorious example!

Mabitsiar’u!

Resources for Livin’ the Warrior Life, Not Just Readin’ About It

The Black Box Warehouse

The Indigenous Ability Blog

The Rough ‘n’ Tumble Raconteur Podcast


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