When I was a young boy, I treated time as an infinite element. Time was not of a high value to me and I treated it as if I were to live forever. As I grew older I started to pay attention to the fact that most people live between 60 and 90 years and only a small percentage of individuals live past 90 and even a 100. The first time I thought about it when I was about 30 years old. At the age of 30 I already thought that I lived a long life. 30 years is a long time. So, if some people live 60 years and others 90, – that’s the difference of 30 years and that is a huge difference, I thought. That’s when the subject of longevity really started to interest me. I wanted to know how I can live a longer life. At that time I was thinking of longevity as one-dimensional attribute: number of years you live. If 30 years felt to me like a great chunk of life, why don’t I figure out how to live that extra 30 years. I learned everything I thought I needed to know about how to take care of my body, so it can live as long as possible and that’s when I made lots of changes to my lifestyle. I thought I figured it all out but than I started to understand that the true measurement of longevity is not the number of years alone and that there is another very important component to longevity. It is much more important than the actual number of years lived.
The other, more important, component of longevity is how much of that entire time of your existence that you actually lived, how much time that you actually spent doing the things you truly love, how much time you spent with people you actually want to be with.
There are 2 types of longevity: one is the total amount of years you are alive and the other is the amount of life in the total years you existed. A lot of people pay attention to the first, but not to the former. For me, the way I live is far more important than how long I live. For me, living the life with higher purpose is essential. When it comes to longevity, we all shall strive to have a meaning to our lives rather than solely caring about amount of years we would like to live.
I started to analyze my days, and started to see that, actually, a very small portion of my life is spent on living, doing the things I love and spending my time with people I love. I started to realize that majority of my time is wasted. Then I asked myself this question: “Why I care so much to try living to 90+ years, if only maybe 10-20 years of it is the time that I spend doing what truly brings me happiness?”. It just didn’t make sense to me to live that way. It might be better to live 60 years, 50 of which are devoted to living… Well, that didn’t excite me too much either. Ideally, I’d like to live 90+ years, at least 80 of which are spent living and not just existing.
To me, longevity is not only amount of time you existed on this planet, but also how you lived it. Did you spend the time living the life and doing the things you love or you spent most of your time doing the things that didn’t matter to you?
So, If many of us living, let’s say, 15 – 20 years (+ – 20% of our entire lifespan) and the rest of the time is wasted on things that are not important, how can we double, triple or even quadruple our life, how can we extend that time of 20 years into 40, 60, 80…? I am talking about the time that is actually spent meaningfully and purposefully.
It is a known fact that most people do not love their jobs. They say that they do, trying to fool themselves, but the reality is that most people go to work, because that’s the way our standard lives are – we all got bills to pay and we all must work. We learned to “love it”. Ask anyone if they love their job and many will say that they love it, but then ask them if they’d go to their job tomorrow if they won a huge lottery today (if they won enough money to support them very well financially for the rest of their lives). Now, be honest with yourself: If you were financially set, would you go to your work or would you find a better way of using your time?
You see, our prime time, which is when we are between the ages of 20 to 60 years old, is spend working Monday thru Friday 9-6. You have to wake up early, eat breakfast, get ready, sit in traffic getting to your job. That could be 1-2 meaningless hours of your life spent nearly every morning. Then you have 8-9 hours that you spend at work. Then another hour or so to commute back home. As you get home, you feel exhausted and hungry. You eat, you watch TV or do some other things and then you go to bed. If you got kids,- there are a few other tasks added to your agenda every day. Maybe you’d go to see your friends or you’d spend some time with your neighbors after work but you know that you have to wake up early tomorrow, so you decide to just stay home. You do that exact same thing for 5 days every week and in return you get 2 days off. That’s the normal life for many people. If days were currency, you are paying 5 days to get 2. Not a good return on time invested.
Because of your hectic schedule you do not have much time to spend with people you love and spend it the way you’d love to (not just be physically present while your mind is elsewhere). You may not have much time to do the things you love, be where you want to be, do what you want to do.
So, how much time we actually spend living the life?
Once again, the true longevity is not just amount of time of our existence on this planet, but most importantly, how much of that time we actually live. I now realize how valuable the time is and I recognize how important it is to spend it wisely. Whatever makes us happy, whatever brings joy and meaning to our lives are the things and actions that we are meant to do.
If you are in the situation,where you feel that out of 80 years, you’d truly live only 10 based on your lifestyle, – doubling, tripling or even quadrupling amount of life from the years you’d live should be of a high priority. I understand that everyone’s situation is different and that some people may feel trapped with no clear solution to increasing their longevity, but I’d like to give you a trick I always use to find solutions to practically all the puzzles I encounter in my life. The trick is to simply ask “How” questions day after day until the answers start coming to you. For example, if you don’t have time to be with your kids (truly spend meaningful time with them, like take them to a park, take them to movies, go for a dinner while being mentally and emotionally present with them) and you don’t even have 1 hour a day every day for them, but you know you must find that 1 hour a day, simply start asking question such as: how can I rearrange my life or my day, so that I have an hour every day for my kids? What can I cut out of my life that is not important or less important than spending time with my kids? Is it worth working 1 hour less and exchange these dollars for the time with the people you call your family? Would that be a good trade? Would spending time with your kids every day be more important than watching that TV show or a game you love? If you ask a “how” question and search for an answer, if you keep doing it persistently and put some time into really searching for the answers,- sooner or later the answers will start coming. You will figure it out. If they don’t come – usually it might be that you’re not really putting enough time and effort into looking for the answers or deep inside of you it is not important enough for you. Keep searching, keep thinking.
Anyhow, the point I am trying to make is that the true longevity is not just amount of years you existed, but amount of years you actually lived.
You have one life to live. Go and live it.