In less than a month of it coming out, I sunk around 50 hours into Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. 50 hours. That’s over two days of playing one game. It sounds gross, but then I got onto reflecting on the other numbers that I run up on other aspects of life.
We sleep for a third of our lives. That’s obvious. Roughly 8 hours a night, 24 hours a day, easy to calculate. So, if you live to 80 years old, really you’ve been awake for around 54 years. Damn that’s short. I’d even skim off the first seven or eight years or so since I barely remember any of it. We’re down to about 47 years of sweet living.
But what about other stuff? I remember hearing that you spend around 2 weeks of your life stuck at traffic lights. That sounds like a conservative estimate, especially when you’re running late and you seem to hit a steady stream of red lights at every junction.
How long do we spend on the toilet? What about showering? Brushing teeth? What about washing dishes? Commuting? Waiting at bus stops? Carrying heavy shopping bags with that harsh plastic that cuts into your hand? Masturbation? Lying on the sofa hungover? Missing your stop on a train and having to get off at the next one and then go back? Riding an escalator? I’d tot that up to another 3 years off your life depending on how you get your kicks.
So, we’re down to about 44 years or so, provided you reach the fairly ambitious age of 80. Then factor in how a lengthy portion of that is probably spent working. If you love your job, that’s fantastic. If not, then a hearty portion of those 44 years will be spent in misery. Let alone any other unrelated misery that happens during the rest of your life. If you’re an unfortunate soul who doesn’t make it far past 40 then you’ve barely had a chance to kick about on this planet.
So that gives us maybe 30 years of actual leisure time? Not equating to being a 30-year-old of course, that’s 30 years of leisure distributed equally across all ages from about 7 to 77.
So, when does this living thing even happen? The quote that is probably incorrectly attributed to John Lennon, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” is apt. Which bit of living are we doing? And when?
When I played GTA IV on Xbox in my teens, I could go into the menu and see the time I’d spent doing various things. There were numbers detailing how long Nico Bellic had been driving, swimming and running when I’d been controlling him. It told me how long I’d used each weapon, where I’d spent time, who I’d spent it with. It was just a clock, but it broke down my many hours of gameplay and told me a story of how I’d used that time and what I’d done with it.
I kind of wish a similar thing existed for my life. Where we could see exactly where our hours are going. Would we be happy with what we see? Or would it just be entertaining to compare with friends the time spent on the toilet. Google or Facebook probably already know. Screen time tracking never makes for good reading. Maybe it’s better not to know. The mystical parts of life could be the unknowns. We are the constant accumulation of everything we have experienced and are currently experiencing. The things we are actually doing during the hours of a day might not be important. Maybe it’s more about who we are at any given moment. It’s all life, whether it’s the highs, the lows or the absurd swirls of greyish matter that dwarfs all else. Then all of a sudden, we die, and nothing matters anymore.
