Have you ever been stuck at an empty intersection with no cross traffic and no opposing traffic? Yet you can’t move until the red light, run by a 1950s-era mechanical timer, finally decides to change. Sucks, doesn’t it?
Life is finite
Assuming a lifespan of 85 years, a human life is 44,676,000 minutes long.
- When you were in your 20s, this seemed like a long time.
- However, when you are in your 70s, and the number of celebrities, friends, relatives and acquaintances who have kicked the bucket before you increases daily, it doesn’t seem that long.
To make matters worse, if it appears that time passes faster the older you get, it actually does.
- When you were four, a year felt like it was 25 percent of your entire life…because it was.
- At 75, a year represents a mere 1.3 percent of your life and seems to pass in the blink of an eye.
That’s the thing about getting older. You become increasingly aware of the fact you have only a limited time remaining. Hell, there is no guarantee you’ll even wake up in the morning.
This is why the older you get, the more precious time becomes.
Bureaucratic murder
Now let’s say you are responsible for programming your city’s traffic lights.
- If you do the best job possible, traffic runs smoothly.
- However, if you don’t give it your all, what’s the worst that could happen? Everyone’s commute takes a couple of minutes longer.
Hardly worth worrying about…right? Well, let’s do some math.
- We’ll assume your lack of effort costs 10,000 commuters two minutes a day, five days a week. That’s five million wasted man-hours every year.
- Guess what? Over the course of nine years, you being a slacker ends up wasting the equivalent of an entire human lifetime.
- And, because your government job has little oversight, you literally get away with murder at least once a decade.
We hope you are proud of yourself.
Karma’s a bitch
No matter how young you are, one day you will realize you have only a limited time left. You will pray that those still in the workforce show as much respect for your time as you didn’t show for others when you were in their shoes.
Unfortunately, unless you passed a respect for other peoples’ time on to the younger generation, it could very well come back to bite you. And, like General Custer, you’ll have it coming.