Between this post and the next one I will celebrate my birthday. 20 years of being of legal age, kind of a round anniversary. For this reason, I decided to write about countable events, and place them not only in the context of the current birthday, but also of the entire lifespan. The grids below are interactive, so go ahead and test your inputs, too. This post is inspired by The Tail End by Tim Urban.
Talking about the lifespan, I need to make some assumptions: the average female in Belgium reaches her 85 birthday. In the coming ~50 years it will highly likely expand and demographics play also in my favour, so let’s make it round 90 :). Another assumption is that the events are equally distributed along the lifetime. As linearity is seldom a good real-life assumption, I will do my best with choosing examples.
As for a few more days I am 37, I still have 63 birthdays to enjoy. Same for summers, Christmases and dentist’s check-ups. Auch.
Annual
It is painfully countable.
More than yearly
Does it look more encouraging if we look for the events that are not that rare, and happen multiple times a year? Eg. these friends that I meet ~every quarter? Or books to be read, given I read ~6 books a year? How many times will I have a chance to see the full moon? Assuming I have a meal I particularly enjoy twice a month, how many meals are ahead?
Better, but the scroll is surprisingly short. Much shorter than a typical scrolling event.
The rare ones
On the other end of the spectrum, there are events that happen periodically, but rarelier than annual: elections, passport exchanges, stock market crashes. Once I heard that an averaged isotopic1 exchange in the living organism takes 7 years2. For me, it is a mind-blowing realization that every seven years we are literally a different person. Well, on average. How possible? Atoms are in motion, and the implied mobility warrants that one and the same atom will not forever occupy one and the same point in space. Each atom will eventually exchange with a different atom of the same element. Our bodies are build of light elements (mostly C, H, O, N, S and P), and the light elements are more mobile than the heavy elements. That is why the collective “mobility score” of 7 years is relatively short, or at least short in relation to a human lifespan. From this perspective any bug has greater integrity than a human being.
So how many such exchanges do I have ahead of me?
Events that start later
For some events the clock does not start at our birth. It makes more sense to look only at the elections I could cast a vote in. Or birthdays of my children, that only matter once they were born. Or all these crazy things I will be able to afford once I pay the mortgage.
Right side cut-off
Sadly, my expiry date is not the only right side cut-off. Especially if the events require people that are older than me, it is likely their life expectancy that makes the hard cut-off. My parents. Older family members. My husband, who is a few years older and plain demographics give men worse perspectives than women. My teachers, mentors – people who shaped me are at least a decade older than me.
Heavy? It was meant to be. If you do something wise with this realization, the world will be a better place. Check up on someone who is still around. The power behind “memento mori” is to seize the time we are still fortunate to have and make the best out of it. Thank you for reading.
Footnotes
Isotopes are variants of the same element. Distinct elements (eg. C, P, U) occupy different positions in the periodic table. Isotopes are types of the same element: carbon (dominant 12C or 14C used for carbon dating), phosphorus (that has bunch of isotopes, from 26P to 41P, among which only 31P is stable) or uranium (stable and dominant 238U is not so much of interest as 235U, which fissile material properties). If you are interested, read Wikipedia. For the purpose of this post, isotopes are atoms, but I wanted to be precise with the name of the phenomenon.↩︎
Prove me wrong or at least provide a reference; I have not found a good written one. I heard it back in time in a conversation with a chemistry professor. Yet, the number does not really matter. Isotopic exchange is a physical phenomenon, and what matters is that it happens. How often is a secondary issue.↩︎