Wasting Your Day is a Tragedy

The average person has about 12,000 good ones, give or take.

Let’s say you were to die on your 80th birthday. That would mean you lived 29,200 days.

But let’s not count the first ten years. While they’re certainly formative in shaping the person you’ll become, unless you’re suffering a serious hardship they’re going to pass by without much contemplation or awareness of your situation. You’re going to discover new things like caterpillars and enjoy simple pleasures like a radiator. Just getting an ice cream will make you happy for several hours. You’ll start counting the days to Christmas two months in advance. Then you’ll get a Lego set and think you’ve really hit the big time.

Then you’ll become a teenager and turn into a caged animal living in a strange home. You’re going to be emotional and frustrated and take certain things far too seriously. With any luck you’ll come out unscathed and not start cutting yourself.

Then you’re an adult for a long time, then you get old. While it’s certainly possible to live a fulfilling life past age sixty, highly possible actually, look at Donald Trump, he’s seventy-eight and still has the energy to be an unabashed racist, I don’t think it’s something you can count on. There are just too many things that can go wrong. Cancer. Dementia. Some people just turn into losers and watch TV in a recliner all day and have conversations about the worth of plastic containers.

For these reasons, I’m going to say that for most people, their prime years are going to be between the ages of twenty and fifty-five, give or take.

That’s 12,775 days. If you were being especially agist about it, you could even narrow it down to the ages of twenty and forty, which would be 7,300 days.

The parameters by which you decide to trim it are going to no doubt be based on your current age, but I think 12,000 is a fair estimate. Whether your best days start when you’re twenty or fifty, or sixty, there’s going to be a bell curve of your accelerating and coasting and slowing down.

12,000. I don’t know how to quantify it. Say you had 12,000 dollars in the bank. Wasting a dollar isn’t consequential. If you put one into a soda machine and don’t get it back, you’re not really going to care.

But, say you have a lot of things you want to do, and you’re not doing them. You want to go to Portugal, or do the Ironman, or date a Parisian model.

Those wasted dollars start to add up. Ever been unemployed, and noticed how fast your savings go? I feel like a lot of people are spending their tokens this way, in taverns, in dispassionate relationships, even with sickly priorities such as seeking the approval of nepotism.

That’s why wasting days gives me so much anxiety. Moping around, depressed about a breakup or something, thinking about various injustices, feeling defeated, and coming up with excuses, like the weather or various discriminations. Really just being hungover is a wasted day.

Before you know it, that 12,000 is cut in half, and nothing to show for it. I believe this is how people go broke. That moment most of us have had at some point in our lives, where we go, damn, I need to borrow some money or something.

But now you can’t. You wasted 12,000 dollars and there’s no more. You can’t get it back. I don’t personally believe in the afterlife, but I’ve seen plenty of homeless people. That’s what I think of someone who spends all of their time feeling sorry for themselves, spiritually speaking.

But we’ve all done it. We’ve all wasted plenty of days. And don’t mistake, I’m not one of these seize the day, I read a few Forbes puff-pieces and now I tell everyone I wake up at 4 am, Donald Trump voting terrified empty vessel trying to impress my dirty monied Euro trash in-laws type of guys.

By way of distribution, some days are going to be wasted. Life isn’t some idiot’s Instagram page. You aren’t going to be bungie jumping in Borneo every day. Some days simply have no chance.

03/20/2022 - I went to a job interview for a job I knew I wasn’t going to get. These assholes made me wear a suit, I presume just to exert power. It was an hour drive fighting traffic. I got there and they made me wait for an hour and fifteen minutes. When I went into be interviewed, a nineteen-year-old asked me what kind of animal I’d be, if I could be any animal. I knew it would disqualify me from the job, but I looked at her like she was stupid and said, “Human, because I like to watch American Idol and understand the words.” She looked crestfallen and turned pretty cold after that. Upon leaving the office I found a parking ticket on my car and started screaming profanities. I returned home to find I’d locked myself out of my apartment because I’d given my key to a friend who’d been visiting and told him to leave it under the mat, and he flew home to Washington with the key in his pocket. I confirmed this via phone and pretended I wasn’t irate. I waited two hours for a locksmith. The guy made a snotty comment about how he didn’t have time for “these small jobs.” “Why’d you show up then,” I said. Then I looked at the DoorDash app for about half an hour, debating whether I should order something or make a sorry dinner. Twice I added an order to my Cart and then deleted it, unable to justify the high price markup. Then I decided I’d simply drive to one of the restaurants on the app and save all of the fees. However, I found myself unable to move and staring at the wall while a rush of panic washed over me. I walked to the corner store and bought a bottle of wine and a box of macaroni and cheese. As I was walking home the bottom of the cheap thin black plastic bag fell out and the bottle broke on the cement and wine oozed everywhere. I walked back to tell them what happened, it was now 10:01 pm and the store was closed. I returned home and threw the box of macaroni straight into the garbage, because I was trying to lose a little weight and not be eating late. I went into the bedroom and stacked several blankets on top of me rather than turning on the furnace, which I’d been putting off for over a week, because I didn’t know how to light the pilot.

I think most days, though, have a chance. And this is coming from a deeply pessimistic individual who thinks the whole country is garbage. As long as you have something to look forward to, an average day is a win. It’s like a base hit, or a walk even. You got up, you went to work, you exercised, you had dinner with someone you care about, win. Dollar well spent. You woke up on a Sunday, you did some laundry, you vacuumed, you got an oil change, you bought a new pair of shoes, you watched football, the sun went down. Dollar well spent. But in between those singles you’ll have home runs, you’ll meet your future wife, or laugh so hard you can’t breathe, or finish that painting you’ve been working on.

It’s just the waste that scares me. 12,000 dollars isn’t a lot of money. Regardless of the amount of your savings, you know this. This below image is 10,000 dollars in quarters. Close enough. Imagine, every day, you’re tossing one of those into a fountain, and one day you throw the last one. It’s not that many.

$10,000 in quarters.

My point here isn’t to try and motivate myself or anyone else to try and improve their life. I’m simply trying to quantify how our resources are finite, and our days are not expendable. A wasted day turns into a week and into a year. You can spend a dollar every day on a bottle of water that’s just going to end up in the ocean, or you could drink clean water from the tap and at the end of the year take your 365 dollars and spend a weekend at a hotel by the beach.

I’m just saying that a day spent in defeat is a wasted day, and we should all make whatever changes needed in order to make sure it doesn’t happen too often. Look at it like you have twelve thousand dollars. A few bucks out the window, no big deal. But it adds up quickly. You go to the same bar every day, years later you’ve spent thousands, on what. You could have done something with it.

This is what I’ve been thinking about recently, it’s fairly motivating, or depressing, depending on the day.