III. The Old Man's Accounting

A thought experiment. Imagine sitting with someone who has lived a century and counting what they actually lived.

Find the oldest person you can. Someone who has lived ninety or a hundred years. Sit down with them and do the math together. Go through their life account by account.

Take away the years spent as a slave to creditors. Take away the years spent chasing women or men. Take away the years spent on political campaigns, on pleasing powerful people, on pointless quarrels, on managing other people's money. Take away the years lost to illness that they brought on themselves through bad habits. Take away the years spent numb, distracted, going nowhere in particular.

What is left?

The answer, for most people, is very little. They lived to ninety but really lived for perhaps ten or fifteen years. The rest was just time passing through them.

Most people live as if they will never die. They do not notice that time is moving. They spend it as though they had an unlimited supply. They keep promising themselves that the real life starts later: after the next promotion, after the children leave, after retirement, after things calm down.

Things do not calm down. They just change shape. One day the person who was always about to start living reaches the end and learns, too late, that they never started.