Kobe Bryant said, somewhere in the last few years of his life, that the biggest mistake we make is thinking we have time. The quote has, since his death, taken on a kind of weight it would not have carried while he was still alive. He died at forty-one. The quote, in retrospect, became prophetic. The wider culture has, since then, used it as a kind of motivational shorthand, in the way that quotes from people who died young tend to become motivational shorthand for the people who outlived them.
I want to write about the quote not in its motivational form, but in the form it actually arrives in, when one allows it to land properly rather than to be absorbed as a piece of inspirational furniture. The quote is, on close examination, not a motivational claim. The quote is a structural observation about how human beings handle the finite resource of their own lives, and the observation is, in some real way, more uncomfortable than the motivational packaging suggests.
The observation is that we operate, in most of our adult life, on the working assumption that the time available to us is, in some basic sense, sufficient for the things we intend to do. The assumption is not articulated. The assumption is, more accurately, the background condition of how we make decisions about what to do this year, this month, this Tuesday afternoon. The decisions are made against the implicit backdrop of an indefinite continuation. The continuation is not, in any honest sense, indefinite. The decisions, accordingly, are being made on inaccurate inputs.
What the assumption is actually doing
The assumption of having time is, on close examination, the thing that allows almost all adult deferral to occur. The trip not yet taken. The conversation not yet had. The friend not yet called. The book not yet read. The thing not yet said to the parent who is currently still alive. Each of these deferrals is made, in the moment, on the basis of the implicit assumption that the trip, the conversation, the call, the book, the saying will be available to occur at some later date. The later date is rarely specified. The later date is, more accurately, the indefinite continuation that the assumption is operating on.
The assumption is, in some real way, the most useful working fiction adult life runs on. Without it, the small daily decisions that adult life requires would be paralyzed by the actual weight of the underlying finitude. With it, the decisions can be made smoothly, and the various deferrals can be slotted into the implicit future without requiring any active accounting for whether the future is, in fact, going to arrive in the form the deferral assumes.
The cost of the assumption is, however, not nothing. The cost is that an enormous proportion of the things we intend to do, across the entirety of an adult life, end up not occurring. They do not fail to occur because we decided not to do them. They fail to occur because we deferred them, repeatedly, on the assumption that they would be available to be done later, and the later, in many cases, did not arrive in the form the deferral had been assuming.
The trip that was going to happen next summer does not happen, because next summer something else takes priority, and the summer after that, the trip-companion’s health no longer permits it, and the summer after that, the trip-companion is gone. The conversation that was going to happen at the right moment does not happen, because the right moment, on close examination, never arrives, and the person with whom the conversation was going to occur eventually dies without having heard what one had been planning, for years, to eventually tell them. The book that was going to be read at some point gets pushed, year after year, into the next year’s list, and is, by the time one is sixty, still on the list, in a stack that has by now become statistically certain to outlive the reader.
The version of this that hit me last year
I want to describe a small moment that brought this home to me, because the moment was specific in a way that the abstract version of the observation is not.
My father, who turned seventy last month, has been visiting Bangkok twice in the last two years. The visits have been good. The visits have, in some real way, been the most substantive contact I have had with him in my adult life. During the most recent visit, I had a particular small realization that I have, since, been trying to take seriously.
The realization was simple arithmetic. My father is seventy. Men in our family, on the available evidence from the previous several generations, tend to live into their early eighties. This gives my father, in expectation, somewhere between ten and fifteen more years. The visits to Bangkok have been happening at a rate of roughly once a year. The arithmetic, accordingly, suggests that I have somewhere between ten and fifteen more visits with my father in this configuration. The number is, on examination, considerably smaller than I had been operating as if it were.
I had been operating as if the visits were the early instances of an indefinite ongoing pattern. The pattern, on the arithmetic, is not indefinite. The pattern has a particular finite number of remaining instances. The instances are, in some real way, countable. By the time one counts them, one realizes that the standard assumption of having time is, in this specific case, almost exactly wrong. I do not have time. I have, more accurately, ten to fifteen visits. The visits will, by various combinations of factors, probably end up being fewer than that, because health and travel and the various contingencies of life will, in most cases, intervene before the full theoretical number is exhausted.
This arithmetic has, in the year since I first did it, changed how I conduct the visits. Not dramatically. I have not become a different son. I have, more modestly, started taking each visit slightly more seriously than I had been taking them. I have started asking the questions I had been deferring. I have started saying, in selected moments, things I had been planning to say at some later occasion. The starting is partial. The starting is also, in some real way, the direct consequence of having allowed the arithmetic to land rather than continuing to operate on the assumption of indefinite continuation.
What the quote is really saying
Bryant’s quote, when one strips off the motivational packaging, is, on close examination, this arithmetic. The quote is the observation that the assumption of having time is, in some basic sense, almost universally inaccurate, and that the inaccuracy is producing, in most adult lives, an enormous backlog of deferred actions that will, by structural certainty, not be performed in the time available.
The quote is not, on close examination, a call to dramatic action. The quote does not, in its honest reading, require anyone to dramatically change their life. The quote requires, more modestly, the willingness to perform the arithmetic. The arithmetic is what changes things. The arithmetic is what allows the various deferred actions to be re-examined in light of the actual remaining number of opportunities for their performance.
The remaining number is, in most cases, smaller than the deferrer has been operating as if it were. The smaller-than-expected nature of the number is what produces, when the arithmetic is done, the small structural pressure to actually do some of the deferred things rather than to keep deferring them. The pressure is not, in itself, dramatic. The pressure is, more accurately, the natural response of a system that has been given accurate information about the resource it has been spending without accounting for.
What I have started doing, in the year since
I want to acknowledge that the doing-something-about-the-arithmetic is harder than it sounds. The standard pattern of deferral has been operating in me for thirty-eight years. The pattern is, by long habit, the default. The override of the default requires deliberate work that, on most days, I do not perform.
What I have, more modestly, started doing is the small ongoing practice of asking, when I notice myself deferring something, whether the deferral is being made on the basis of accurate inputs. The accurate inputs, in most cases, are the inputs about how many remaining opportunities for the deferred action are actually likely to exist. The opportunities, in most cases, are fewer than the deferral has been assuming. The recognition of this is what allows the deferral, in selected cases, to be replaced with the actual performance of the thing.
The replacement is small. The replacement is also, on close examination, where most of the meaningful work of the second half of life is going to occur. The first half of life was the building. The first half could afford to operate on the assumption of having time, because in most cases the assumption was, for that half, approximately accurate. The second half of life is the period in which the assumption stops being accurate. The not-being-accurate is the structural condition the second half is going to be lived inside. The accommodation of the not-being-accurate is what the wider work of the second half consists of.
Bryant’s quote is, in some real way, the small structural reminder that this accommodation is required. The quote does not, by itself, perform the accommodation. The performing is the work. The work is mine, in my own life, and I have not, by any honest accounting, performed enough of it yet. I have, more modestly, started. The starting is, at thirty-eight, what is currently available to me.
The next trip my father takes to Bangkok will, on the arithmetic, be one of perhaps fourteen remaining visits. The visit will, accordingly, be received as one of the fourteen rather than as one of an indefinite ongoing series. The receiving is, in some real way, the difference between operating on the assumption and operating on the accurate information. The accurate information is uncomfortable. The accurate information is also, on the available evidence, what produces, in the small remaining time, the willingness to actually do the things one had been deferring. The willingness is the dividend. The dividend, on Bryant’s quote, was the entire point.
