The average U.S. life expectancy is 77, or 4004 weeks.
I'm 26.4 years old, or 1,381 weeks, or 9,668 days. Except for a particularly unlucky incident or some kind of illness, I can expect to live for another 2,623 weeks.
I don't really know what that means. Weeks are something I live through and only vaguely plan. Most weeks are filled with the humdrum of life, punctuated with a dinner or party. The pauses between work, exercise, eating, and sleep feel like commas, semicolons, and periods. Every so often there's a question mark. Even rarer is an exclamation.
So what can it possibly mean to have 2,623 weeks left?
One way to try and put things in perspective is to count how many things we might experience in our time left.
I have about 50 years left to live.
That means 50 more Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Years'.
I try to read at least 12 books a year, or 606 more before the end of my life.
There are 195 countries in the world, and I've been to 17 of them. If I wanted to visit all of them, I'd have to visit 3-4 countries a year.
I'm not married yet. Even if I got married this year, I'd have hopefully 50 years of marriage.
Suppose I have a kid at 32, I'd have 45 years with them. 45 orbits around the sun with them.
I have about 2 meals a day. That's 36,912 meals left.
If I average 12k steps a day, that's 221,472,000 steps left in my life. Where else can I walk with these two feet?
It is well known the drunken sailor who staggers to the left or right with n independent random steps will, on average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime, of many, many, independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
Richard W. Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, 1997