The time of your life
1
SPEND IT WELL
More than anyone else, Tim Urban has shown me, literally, how fleeting life is. A decade+ ago, he laid out a 90-year life on a grid of little boxes (x-axis: 52 weeks in a year; y-axis: 90 years of life). Reader, I was and still am affected. Visual representation is powerful. To see a life—which is rich with love and laughter, sorrow and tears, energy and joy, lethargy and despair, peace and wonder—translated into such stark smallness was a blow and an inspiration at once.
Nearly two years ago (I went on a writing hiatus for a while, ok? but I was still dutifully collecting articles that spoke to me (and apparently I’m feeling a little defensive about this?)), he wrote of time in the era of Covid, specifically of the time we lost with the people we used to see daily who vanished from our physical presence as we all hunkered down against the virus. His message is still relevant today.
He calls this whole time thing “Depressing Math,” a term that stems from the life grids he’s illustrated. For example, growing up in my parents’ home, I saw them for hours every single day. During college, I primarily saw them in the summer, but even then, there was daily in-person connection for a few consecutive months each year. Then I moved across the country and sometimes went up to 12 months without seeing my parents in person. Just letting a year casually pass us by. No big deal. An entire line on the x-axis of the Depressing Math grid, empty. We still talked on the phone, sure, but that’s a lot of days without my parents present in my real life.
The point Urban is making, though, isn’t to push us into depression nor get mired in contemplation of what we’ve lost so far—the point is that we can start making choices that serve our desires now. The past is set. The future is unknown and, crucially, full of opportunity. Make the most of it. Choose the paths that connect you to the people you care about and the things that matter to you. Instead of despairing over the empty boxes behind you, focus your energy on what to fill them with now.
2
IN PRAISE OF FEELING
Touchscreens in cars—sign of the future? Relic of the past? If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d say sign-of-the-future, obviously. (To be honest, touchscreens still seem futuristic to me, even though they’re already here. You say “touchscreen,” and my brain conjures Tony Stark in his cliff-side mansion manipulating data in the air with his fingertips. So yeah, future.)
I drive old cars, so I don’t have personal experience fumbling for audio controls on a flat surface while attempting to keep enough of my attention on controlling thousands of pounds of vehicle barreling down the road. (Yay, vehicles from the early 2010s.)
I have an iPad (this piece of seemingly random info will make sense in a minute). I don’t have an external keyboard for it. Do I type anything of length on my iPad? No. Do I type anything at all on my iPad? Also no. Why? Because it doesn’t have a tactile keyboard; typing on a flat screen with fingertips trained to orient themselves around the raised bumps on the F and the J of my trusty physical QUERTY requires too much visual engagement, too much effort, too much brain power. I want to slide along the steep edges of each key as I feel my way along a word, returning to center at every pause, every typed breath, tracing my way through thoughts in an exercise that’s in turn both physical and mental.
I’ve never been in control of a vehicle (in control of life and death) while my fingers slid along the smooth face of my iPad—advancing to the next song, typing a destination, optimizing my immediate lived experience so that the air and sound circulating are tailored to my preferences, all while attempting to drive safely without signposts guiding my fingers as they trace along the controls.
This article gave me deeper appreciation for my old cars, with their knobs and buttons that my fingertips have memorized just as well as those raised F and J keys so that I can find the perfect song, singing along while keeping my eyes—and brain—on the road.
3
ALONG THE DOTTED LINE
A man dies, as quietly as he lived. His grandson, when first drafting his obituary, captures accomplishments, connections, impact—all those obit standards. “Child of, father of, worked at, survived by ….”
Assembling this history, charting the meandering path of life on a dotted line between a thing of note here that happened and another thing of note there that also happened, shows a life accomplished but not a life lived—because life isn’t a highlight reel.
Life is lived along the dotted line, on the in between: a hidden smile gifted in a glance caught across a crowded room; the effervescent sparkle of new friendship and the magic soul-bond between old friends; the comma curl of one body around another; a face lit with delight as a laugh is startled from deep within; the press of a comforting hand, gentle and warm on a shoulder; the weight of a small body resting on the lap of a person reading aloud; small, selfless actions meant to ease another’s burdens, not to tip any imaginary scales but simply to express love.
The grandson scrapped that first obit, the one comprising accomplishments and titles, started over, wrote instead of “the sheer audacity of a quiet life” lived along the dotted line, not a performance, but even greater, a symphony.
4
AI REORG
I’ve worked in corporate America for some years now, so I’ve weathered a few reorgs in my day. Because I’ve been situated in giant companies on smaller teams embedded in larger teams, sometimes I experience the direct hit of the reorg, but more often, I feel the pulsing echo of its aftershocks.
From what I’ve gleaned (having never participated in the process of restructuring an organization), moving the chess pieces around on the giant board of team composition to form logical groups takes a lot of thought, data, and time.
As software gets ever more nimble and powerful, and especially as AI models more prominently under-gird the data structures, teasing patterns out of information becomes simpler and more accessible. Microsoft researchers looked at team structure data and geographic data, layered on collaboration data, then used machine learning to map out the “true” organizational structure of teams. Take a look at this interactive story to see the future of reorgs.
5
SPEAKING POETRY
Languages are rich and vast, but we tend to speak the words that are familiar to us, using only a narrow subset of the words available.
Like so many things (fashion, design, art), language follows trend lines, so we build our vocabularies on the blocks provided by our family of origin, the era of our youth, the slang of our region, the phrases of the moment. None of us (I suppose there could be an outlier or two out there, but we’ll disregard them for the sake of this entry) memorize the dictionary.
Sometimes the perfect word doesn’t exist in our language, but so often it does. There’s beauty in precision. Finding the clearest, flawless word to express yourself is so satisfying. Let’s increase our fluency so that we may speak poetry.