You Already Know How Many Summers You Have Left

Quick question: how many more times will you eat dinner with your mother? Not how many years does she have left, which is how we usually frame it, but how many actual dinners. If she lives another twenty years and you visit twice a year, the answer is forty. Forty dinners. You could count them on your fingers and toes, twice over.

That small act of arithmetic is the engine of 'The Tail End,' a much-loved essay published in 2015 by Tim Urban on his blog Wait But Why. Urban drew his own life as a grid of boxes, first in years, then in months, then in weeks. The grids were unsettling enough. But the part that made the essay famous came when he stopped counting time and started counting events. In his mid-thirties, he worked out that he probably had something like sixty Super Bowls left, sixty more swims in the ocean, a few dozen more winters of snow. The numbers were not morbid. They were just small.

His most quoted passage is about parents. Urban calculated that by the time he finished high school, he had already used up the overwhelming majority of the in-person time he would ever spend with his mother and father, and that everything since had been a thin spread of visits across the remaining decades. Nothing had ended. He was simply, as he put it, at the tail end, and nobody had told him.

Why years keep us calm and numbers wake us up

Years are soothing because they are abstract. The phrase 'we have years left' feels like a cushion. But nobody actually lives a year. You live a Tuesday, a Sunday lunch, a single phone call. When you convert the future into the units you actually experience, the cushion becomes a number, and a number can be acted on. That is all mortality math is, done gently. Not the thought that time ends, but the thought that you have maybe thirty summers left with your best friend, and three of them are already spoken for by logistics.

So what do you do with a number?

You do not panic. You pick your units, and then you defend them.

• Choose the people who matter and the unit that fits them: dinners with a parent, weekends with a sibling, one trip a year with an old friend.
• Do the arithmetic honestly, using how often you actually see them, not how often you mean to.
• Protect the next one. Put it in the calendar before the calendar fills up with everything else.

The point of the number is not sadness. The point is that a specific Tuesday starts to look like what it truly is: one of a limited edition, passed off as an unlimited supply.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it. Seneca wrote that almost two thousand years ago, and we are still catching up.

Which may be why the best gifts have quietly changed shape. A candle says I thought of you. A promise of time, one long walk, one unhurried dinner, one Saturday that belongs to the two of you, says something better: I counted, and you are in the number.