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Die With Zero - Track 010

Die With Zero

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  • Heffalump Movie Moment Shows Phases End
    • The host recalled watching Pooh’s Heffalump repeatedly with his young daughters until one day his 10-year-old lost interest.
    • That unnoticed shift revealed how phases end subtly, prompting regret for missed extra viewings when he had the chance. Transcript: Unknown Speaker When my daughters were little, we loved watching Pooh’s Heffalump movie together. I think it’s the most wonderful kids movie there is. A sweet, innocent story about friendship. We watched it many times. But then one day, when my younger daughter was 10, I suggested we watch the Heffalump movie and, my astonishment, she just wasn’t interested anymore. All of a sudden, she thought she was too old for it. If someone had told me by this date my kid would stop wanting to watch the Heffalump movie, I probably would have watched it with her a lot more. Unfortunately, in real life, you rarely get an exact date when you will no longer be able to do something. These things just seem to fade away. And until they’re gone, you don’t give their gradual demise much thought, if any. You just kind of assume that some things will last forever, but of course, they don’t. (Time 0:00:11)
  • We Die Many Times Across Life
    • You experience many ‘deaths’ across life: the teenager you, the single you, the parent of an infant — each version ends irreversibly.
    • These staged endpoints mean the final date to enjoy specific experiences is often long before your actual death. Transcript: Unknown Speaker Die. As we age, our health will gradually decline. But there’s another, less obvious truth about dying that has important implications for how you should live your life. We all die a multitude of deaths throughout our lives. I’ll explain that shortly. This chapter explores the practical implications of this universal process of passing from one stage in your life to the next. In addition, this chapter gives you a tool, known as time bucketing, for planning your life experiences accordingly. No clear endpoints. My experience with the Heffalump movie is just one example. For several years, I was living the life of a dad who watches his favorite kids’ movies surrounded by his young children. But then one day, that stage of my life and theirs was gone. I’m still here, of course, and I can still enjoy other experiences with my daughters, watching their soccer games and dance recitals, for example, and taking them on trips. But someday they will grow up and that version of me will disappear too. Likewise, but for reasons of my own inevitable aging, there will eventually be a last time I ever go wave running, and the last time I play in a poker tournament, and the last time I’ll Be able to board a plane and fly somewhere exotic. Some of these final experiences will come sooner than others, but all will definitely come at some point, hopefully in the far distant future. Now, I’m not trying to be morbid, nor am I trying to present so much in the way of gloom and doom, my point, and this is important, is that the day I die and the day I stop being able to enjoy Certain experiences are two distinctly different dates. And this is true for everyone. That is what I mean when I say that we die many deaths in the course of our lives. The teenager in you dies. The college student in you dies. The single unattached you dies. The version of you that’s a parent of an infant dies, and so on. Once each of these many deaths occurs, there’s no going back. (Time 0:01:17)
  • Windows Close Quietly Not All Opportunities Transfer
    • Windows for experiences typically close without fanfare, so delaying can permanently eliminate opportunities.
    • The resort-pool analogy shows some experiences become impossible once you age out of that ‘pool’s’ rules. Transcript: Unknown Speaker The periods may overlap, but sooner or later, each one comes to an end. Because of this eventual finality of all of life’s passing phases, you can delay some experiences for only so long before the window of opportunity on these experiences shuts forever. The best analogy I can think of is a set of different swimming pools, the kind some large resorts have. There’s usually a wading pool for the little kids, a pool with a water slide for the older kids and teens, and an adults-only pool. Maybe even a pool for lap swimming and a pool just for seniors. Now you can go in every pool for as long as you want, but only if you follow that pool’s precise rules. So if you don’t learn how to swim by the time you’re too old for the kiddie pool, you can still go to the teen pool and later to the adult pool. But if you’re no longer a teen, no more water slide for you. It doesn’t matter how strong a swimmer you are or how much you regret your fear of the water slide when you were younger. Likewise, in real life, you can safely delay some experiences for a future period. If you don’t take certain trips or pursue certain physical activities in your 20s, you might still be able to take them in your 30s. But this ability to transfer physical experiences from one time period to another is limited. In fact, it is actually more limited than most people seem to realize when they delay and delay. (Time 0:04:03)
  • Regret Can Repeat At Each Life Stage
    • Regret from excessive delay repeats across life stages, not just at death, affecting teens, parents, and career-focused people.
    • Many only realize too late, when children leave the nest or they face mortality and cannot reclaim lost time. Transcript: Unknown Speaker Do you see what I’m saying? The problem of confronting overly delayed gratification and the resulting regret doesn’t occur just once at the end of one’s life. Rather, it can occur at every period during your life. From the bookworm teenager who missed out on all the fun of high school by making too many sacrifices for the sake of a supposedly brighter future, to the middle-aged dad, who repeatedly Skipped irreplaceable experiences with his own teens by constantly hustling for one job promotion after another. Sometimes people realize their mistakes just before the window of opportunity closes, like when one’s children are getting ready to leave the nest. And sometimes the recognition comes when it’s too late do anything at all about it, except resolve to do better in their next life stage. The saddest, though, is when the realization doesn’t hit until you’re facing your own mortality, when it is really too late to change anything at all, and all you can do is make peace With your past. (Time 0:05:45)
  • Bronnie Ware’s Deathbed Regrets
    • The host cites Bronnie Ware’s palliative-care findings: top regrets include not living true to oneself and working too much.
    • Ware’s male patients especially regretted missing family life for treadmill-style work. Transcript: Unknown Speaker Many of these are particular to each individual, of course, but if you listen to dozens of stories about people’s deathbed regrets, common patterns do tend to emerge. An Australian woman named Bronnie Ware, whose work as a palliative caregiver put at the bedsides of patients with just weeks left to live, talked with her patients about what they wished They had done differently in their lives, and found five key regrets coming up more often than any others. As she describes in a popular online article and in a subsequent book, the two most common regrets are ones that are most relevant to my message. Her patient’s number one regret was wishing they had had the courage to live a life true to themselves, as opposed to the life that others expected of them. It’s a regret about not pursuing your dreams and therefore having those dreams go unfulfilled. You ignore what you truly value in life and instead pursue a path that the rest of your surrounding everyday culture foists upon you, you risk having real regret at the end of your days. In American culture, which so often values hard work and earning money to the exclusion of other important values, such as leisure, adventure, and relationships, it stands to reason That people often come to the end of their days really wishing they hadn’t made this kind of sacrifice. As the old saying goes, no one ever regrets not having spent more time in the office. Along those lines, the second regret, and actually the top regret among Ware’s male patients, was this. I wish I had not worked so hard. That hits right at the heart of what I’m preaching. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence, Ware writes. (Time 0:06:54)
  • Limiting Time Boosts Savoring And Joy
    • Anticipatory awareness of limited time can increase happiness by motivating savoring and better choices.
    • A study had freshmen imagine leaving campus in 30 days; those who savored became happier than the control group. Transcript: Unknown Speaker But believe it or not, thinking about impending loss can actually make you happier. A most revealing experiment with college freshmen shows why. A team of psychologists asked one group of young students to imagine that they would be moving far away in 30 days and told them to plan their next 30 days accordingly. It would be the students’ last chance for a very long time to enjoy all the special people and places they come to like about their college. In short, the students were urged to savor their remaining time on campus. Then, every week that month, the researchers asked the students to write down their activities. By contrast, another group of freshmen weren’t told to imagine anything or to do any kind of savoring of their days. They merely had to track their daily activities. Guess what happened? As you can imagine, the students in the first group were happier by the end of the 30 days than the second group. Whether they did more or just managed to squeeze more enjoyment out of whatever they did on a daily basis, the mere act of deliberately thinking about their time as limited definitely Helped. What’s the takeaway here? (Time 0:09:19)
  • Plan Your Life With Time Buckets
    • Do a time-bucket exercise: draw a timeline to death, split into 5–10 year buckets, list life experiences, then assign each to buckets.
    • Ignore money at first; place activities where health and free time make them enjoyable. Transcript: Unknown Speaker In order to help you plan the experiences you want to have during your lifetime, and therefore to help you avoid excessive delays. Learn from your time buckets. Time buckets are a simple tool for discovering what you want your life to look like in broad strokes. Here’s what I suggest you do. Draw a timeline of your life from now to the grave. Then divide it into intervals of 5 or 10 years. Each of those intervals, say from age 30 to 40 or from 70 to 75, is a time bucket, which is just a random grouping of years. Then think about what key experiences, activities, or events you definitely want to have during your lifetime. We all have dreams in life, but I have found that it’s extremely helpful to actually write them all down in a list. It doesn’t have to be a complete list. In fact, you can’t know right now everything you’ll ever want to do. Because, as you know, new experiences and new people you meet tend to reveal unexpected additional interests that you’ll want to pursue. Life is all about discovery. And you will revisit this list later in life, too. But I’m sure you already have some ideas about which experiences you want to have at some point, some perhaps more than once. For example, you might want to have a child, run the Boston Marathon, hike the Himalayas, build a house, file a patent, start a business, volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, dine In a Michelin star restaurant, attend a Sundance film festival. Go skiing 50 times. Go to the opera. Take a cruise to Alaska. Read 20 classic novels. Attend the Super Bowl. Compete in a Scrabble tournament. Visit Yellowstone. See autumn in Vermont. Take your kids to Disneyland three times. And so on. You get the idea. Be as creative as you want. Your list will be your own unique expression of who you are, because your life experiences are what make you who you are. Key point, as you’re making your list, don’t worry about money. Money at this point is just a distraction from the overall goal, which is to envision what you want your life to be like. Then, once you have your list of items, start to drop each of your hoped-for pursuits into the specific buckets, based on when you ideally have each experience. For example, if you want to go skiing 50 times in your life, during which decades or five-year buckets would you like to have those ski days? Here, too, don’t think about money just yet. (Time 0:12:31)
  • Schedule Physical Activities Early
    • Prioritize physically demanding activities earlier when health peaks and before parenthood constraints.
    • Expect your experience desires to cluster (bell curve) toward younger decades and adjust timing accordingly. Transcript: Unknown Speaker Mountain climbing and attending loud concerts, for example, are much more fun when you’re younger. Not surprisingly, the most physically demanding activities tend to fall on the left, younger, side of the timeline. You probably won’t be skiing as much at 80. Yet some people run the Boston Marathon in their 70s, and one exceptionally fit woman named Catherine Beers completed the race when she was 85. But these individuals, of course, are outliers. And even for Beers, the marathon at 85 was not her first, but her 14th. A season for everything, time buckets versus a bucket list. As you go through this bucket exercise, you’ll come to see for yourself that there’s a season for everything. That being said, you might begin to sense that some desired experiences conflict with other experiences, or you might realize that some of the activities you want to do won’t happen At all unless you begin to plan for them now. And just to clarify, this list is the opposite of the so-called bucket list, which is typically a single accounting of all the things you hope to do before you kick the bucket, so to speak. The more traditional bucket list is usually put together by an older individual who, when confronted with their mortality, begins to scratch out a list of activities and pursuits They not only haven’t done yet, but now feel compelled to do quickly, before time runs out. By contrast, by dividing goals into time buckets, you are taking a much more proactive approach to your life. In effect, you’re looking ahead over several coming decades of your life and trying to plan out all the various activities, events, and experiences you’d like to have. Time buckets are proactive and let you plan your life. A bucket list, on the other hand, is a much more reactive effort in a sudden race against time. Now, you might notice as you fill up your time buckets that some experiences are more flexible than others. For example, you can still enjoy visiting libraries, watching classic movies, reading novels, and playing chess well into your old age. Taking a cruise can be enjoyable at just about any age. Still, as you start filling up your time buckets, you’ll probably see that the experience you want to have in life don’t fall evenly across the ages. Instead, they naturally cluster during certain periods, taking on roughly the shape of the right side of a bell curve. As long as you’re still ignoring the money factor and still focusing primarily on your health and your free time, that bell will probably skew to the left. Because you’ll want to have most of your experiences, especially those with physically demanding activities, when you’re at peak health to enjoy them, and before you’re constrained By the demands of parenthood. If your life plan includes children, the experiences you want to have with them will cluster a little later, probably creating a peak around your 30s and 40s. Again, all that’s true even if you don’t take the cost of the experiences into consideration. Okay, remember we’ve been focusing only on two key components of your time buckets, your physical health and your life dreams. (Time 0:15:44)
  • Start Simple With Three Time Buckets
    • If full life bucketing feels overwhelming, start with three buckets covering the next 30 years and add later.
    • For parents, pick one experience to increase with children in the next year before that phase ends. Transcript: Unknown Speaker Recommendations If time bucketing your whole life feels a bit overwhelming, just do the exercise with three time buckets covering the next 30 years. Know you can always add more to your list. Just do it long before your age and health become a real factor. (Time 0:19:15)