TL DR : If you're able to read this, you really don't have much time left. Of that, your best years won't even last that long. The future is earned.

https://understandinguncertainty.org/why-life-expectancy-misleading-summary-survival

Look at that graph. As a man, you're most likely to die by the age of 86. Let's go nature's way and assume you hit puberty by the age of 12-13 (which is when nature expected you to start manning up, and you start doing stuff on your own. Till then we can forgive you for being dependent). Do the math and you've got just 27,028 days remaining from the age of 12, including leap years, give and take a few. That's just 900 months. Or 3861 weeks.

EDIT : For those who like hours, the number is 648,672 hours. Take it as ~ 649,000 h if it makes you feel better. This way you can REALLY see your time fly

If you were thinking you had a million hours or more to live, sorry, it's not even 700,000 hours - it's in fact short of that by nearly 6 years! I didn't put that up on the title as I thought it sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. If you were paid $24 a day, $2 every hour, to work for 12 hours every single day till you die, you'll get to that number. That's how small it is.

When I change my unit of time for a life lived from years to days or weeks or hours, it totally changes my perspective. Putting this up on a countdown timer or an app that counts the days to / since a particular date, you can see for yourself how much time you lose everyday, and how rapidly.

When you see how quickly a day flies, you'll respect how small these numbers are. Days fly, and then it's Sunday again. Then it's the first of the month. Wait, didn't we just celebrate my birthday last year? Oh yeah...

And you WILL find your days and weeks absolutely blasting by when you're binging in pleasure addictions - the internet (ESPECIALLY the internet), porn, masturbation, video games, unproductive time, social media, your smartphone, busy for just filling time. Before long, it's already midnight, and there's a tiny little voice in your head that asks you, "So what all DID you achieve today?"....

In contrast, one minute is an eternity in the world of racing - 1 second is huge - because they respect the clock like no one else on earth. The clock is objective, but our value of time as an experience can be changed. The more you respect your time, the more time you've got.

I'm turning 30 in a year and a half, and in a way it means where I stand, over a third of my life is gone - not one second, one minute, one hour, one millisecond of that, not one calorie of wasted energy is gonna come back.

Every minute you spent on unproductive shit that felt pleasurable but made you depressed at the end of the day because you look back and realize you didn't make a damn piece of progress? Not one second is gonna come back. You'll never be 18 and feel immortal again. I think back to vacation days in college where after the exams, I'd binge watch shows and realize it was 2 a.m., go to bed, get no good sleep, spend the next day at half strength -- well, it's been 10 goddamn years since then. 3652 days, 88000 hours.

If the 10,000 hour rule was correct, and I only spent half of my 24 hours working and sleeping 8 hours a day, I could have mastered 4 different domains by now since my 18th birthday and almost half way through a 5th. But did I?

That depression is your inner soul trying to warn you to evolve. Our brains evolved to treat pleasure like white sugar (i.e. extremely scarce) and body fat. Even an 80:20 split of your time assuming you're awake for 16-17 hours means over 3 hours of pleasure - TV, internet, porn, games, wasted gossip - daily. The amount of pleasure we're bombarded with daily is way too much for our minds these days -- we could go without any of this and we really wouldn't need any more. It's made our brains obese and sick, just like our bodies. Pleasure is sweet poison. It's the root of all modern unproductivity, and the loss of all your time, energy and value.

Wanna lift, spend time with your loved ones, read, improve your SMV, travel the world, learn new skills, game girls, raise kids, make money, create opportunities for yourself, do yoga, build an empire, become a monk, whatever? Quit pleasure. Get productive. Get out of the internet and those smartphone apps - they're making us autistic. I am sorry to say that when I look back, I was most productive only in the gym where no BS was entertained - they do not allow phones inside for a reason. But pain (growing, healthy pain) and hard work felt so good when you were done and the results were there to show.

Say I only saved Sunday for enjoyment - even if I worked my ass off rest of the week and was 100% productive for all the 16-17 hours I was awake, that's still an 85:15 split between productivity and pleasure. In reality, no one's 100% productive all the time, not even 75% of the time.

Why? Because we've got finite energy - physical (the body), mental (the mind), emotional (the heart), spiritual (the motivation, the beliefs, the why). If we need to manage our time well, we must manage these energies better. The absolute best thing one can do for one's happiness, is to keep one's energies high.

Side Note : Some of my most unproductive and lethargic days ever, as a teenager was when I fapped too much. Yes. There was one time where I went without it or the internet for a week and got good sleep, and I was getting up before sunrise fresh as a rose. Of course, after that the sex drive just got too high...

Pleasure ain't the purpose of life - we've got 1000x more pleasures than any of our ancestors ever did - my grandparents didn't see electricity until 1950. And with all these pleasures, I can't smile like my 1 year old niece who has no idea how to binge on netflix or Youtube.

Look at kids, naturally confident, don't know what failure is yet, and happier than adults who've got more pleasure than at any point in history. Happiness is already within.

Then the purpose of a man's life is simply - becoming the best version of himself.

The biggest drive underneath it all is the drive to evolve, be better than yesterday at some level - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.

I realized this when the world labelled me 'low value' for the first time in my life, when I lost attraction, when my ex hated me with every fiber of her being, and got divorced - the shit hit me like a freight train at 100 mph when people with less than a quarter my ability mocked the old beta me as 'not even half a man' - and I wasn't even a slacker. Yeah I made all the BP mistakes (that's another story), but I also realized that I had fallen into unproductivity hell at some point in my life and that was by far the most burning problem.

But somewhere along the way, the pleasures of the world tempted me, and while I did make progress, made a decent amount of money, worked for 6 years since leaving college, I also made a few wrong choices about which way my life should go, and I became unproductive enough that when I look at the guy in the mirror, I see the chasm between what he could really do and where he ended up. It's no longer belief when you feel it like someone stabbed you on the inside.

If you really wanna be happy and fulfilled in life, you need to feel proud of the guy in the mirror. I don't recall who said that Life's biggest regret is to look back, and see it wasted - but I felt it. I look back today, I'm not at all happy. And I wasn't even that unsuccessful compared to a lot of people, but still I was a laughing stock. The thing is - does your conscience respect you?

Yeah, I believe in karma that I'll have to answer for and I believe in my next life, that what I do in this life decides what my next life will be - now I'm not debating if this is true or not. But there's a reason for that. It keeps me grounded. It makes me respect the life I've got now. 10 years ago, when I told myself I live only once, it made me a hedonist, doing low value stuff and binging on pleasure addictions (especially the internet) - many others around me at that age believed everything ends in the grave and were in quite a hurry to get there, with pleasure. :)

Well, beta me learned a very harsh lesson down the road on what respect means to a man - the universe rubbed it in my face in a way I'll never forget. My spirituality was fucked up - fixing it was the best and first thing I needed to do for myself.

I told myself that if I kept going down this route, I ain't getting this opportunity next time, not even in this life. I've got to earn my future, whether this life, or the next. Beliefs are our programming, whether they're true or not, our beliefs dictate everything we do.

At 28, I'm not nearly old, and yet if I live till 86, I have only 21000 days before I will most likely be dead (if modern lifestyle or an unfortunate event hasn't killed me sooner). That's just 3000 weeks, or 700 months or almost exactly 500,000 hours.

UPDATE : Since I wrote this article, about 3 of those hours are already gone and counting, so I don't even have 500,000 hours left. I just passed a milestone then. I have 499,999 hours remaining. That feeling when you see that 5 change to 4. NOOO!

86 is above average in my family - only my great grandma really managed to hit it. If I don't quit low value activities that don't make me better than yesterday, there's no chance I'll have this energy when I'm 70 and still have 16 more years to go.

In conclusion - as one of the veterans wrote : https://illimitablemen.com/2016/04/26/the-sanctity-of-time/

I don't have a minute to lose, never did. Or a calorie to waste. Neither does anyone else.

My goals await.

PS : I reposted as I wasn't happy with the title. Sorry guys.

Edit : For people who're wondering, if I started from age 0, it would be close to 31,100 days, 4490 weeks, 1050 months and about 754000 hours. But for 12 of those years, you'll be a kid and I assume your parents are there for you and you have a normal childhood. This is not to deny the importance of a strong foundation in childhood, it's a critical stage where you observe life and people and learn the most. Many prodigies have started earlier than 12. Still, you only have just over 1000 months, about 750,000 hours and not even 4500 weeks to live.

If you have kids, keep that in mind, but make sure they get a good childhood and eventually see the truth.