What do you do before you die?

Originally posted on Medium in 2016

I wrote the other day about Parkinson’s Law. The idea that ‘work expands to fill the amount of time available’ and in the absence of hard, soon approaching deadlines we’re often terrible at getting things done.

But what if we applied that to life as well?

Because death is the ultimate deadline. Time’s up; pencils down.

So naturally, if the law is true, our list of things we want to do also expands to fill the time available and for young people like me in a world that’s increasing life expectancy every year, that’s feasibly 60+ years to go.

A lot of time to put things off.

The opposite is like, terminally ill patients. You have X amount of time, give or take, and you have to choose what and how you’re going to spend it. Go!

Those people, if they have the means, tend to go out and achieve those things very quickly because the alternative is never doing them.

We could too, of course. But we’re long term thinkers: you can’t just quit your job and blow your entire savings on travel if you need to get through the next 60+ years as well, right? It’s unsustainable and regarded as a foolish move.

But what if you said you were going to die. What if I said that on the morning after my 25th birthday I just wouldn’t wake up. It would be pleasant and everything, you can choose all of the aspects between now and then, but you go to sleep that night and that’s the end.

For me, that’s less than two years. Seven quarters.

Would I ever reach a point where I did all the things on the list and just hit the ‘yeah, I’m good’ moment? Would there be a point where you can cram a whole lifetime into such density that by the time you’re finished you are actually ready? Is anyone ever ready?

And, if there was such a point, should we not be relentlessly pursuing that?

Because really, we have zero certainty. I was hit by a semi in my car one icy December day and fortunately walked away from it, but you never know: he could have crushed me. The timing and physics and random chance could have been completely different. I was just driving at lunch to get tacos.

So then the question is like, if I had died that day — what would I have left undone? What would I have wanted to do?

Now, as a living and able person, am I not sort of required to do those things?

“I’ll do them eventually.”

And so Parkinson’s law was fulfilled.