How Do Your Actions Can Affect Your Life?

If I were to tell you that you only have 1 year left to live, what would you do right now? The reaction is going to be very predictable, most probably you would drop that salad, smoke a cigar and go for a crazy night with all your loved ones… and then repeat for the next 364 days. Ok, maybe that is only me but I can bet that most of you would have a dramatic change in lifestyle including less healthy food, doing more risky activities and let’s say spend time with friends and family to not look selfish here.

Why will our behavior be different if we can know with certainty (or a close estimate) how long are we going to live?

We live in a society that wants to reward delayed gratification. That is why it is highly encouraged to eat healthy, save for retirement and exercise regularly, among others. We are giving up the chance to do something desirable or at least more fun now by taking actions that “you would thank yourself in 20 years”. Actually, I have nothing against this; it may even sound lame but I agree with the idea. Everyone keeps a balance on how much instant gratification are they willing to take right now and how much to delay, anyone that has ever decided to sleep in early instead of going out because tomorrow there is work/school/commitment believes in some sort of delayed gratification.

Again there is nothing wrong with this idea for one simple reason. The more unhealthy (and fun) lifestyle we have the less of life we have left to live. Someone that smokes two packs of cigarettes a day, drinks 6 cups of alcohol, eats a greasy pepperoni pizza for lunch and dinner and sleeps 5 hours a day is expected to have a lower life expectancy than someone who does not do all of the aforementioned. Same way that someone that has a health insurance and enough savings to pay for any medical intervention should have a higher expectancy than someone who doesn’t.

On average a human being has a life expectancy of 71 years, it goes down to 51 if that person was born in South Africa and up to 87 if its a female born in Japan. Taking a look at the average American (79.8 years) we can get a closer estimate of how close is that person to reach or exceed this number. We know that the chronic smoker/drinker/pizza eater is less likely to make it out to the average, while someone that eats healthy, exercises regularly and doesn’t smoke will most probably reach and exceed the average.

We know how the actions we take on a macro level affects our life (for example smoking regularly can take away from 5 to over 10 years of your life) but what about the little picture actions we take on a day-to-day basis?. Choosing a hamburger over a salad for lunch, having 2 shots of jaeger at that party, pulling an all-nighter, skipping the 30 minute workout that was scheduled after work or travelling by car instead of flying. It seems as if these are all insignificant day to day decisions that we deal in our life, however as small as they seem they must have an effect, right?.

Doing quick (and rough) math we can look at the effect of cigarettes. If we assume that smoking 5 cigarettes a day for 20 years will reduce our life expectancy by 10 years, it adds up to 36,500 cigarettes or a single cigarette taking away .00027397 years of a smoker’s life. This is roughly 2.4 hours per cigarette or 144 minutes that are lost for each cigarette, we can even go further down to each pull but that would be beating a dead horse.

Imagine a life in which each second we can know how our actions will affect our bottom-line. Go out for drinks with your friends, 1.3 hours lost. Run for 45 minutes in the afternoon, 0.9 hours gained. Diagnosed with diabetes, 2.6 years lost. Moved from a city to a small town, 2.4 years gained.

I am just using random examples to give it some color but at the end of the day life expectancy is a game of probabilities based in our lifestyle and big picture actions. However breaking it down into day to day events may be beneficial for us to have a good benchmark in deciding whether some things are worth it or not. I would definitely think it twice about lighting the next cigarette knowing that it is going to cost me 2.4 hours or whatever it may be.

This does not mean that we have to live a life without vices, eating salads and working out every day. On the contrary is about being aware of what are the consequences of our actions and being comfortable with what we do. Every action and decision we take its going to have a ripple effect for the rest of our life it’s only a matter of how significant it is and whether we can notice it or not.