7,300 Days
Or why Potential is Overrated
Last night at 11 PM, while scrolling through Amazon, attempting to find some new artwork to put on my lonely wall, I suddenly had an impulse to write. Writing always brings me comfort in times of chaos — as long as I have a keyboard in front of me and OneNote open, I know I’ll be able to figure shit out.
Sometimes, as I go through my everyday life, a semblance of an idea pops into my head. Sometimes the idea gets away on me, sometimes its not as big as I thought it would be, and sometimes its too big for my puny brain to handle. The idea is usually hidden behind a few weeds of mental clutter, which means I need to find a way to reel it in without letting it get away.
In this particular case, I felt I had caught a big one. I knew that if I put words to it too quickly I would risk it getting caught up in the weeds, I also knew that if I took too long to capture it, I would give it a chance to slip away altogether.
Slowly and steadily I pulled, and as the idea inched closer, I started to make it out. I saw a shade of existential dread mixed with a small glimmer of hope, and in that moment, I knew that sucker was mine.
I pulled it out and unhooked it from my mind with the power of the pen (or the keys, for those living in the 21st century).
As I wrote, I didn’t see any hope, it looked to be all dread. You know the typical nihilistic thought -
Everything is meaningless so why even try?
Your life is literally less than a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of this universe.
Let’s forget about this idea and go order some pizza because you’re just gonna die one day anyway.
You know what I’m talking about.
But I didn’t give up, even though this idea seemed like a dud on the surface, something about it felt different.
Don’t ask me what, why, when, or how, but in that moment, for some insane reason, I decided to use the power of mathematics.
I said “okay, if you want to get all meaningless on me, I’m going to get all logical on you.”
I decided to calculate the amount of reasonably good years I had left in my life, then multiply that number by 365 to give me a rough estimate of the amount of good days I had left.
We all know that one day this shit is going to come to an end, but its such an abstract and far off thing that its rare for us to give it a second thought, nor do we even want to. In this case though, some sick, twisted part of my mind wanted to, and as I punched the equals button on my calculator, I knew there was no going back. And for that sweet, beautiful millisecond before the result reared its ugly head, all of my brain cells held their collective breath…
7,300 days.
“I must have punched the numbers in wrong,” I said to myself.
I tried typing it in again. A second time, a third time.
But try all I might, that’s what it was, and there was no changing it.
7,300 more days of prime years left in my life.
This exercise brought a certain level of finality to my life that I’m not sure I had ever really experienced before. It was like getting walloped upside the head with a watermelon.
As my bruised mind slowly got itself back together, I wrote the following:
Now I can either sit here and stew in the fact that I’m just going to die one day and that there is no real point to anything, or I can decide to step into and live those 7,300 days, and actually use the time I have here.
In light of this hard truth, somehow it no longer made sense to me to just sit on the sidelines of my life and whine about how I only had 7,300 days left. I figured that if this was it, then I better decide how I want to spend that time.
“What do I really want to do with my life?” I asked.
My current cushy, boring, monotonous 9–5 was paying the bills, but in light of this big catch of an idea, it didn’t exactly seem like the most compelling way of spending my remaining 7,299 and a quarter days. From there I was struck with a question -
What are you going to commit to? You only have so much time on this earth and you can’t do everything, so what are you going to commit your life to?
Some people choose to be doctors, some lawyers, others like drawing, making cakes, traveling, or lifting weights, some decide to be business people, fire people, or fisherpeople (?), and some even decide to be writers.
For many of us, committing ones life to a job, an idea, a project, or a lifestyle, to commit to any particular way of being for that matter seems preposterous.
Many believe that by not choosing, you will never be limited, and your youthful potential — the dream that you could be anything — will never be quelled.
“I’m waiting for my calling. One day I’ll know what it is,” you might say.
But as I looked deep into the 7,300 day abyss, there was no part of me that wanted to wait. I wanted to pick something and start going after it. A small voice within me piped up-
What if you choose the wrong thing?
But then a bigger part of me shoved the smaller part to the side and said
When did making a choice mean making the right choice?
Out of the seemingly infinite sea of options out there, odds are, yeah, you’re probably going to pick the wrong thing,
But I’d rather choose and pick wrong than not choose at all, or worse yet, let life choose for me.
To pick something out of this infinite sea of somethings, to pick our own limitations, is indeed one of the most heroic things a person could do, because by choosing something, you’re not choosing everything else.
To choose to work your way up the corporate ladder and one day become a CEO of a big business means you won’t be a freelance writer that travels the world.
Choosing to open a non-profit that helps the homeless means you implicitly choose not to become a top chef, an expert graphic designer, a real estate agent, or a plumber.
A child is full of potential, they are box full of everything and a boatload of nothing all at the same time.
“You’ve got potential kid,” is just another way of saying — you could be something one day.
But to live a life of only potentialities means you never actually become anything, it means living in a fantasy world of what ifs, a self-constructed neverland, a dream you hope you never wake up from. Because in the end it feels better to say “I could have been something,” rather than “I tried to become something and failed.”
If you do make a choice though, regardless of whether you live up to your supposed ‘potential’ or not, at least you tried, at least you didn’t stand on the sidelines, at least you had a go at this thing called life.
Commit to something, sacrifice for something, choose your own calling, don’t wait for it to come to you.
This is why potential is overrated, because a headful of dreams is a handful of nothing.
Thanks for reading
