10,000 Days Alive
I was born on the 19th April 1990, in North Shields, in the northeast of England, making me roughly 27 and a half years old. I recently discovered through the website you.regettingold that the 4th September 2017 was my 10,000 day alive. Entering your date of birth into this website gives you a variety of interesting facts about your time alive, such as your approximate number of breaths (236 million), how far you’ve travelled around the sun (25.9 billion kilometres) and an interesting event that is nearer to your date of birth than today (Release of The Beatles’ first album). Apart from making me feel old, this made me wonder more about the first 10,000 days of my life, and how exactly I’d spent them. So that’s what this blog is about.
How I spent my first 10,000 days
The first thing I looked into was how I’ve spend these first 10,000 days. This information is displayed in broad categories in the graph below:
I was slightly surprised to see that weekends have so far made up the greatest part of my life (it doesn’t feel that way!). I certainly didn’t expect to see the number of weekends (2,857 days) exceed the number of days spent in school (2,680 days). Following weekends and school are holidays (1,540 days), working (1,180 days), infancy (1,143 days), and university (600 days).
At the current rate, I can expect working to overtake holidays around the end of February 2019, but it will take until July 2023 for working to overtake school.
Where I spent my first 10,000 days
One of the things I’m proudest of is the amount of travelling I’ve managed during this time. In total I’ve lived in 3 countries (UK, Singapore, South Korea) and travelled to a further 37, for a total of 40 countries “visited”. So next I wanted to look into where exactly I spent my first 10,000 days alive.
In total I estimate that I’ve spent 8,534 days of my life in the UK, and 1,466 days in other countries. The graph below depicts the countries I’ve visited, with a colour scale indicating the amount of time I’ve spend in each one. East and South-East Asia, and Europe, feature heavily, but there are still huge spaces of land I’ve never been close to!
The other countries that I’ve spent the most time in are:
- South Korea — 710 days
- Singapore — 241 days
- Tanzania — 84 days
The USA (70 days), France (60 days), and China (55 days) are the only other countries I’ve spent more than 50 days in. Despite having only spent 22 days there in total, Malaysia is the country I’ve visited the most with 11 visits, excluding those countries I’ve lived in. Many of these were one or two day trips while I was living in Singapore as an exchange student. Next are France and Tanzania with six and five visits respectively.
I also wanted to get an idea of which places I’d actually “experienced” the most and least. I roughly estimated this by taking the area of the country, and dividing it by the number of days I’d spent in there. This gave some interesting and unexpected results. The place I’ve “experienced” the most is Singapore, followed by Macau (despite having only spent one day there), and then the UK. The place I’ve “experienced” the least is Australia, despite it being equal 10th on the list of total days spent in each country.
Looking back on this makes me proud of the things I’ve done so far in my life. From the Prime Minister’s Global Fellowship, to completing a Masters degree, to studying and working abroad, to now working in international development, I’m pleased to say that I feel like I’ve done a lot of great things up to now. But it also makes me wonder what else I could have achieved during this time, and what I’ll be able to do in the next 10,000 days. Hopefully on the 20th January 2045, I’ll have a few good stories to tell about my second 10,000 days.
