The Mistake of Measuring Life in Days

There are better options. We need to think about depth.

When we think about a life lived, the most common way we measure it is by reference to time.

How long did she live? How old was he when he passed away?

By changing how we measure life, we may actually be able to improve our experience of it.

Most people would agree that we tend to quantify life using days, months, years. In doing so, we are effectively measuring life as a length of time. We are measuring in one dimension.

I appreciate that the concept of ‘measuring life’ is a bit vague, but please stick with me as I attempt to expand.

What is the problem with using time to measure life? For a start, it leads us to place a greater value on long lives than short ones. Our personal experience tells us that some people we know have had shorter but ‘better’ lives than other people that we know who have lived many years longer.

(I will not delve here into discussion about quality of life in the later years, and the ethical and moral considerations regarding the ‘value’ of using medical science to extend what may be considered to be a very low quality of life.)

And yet it is almost rebellious to talk about living a short but wonderful life than a long one.

“Live fast, die young, have a beautiful corpse,” was reportedly a favorite saying of James Dean, one of the modern era’s most famous rebels (a little research suggests that Dean borrowed this from a much less famous source).

What about using ‘achievement’ to measure life? It would include such things as achieving excellence or success in a particular field — education, business, sport, music etc. — and may be associated with admiration, fame, status and wealth.

I think that ‘achievement’ type measures are flawed. Reaching a level of excellence in some endeavour is no guarantee of happiness or life satisfaction.

What about the idea of ‘doing’? Does a person who does more stuff have a better life than a person who does nothing much to write home about?

We are influenced to believe that to be busy and active is good.

“Yeah, I’m good, keeping busy,” is a standard answer to being asked how you are. Busy implies good to most people. But busy has no link to quality of action, or the benefit to you from what you are being busy at.

Is it necessarily the case that a person who has traveled the world, experienced different cultures, learned several languages, seen all that mother nature has to offer, will have had a better or happier life than a person who never ventured more than a two hour drive from their home? The answer of course is no.

When you stop to think about it, to measure something as variable and complex as life in one dimension is almost absurd.

Let’s add one more dimension, and start to think about life in terms of length and depth. We can keep time as the unit of measurement for length. I will discuss my preferred ‘unit’ for the depth measure, but many others could be adopted to come up with a better two-dimensional measurement of life.

Over the last year or so, I have realized that my life is more rewarding, or ‘better’ when I am able to live it with a greater sense of awareness. Awareness means different things to different people — for me it is a combination of being present in the now and being conscious of my reactions to what I experience.

When it comes to a unit for depth in life measurement, at the moment, awareness is the best measurement unit that I can come up with.

And so, when I think about measuring a life (including my own), I now think about a combination of time and awareness. If, in living each day, I can be as aware as possible, I will be contributing both length and depth to my life. This two-dimensional measure is something that I hope I can maximize.