You Took My Breath Away, and Now I’m Dead
Some conversation math.
I made the mistake of looking up how many breaths a person takes in their lifetime.
605,491,200 if we live to be seventy-two.
So Elon Musk has roughly 100 times more money than I’ll ever have gasps of air.
Neat.
Worse — because it’s not like I can invest in more air — that if I put my breath in the right places, it’ll pay dividends. No.
And, rounding up to my next birthday, I’ve already spent 277,516,800 breaths. Upon realizing this — I couldn’t fight off a single, nagging thought:
How many of these breaths have I spent on useless conversations with people I don’t like?
How many breaths have I spent with one foot out the door, hand on the knob, nodding, saying, “Mhm, yeah, alright, right, yeah….”
How much of my ever-dwindling bank account of life did I waste listening to someone I don’t like talking about how stressful it was finding worm medication for their dog over the weekend?
I’m a frivolous spender — a serial impulse buyer — but I did not realize I was so irresponsible that I’d spend 160 breathes on lamentations over why someone’s brother hasn’t called them in two weeks and, “Isn’t that messed up?”
