What To Do With the Time You Have (Left)

If you knew how long you had left to live, what books would you read and what films would you watch with that time? I ran the numbers on that question.

Photo by Radu Marcusu on Unsplash

It turns out there are certain facts that cannot be forgotten, however much you might wish to forget them. Fair warning: I’m about to discuss one such fact. I discovered it via the title of a recent book by Oliver Burkeman. The book is called (last chance now to look away and remain in blissful ignorance) Four Thousand Weeks. Burkeman’s title is a mortality countdown. “Assuming you live to be eighty,” he writes, “you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”

Distilling life to this number is enough to bring on a panic attack. Burkeman intends his title to be liberating, no doubt, but it gives me a kind of existential vertigo. My head spins as I realise how uncomfortably close I am to various ledges — the step down into middle age, the drop into old age, then the final fall into the bottomless abyss of death. Cheery stuff.

My default setting is to maniacally quantify my days into measurable tasks organised by endless list-making, although meditation and Stoicism have given my operating system various upgrades. These days, I’m in recovery from the twenty-first century addiction to “life-optimisation”, which promises much and yet is best expressed by the title of a McSweeney’s article: “I’ve Optimized My Health to Make My Life As Long and Unpleasant As Possible”.

I’d been half-successfully looking away from the fact of my four thousand weeks, when I read an article by

Joel J Miller

over on his substack, Miller’s Book Review. “All the Books You’ll Never Read” is a wonderful essay, but it synergised far too effectively with the life number I was trying to ignore. Miller writes about Umberto Eco’s back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many books a person could read in a lifetime. This rebooted my brain back to factory settings. I started measuring out my life again, not in Eliot’s coffee spoons, but in the number of books to be read and films to be watched.

The Calculation

My work as a writer means that reading takes up much more of my life than it does for the average person, for whom reading is what Miller calls a “marginal activity” — something that fits into the narrow spaces of free time around other priorities. I tend to read one or two average-sized books a week, as well as reviews, op-eds, the news, and articles on Substack. I also dip in and out of poetry, non-fiction, and “light reading” when my brain has been worn down (by work, by stress, by sickness) to a near primitive state of basic comprehension. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll use the median of 1.5 books a week.

For cinema, it averages at two films a week, although it can be as many as four or five. My friends tend to be more focused on cinema than on literature, and my local movie theatre often plays classics on 35mm. Watching a film is a communal activity that allows me to take in culture while counteracting the hermit-like conditions of my literary life. But, for the sake of an even number, I’ll call it two films a week for my calculation.

In a typical year, I read about 75 books and watch around 100 films.

Rounding my current age up to forty and assuming I live until eighty (cue the first flush of anxiety and pit sweat), I’m left with forty years of reading, cinema, and everything else. Here’s the drumroll — or is it the rumble of my nervous stomach? — and the total number of books I’m likely to read before I die is: 3,000. For films, it’s 4,000.

So, what do I do with these numbers?

I could look up how many books are in most versions of “the canon”, and how many of those I haven’t read, subtracting that from my starting number of 4,000.

I could list all the books I absolutely have to re-read in my lifetime, and how many readings I’ll want for each. Some might only stand up to a second read, while others are more like infinite origami, revealing unfolding layers every time I open them.

Could I increase my base rate to four books a week? That would more than double the number of books I could read before the final “the end”. I can definitely increase my film count, especially if I cut out podcasts and start watching films on my lunchbreaks. (I can read and walk, but reading and eating is a skill that evades me, so a lunchtime movie would be perfect.)

In the end, I fret over the numbers for a while, a few days actually, before I finally know what to do with them: nothing. Do nothing with these numbers because, during the counting and calculations and “optimisations”, I realise that I have things totally backwards.

I don’t read as much as I do because I write about literature; I write about books because I love reading. I don’t watch a lot of films just because my friends do; our friendships were largely founded on our shared love of cinema. The reason to read books (or watch films, listen to music, or do anything of real value) doesn’t come down to mathematics, but to love of the thing itself. It isn’t a numbers game — it’s a way of living more deeply.

What’s Gloriously Possible

Is there any use to the calculations I made above? Well, yes, in a sense. Returning to Oliver Burkeman and his book about our finite time alive, he offers what might be the real lesson buried within all these numbers:

“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible — the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”

And just what is “gloriously possible”? That’s easier to see once we’ve cleared away some of the cultural clutter. Given that I won’t be able to read all the great novels that have been written and will be written, I should give as much time as I can to that perpetually growing list of worthwhile books. That means wasting no time on a book I’m detesting or can see no benefit in reading.

I just picked up a non-fiction book that made a mess of its ideas and evidently didn’t understand the social science it was citing. Not offering me information or pleasure, I had no problem tossing it aside and reaching for the next book on my TBR pile. That book happened to be Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying, and it was breathtakingly wonderful. Within the first ten pages, I was infinitely glad that I hadn’t delayed reading it by a single page more of that previous, unedifying book.

A week later, I couldn’t stop thinking about In My Time of Dying, so I read it again. The first time, I was fuelled by adrenaline as I anxiously, excitedly read Junger’s account of how he almost died. (The fact that this tension was never allayed by the knowledge that he survived to write the book is testament to his skills as a storyteller.) On the re-read, I got so much joy out of “working out the magic trick”, of analysing precisely how Junger achieved what he had with his writing. I also got to spend more time with his ideas. On first pass, some ideas can only be comprehended; on second and third, they can be argued with, synthesised with other ideas, and assimilated more fully into one’s worldview.

It turns out that this is what’s gloriously possible: depth over breadth. Rather than the thin-spreading attempt to go further in life — to read and watch and do more — we can go deeper, which is equally infinite, yet paradoxically more satisfying the deeper you go. Breadth, on the other hand, tends to make people stressed about how far they haven’t yet gone.

Don’t worry about the numbers. They’ll add up to whatever they add up to at the end of your life. Ultimately, it all comes down to what the critic Mortimer J. Adler said of great books — that it’s not about how many you get through, it’s about how many of them get through to you.

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Further Reading:

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman (2021)

• “I’ve Optimized My Health to Make My Life As Long and Unpleasant As Possible”, in McSweeney’s, Tom Ellison (2023)

• “All the Books You’ll Never Read”, in Miller’s Book Review, Joel J. Miller (2023)

• How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler (1940)