Top 10 Things we Spend our Lifetime Doing

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If we live to be 70 years old, we get roughly 613,200 hours to live. That’s 365 days, times 70 years, times 24 hours. This is the time we have to enjoy, to love, to weep, to learn and to cry. The quest for ‘the good life’ for the meaning, for fulfillment, and purpose must fit into this average number of hours. But we spend a lot of our time doing other things, things we have little choice in, and so don’t pay much attention to. But if we start to look at these things we spend so much of our time on we might think again about our priorities and even more about sex. It’s a long story. Here is a list of the top 10 things we spend our lifetime doing.

10. Watching TV

The declining inventiveness of the modern generation is a myth. In reality invention isn’t disappearing, it’s just not happening in the street outside your house anymore. Sad though it might be for those of us who grew up inventing games that revolved around a pineapple some had stolen from their home and a roll of tape found in a bush, kids are turning their endless capacity for invention to the internet and the cyber world of modern day wonders. The fact is those of us left to grumble of the decline of games like pineapple-leap-frog, are the also the ones wasting away in front of the TV. Simply put, the younger generations are more able to balance their TV watching with all the other screen staring operations of their day. But we get home tired from work, (blah blah), sit down and zone out to the latest reality TV show no one likes but everyone watches. So unless you want to spend the latter half of your life watching the latest cast of Tool-Academy dating the throws backs from Rock of love in an epic real time saga where they all try to find each other’s brain cells, then it might be time to break out the sticky tape from the desk draw and go find someone who has a pineapple.

9. Eating

Fast food, no matter how health conscious we have become, defines us. Our body chemistry, by and large, was originally designed for snacking. We are not meant to eat three big meals a day. Instead we are built to eat smaller meals more often. After all no one ever ate a cheeseburger, leaned back in the seat and said ‘Phew I don’t think I could eat another bite.’? It doesn’t fill us up, and it’s not supposed to, it’s fast food. But under our fast food nature there is a long tradition, (from who knows where), that revolves around several square meals a day! In fact we spend so much of our time eating, and snacking in between to keep our metabolism up, that it’s sometimes hard to see how we fit anything else in. On top of this we are also starting to get incredibly health conscious and that only means more time and energy going into eating! Food is meant to fuel us but, it seems, we are using most of that fuel looking over vitamin labels and examining fat contents.

8. That…other thing

Okay, so maybe you don’t go every day, but we all go eventually. It might not seem like a very long time, but over a lifetime you’d be surprised how squatting over the porcelain princess adds up. What’s more, as life rolls around, we also find ourselves spending extra time in the bathroom, time we had once spent on something more productive, like pulling girls hair. In fact as the pressure of life starts in we find ourselves making excuses to go to the bathroom. Honestly now, how many people have made up a toilet break so they could finish the last chapter of a book, or just get some alone time? On top of this we spend a lot of time on the toilet when drunk, ill, or just at the end of a really long drive.

7. Talking

Communication might well be the single greatest invention and advantage of human beings over the rest of the animal kingdom. We have a complex and exacting method of transferring information, thoughts, ideas and scores that have made it possible to continue to learn, improve and develop upon one another’s experience. Of course most of us use it for a completely different reason these days, including updating each other on our current level of drunkenness and making sure our children know just how many smiley faces we think of them. But with the development of technology we have also increased our ability to communicate constantly. Almost all of us carry cell phones that can transmit any number of digital signals from voice calls to twitter blogs and more. As a result we now spend more time talking then we ever have, and most of it complaining about how many messages we have.

6. Surfing the Internet

A growing activity we spend our life time doing is surfing the internet. This is not the time we use talking on media devices and separate from the time we spend emailing, or even working on the computer. This is the amount of time we spend simply looking at things on the internet. Some of it is a passing fancy, a wandering question we have come up with, but a lot of it is actively searching for things we need to know. This has grown to such an extent that while people used to be considered ‘well read’ when they knew an answer, now people roll their eyes and assume you have an internet connection and an addiction to Wikipedia. Not everyone spend their lives looking for random, if interesting, pieces of information but most of us feel the need to gather together good, funny, and fascinating information. Some of it may come in handy, we believe, but mostly it is the human urge to explore and understand that ends up costing countless hours spent on the internet. Of course there are other natural instincts that drive people to spend hours trolling the internet, but the less said about those natural urges the better.

5. Reading

Despite what the prophets are saying, it seems that people are reading more and more. We have the Harry Potter craze to thank for the renewed attention in reading, but the internet has also helped. Books, eBooks and other electronic resources like Amazon and eBay have made the written word even more accessible. And much like the video phone fell under the popularity of text messages, people are starting to remember that some things can only be done, and done well with written words. Film, being an art form in itself, is no doubt taking up a lot of our lifetime, but people are continuing to invest more hours in reading. Reading a book makes people feel like they have accomplished something; it is rewarding. But often when people watch a film it makes them feel like they have wasted two hours. The ability to read and write separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, and may be the source of all our success. Look at it this way, if a brick can do it, it’s probably not worth spending too much of your life on.

4. Wishing

We live in a remarkable time, despite the economy. We enjoy more freedom, (in our parts of the world anyway), then anyone has before. We have more opportunities, more chances, and more equality. There are still battles to win against racism, sexism and all sorts of other –ism’s but by large we are now brought up to believe not only that we can do well, but that we probably should do. With such prosperity we naturally spend a lot more time wishing and hoping about what we will and might do. We are brought up with more hope, less restriction, and a genuine belief that we can accomplish almost anything. Heck! a man even walked on the moon, and that was over 40 years ago, before they even had flat screen TV’s and cell phones.

3. Sex

No matter how much we might wish otherwise, we spend surprisingly little of our 613,200 hours having sex. We do however, (men especially), spend a lot of that time thinking, planning, and hoping for it. (It’s called puberty). It has also been suggested that most of human civilization has been created in order to attract our significant others, and often times many insignificant others. It’s hard to disagree with. After all when we crave fame, fortune and success it mostly comes down to a bunch of junk about self satisfaction, fulfillment and purpose. Which is just shorthand for sex, right? The internet, despite however many other things it has done, has spread and enhanced our ability to spend time on sex, while never actually increasing the time we spend on doing it. (Delicately put, or what?)

2. Traveling

Think about it, how much time do you spend going from one place to another every day? It’s a lot isn’t it? But let’s take it further; let’s say that traveling is almost all we do. Whether it’s driving to work, flying to Hawaii, walking to your bedroom, or running to the fridge it’s clear that most of our lives are taken up traveling. You could even say that most action is traveling, after all fingers have to travel to the keys in order to type, legs have to lift for us to kick, and eyes have to move from one place to another for us to read. Even our chest travels up and down as we breathe! This is a deeply held fact of life but as people of the future, (even if we don’t fly around in hover crafts we are the future), we do see distance as something negotiable. As a result we never actually stop to say it anymore. We travel so much it’s a wonder we go anywhere come holiday time, we should just stay still for a week to catch our breath.

1. Sleeping

Is it any wonder we sleep so much considering all the traveling we do? We need a break after all our eating, our whishing, all our talking, watching and you know what-ing. Our days are made up of 24 hours. That’s 3 sets of 8, and we are recommended to take one of these 8 hours and use it to sleep. Whether you get your full eight hours or not the amount of sleep we get when we are babies and the amount of naps we take as we get older more than make up for it. We spend at least a third of our lives asleep, unconscious and oblivious to the world. Maybe that’s why we invented whishing and language, so we could do some of our dreaming while conscious to try and get it out the way. Who knows? The fact is the single greatest activity we spend our lives doing, is not living our lives, but sleeping. Our lives are subdivided into so many different categories, (see items 10 through 9), that we spend most of our time doing things we never really plan on, but do out of necessity. It’s not like we have a choice in the matter of either, because you don’t get a great deal of enjoyment out of life if you try and stop sleeping.