Doing nothing part vi: don't wait for anything edition
Chronos, kairos, and the long tail
To find earlier posts in my Do Nothing series, here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Did you know I’ve started a podcast?1 It’s a companion piece to the Financial Freedom course (summer cohort starts this weekend). In last week’s episode, I talk about the moment I decided to quit working at age 42. You can listen in at min 5 here:
I was raised by my aunt and uncle. My uncle died of ALS in 2015, right after I got laid off. His last words of advice for me were: “Don’t wait for anything.”2 And then later that year, I attended a Mr. Money Mustache workshop where I did the math and I had already reached financial independence. But there’s a third part to the story.
That same year, internet blogger Tim Urban wrote an article called The Tail End, where he put a new perspective on time. Some events happen regularly, year after year, like your birthday. But the really important parts of life aren’t spread out evenly. He illustrates it with how much time he has left with his parents:
I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.
Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I lay out the total days I’ll ever spend with each of my parents—assuming I’m as lucky as can be—this becomes starkly clear:
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.
So what do we do with this information?
Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here:
1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.
3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
This article hit me because, remember, my uncle had just died. He was 64 and I was 42. I thought that we had 20 more years together. We didn’t.
We had none.
Priorities matter. The tail end matters. Quality time matters.
Because we might not even get it.
Chronos and kairos
The ancient Greeks had two words for time. The first was chronos, measurable clock time —seconds, minutes, hours, years, like the word “chronological.” The Greeks depicted Cronos (Saturn to the Romans) has an old man, Father Time, devouring his children:
Kairos, on the other hand, describes a spiritual quality of time: the right, or perfect moment. The Greeks depicted him as a handsome, virile, young man:
In capitalism we’re in chronos. On clock time, someone else’s clock time. You’re being measured on efficiency and promptness. You have to be at this Zoom meeting at this chronos. Arrive at the doctor’s office or the airport x number of chronos before the actual chronos. Finish your project by this chronos. People are depending on you. It’s Father Time, devouring our lives. As Western culture as spread around the globe, so has the dictatorship of the clock. Ask any Mexican or Indian about the American’s anal-retentiveness and irritability about being “on time.” To us, in our industrialized, commoditized thinking, being in chronos to the second, minute, or hour matters. And it’s soul sucking because the soul doesn’t operate there.
In kairos, on the other hand, the seconds, minutes, hours don’t matter. It’s the quality, the magic, within time. It is difficult to describe that feeling, but I’m sure you’ve felt it: the unexpected punchline to a long joke, the call from a long-lost friend, the moment of falling in love with someone who’s falling in love with you.
“To every thing there is a season, and a kairos to every purpose under the heaven: A kairos to be born, and a kairos to die; a kairos to plant, and a kairos to pluck up that which is planted; a kairos to kill, and a kairos to heal. — Ecclesiastes 3
There are right, perfect moments.3 Time in the Now, fully absorbed in the Present. As any parent knows, children live in kairos. As souls developing an ego, they have to be taught chronos. Chronos is an artificial construct that is, as Freud said, the (necessary) price of civilization.
And it’s only when we step off the work/spend cycle do we begin to unlearn and return, as Jesus said, to be again like children.
“Being here now sounds simple, but these three words contain inner work for a lifetime. To live in the here and now is to have no regrets about the past, no worries or expectations about the future. To be fully present in each moment of existence is to reside in a different state of being, in a timeless moment, in the eternal present… There’s nothing to do, nothing to think about. Just be here now.” — Ram Dass
Busy is the life killer
Kairos is standing outside of the lights of civilization, underneath the innumerable stars.4 Kairos is staring out at the ocean, realizing this has been happening every day for a billion years. The Infinite Now.
These are the things we lose when we’re sitting at a desk, staring at a computer. In today’s modern age, we have an army of many labor-saving devices. Electric kettles, microwave ovens, pressure cookers, food mixers, blenders, sandwich makers, coffee makers, juice extractors, and toasters. An induction stove that boils water in 1 minute instead of five.
Yet for the labor-saving machines around, we have so little actual time. Most of my friends are incredibly stressed at work. Even if they profess to loving their jobs, it’s too much, like a pie-eating contest. Not occasional stress, but chronic stress. When they aren’t at work, they talk about how stressed they are at work.
Does this sound like you?
My friends do therapy, psychedelic retreats, yoga retreats in Bali, fly fish in Montana, get massages. They get stoned, they drink. They spend a lot of time zoning out on the social media. Hyper and hypo arousal in capitalism.
I think a lot of these (expensive) interventions wouldn’t be necessary without having to work so hard and being so stressed. In the book Your Money or Your Life, Vicki Robin talks about the basic labor exchange: we give our life energy in exchange for money (jobs). So when we spend that money, we’re literally “consuming” those life hours we worked. But if you save that money for financial independence, the less money you consume and the fewer of your life hours you consume.
The average American will consume 90,000 of their life hours working.5 Chronos, the devourer of life, destroyer of worlds.
When you don’t have to work, you don’t have to do anything and doing nothing is making time. The five Sabbath activities is making time: napping, spending time with friends, eating delicious foods, being with God, making love. No one is on the clock doing these things, particularly anyone else’s clock. It’s by living in kairos, the Naked Now, do we invert the ironic capitalist phrase, “how you make a living.”
Kairos, maker of life.
Counting the long tail
And that’s what Financial Freedom does: stretch out kairos. I’ve had many more moments since financial independence than when I was working. After my uncle died and reading the Wait Buy Why article, I realized there was only limited time for the people and things I loved, and I had to look at time differently.
For example, I figured that I had, at most, ten more good years of playing soccer. When I had a job, I played soccer twice a week, which meant I played about one hundred times a year. Maybe I only had one thousand soccer games left in my life. So post-financial freedom, I decided to prioritize playing soccer every day. In the eight years between FF and before my Achilles rupture, I estimate that I got about two thousand soccer games in. And had lunch with my best friend Stefan after soccer about a thousand times.
I realized that I would see my friends on the East Coast, at most, once a year. So I prioritized going on my friends’ family vacations with them:
I committed spend at least 10% of every single day outside, which sounds easy until you realize that’s 2.5 hours every day (it really helps to have a dog). I nap almost every day. Share a meal with a friend almost every day. When I give talks about Financial Freedom, I pitch financial independence as Every Day is Like Saturday. Imagine what you like doing on Saturday. Saturday is my every day.6
We only have so much life. And we don’t know when it stops. Don’t wait for anything, my uncle whispers. Priorities matter. Because the tail end matters. Quality time matters.
Because we might not even get it.
You only get so many moments with your parents or siblings. Only so many days with your children. Only so many games of playing soccer, or backpacking trips, or having lunch with your best friend.
Time is the only prize worth having and the one thing working and spending takes from you. I’ve missed weddings due to work: Bill and Amy’s. Steven and Illeabeth’s. I’ll never get those moments back. My aunt’s 76th birthday is today: how many more summers?
More time with the people you love. Sabbath. Wu-wei. That’s on the other side of work. That’s the real reason for Financial Freedom. Owning every hour of your life is not about escaping from capitalism. It’s about running towards the people you love.
The long tail.
Kairos.
It’s work to get there, but it’s worth it.
Financial Freedom 1 starts next week
I only have 2 students for summer cohort of FF1, which starts next week. Maybe this thing, after eight great years, is dying? If you’re alumni (half this subscriber base), spread the word? If you haven’t taken it and want to, maybe this is the last one? You have to participate in your own rescue.
I’m working on a whole other podcast, but that’s a story for a few months from now.
I wrote a little about it here in 2022.
In 1985, a group of black South African theologians wrote The Kairos Document, a call for the end of apartheid. It began “The time has come. The moment of truth has arrived.” The time was ripe for change: the fate of South Africa balanced on a knife’s edge, and small actions might have the power to change the path of history (source).
Abraham in the Hebrew scriptures counting the stars was a moment of kairos (Genesis 12)
Because I did the FI thing and “retired” at 42, I spent 30,000 hours.
No coincidence, Jewish Sabbath
Good article. Thanks for the insight
Priorities matter. The tail end matters. When put this way with all of the examples, I don’t think I will ever see time the same. Thank you for shifting my thinking.