Main Course
Mid-Life Thoughts on Finitude, Part 2
They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. At the start of 2025, my teacher appeared in the form of a slim, hardcover book: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.
Despite its rather heavy-sounding title, Meditations is a surprisingly upbeat read. Its central message: embracing our limits gives us permission to let go of the ought-to-dos, and instead focus on what matters most to us. The first and most important step: accepting our finitude. As Burkeman explains in the first chapter:
The most liberating and empowering and productive step you can take, if you want to spend more of your time on the planet doing what matters to you, is to grasp the sense in which life as a finite human being—with limited time, and limited control over that time—is really much worse than you think…
You think the problem is that you have far too many things to do, and insufficient time in which to do them, so that your only hope is to manage your time with amazing efficiency, summon extraordinary reserves of energy, block out all distractions, and somehow power through till the end… The truth is that the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible.
But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible. Something inside unclenches… Once you see it’s just unavoidably the case that you’ll only ever get to do a fraction of the things that in an ideal world you might like to do, anxiety subsides, and a new willingness arises to get stuck in what you actually can do… After that—once you’re staring reality in the face—you can take action not in the tense hope that your actions might be leading you towards some future utopia of perfect productivity, but simply because they’re worth doing.
It’s in that last bit—choosing not to chase productivity, but instead purposefully spending time doing things that are worth doing—where I have felt myself recalibrating most over the past year. But old habits die hard! If you are anything like me, you probably find it a struggle not to get caught up trying to optimize, maximize, and get the most juice for the squeeze. That sensation of being constantly behind, of always trying to stuff 10 pounds of To Dos into a 5-pound bag, can seem relentless.
And so I find myself here, at the close of the calendar year, returning to this same passage and the wisdom it offers: embrace finitude, and act on what’s meaningful. It feels like valuable guidance to accompany me into 2026.
It can be instructive to look more closely at how we spend the finite time we do have. You probably don’t look to the American Time Use Survey for guidance on how to approach life, but data has an uncanny ability to distill certain realities. Collected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and as its name suggests, the survey measures how Americans spend their time on various activities of daily life. More intriguing to me, though, is that the survey also captures who we spend time with, and how the amount of time spent with those people changes over the years. In a bit of inspired deconstruction, writer Sahil Bloom breaks out the data on who we spend time with into six individual line graphs; the three that spoke to me most are below:
We likely know from our own experience that as we reach our early twenties, the time we spend with our parents, siblings, and other family members drops significantly compared to prior years. But seeing the precipitous drop in the graph really drives the point home.
If you’ve parented children to adulthood, you’ll feel the truth of the adage, “The days are long, but the years are short.” Seeing this graph reminds me that although the time I spent in the thick of parenting—in my case, in my 30s and early 40s—might have felt all-consuming, it was also precious and meaningful.
I confess that in the past I took time with friends for granted. In my teens and early 20s, time with friends seemed effortless and abundant. But now that many of my friends are, like me, in the second half of life—sometimes sandwiched between raising children and providing care to aging parents—I know that time together is no longer a given. I’ve learned to better appreciate the conversations over coffee, the quick phone catch-ups, the group chats that keep our connections going over years and miles. The friendships that have aged with me feel more valuable the older I get.
Viewed through the lens of finitude, the time with our friends and loved ones looks and feels vastly different than the way we experience it in the day-to-day.
Burkeman also wrote the book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, in which he helpfully notes, “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short... Assuming you live to be eighty, you'll have had about four thousand weeks.”
Four thousand seems like a much smaller number than we might hope! And so, feeling the tick-tock of the 52 weeks that just elapsed in 2025, how might we go about identifying where we can best invest our energies, given our finite time?
Some wisdom can be found in the perspectives of people who are closer than not to reaching their four thousandth week of life. Research exploring end-of-life regrets reveals patterns:
People don’t regret missing out on a promotion or failing to buy a bigger house. They regret not asking for forgiveness. They regret not expressing their love more often. They regret holding a grudge. And they regret letting relationships with their families and friends fall apart.
My mother, who I explained in my last newsletter had relocated to memory care, has since moved to a nursing facility and is now on long-term hospice. When she speaks, it is only in brief, faltering fragments; expressing her thoughts is a challenge. I can’t help but wonder what crosses her mind during her many hours with her internal thoughts, and what regrets she might have as she reflects on her life. And I also can’t help but think about what regrets I might try to avoid—might act to avoid—with intention, and a clear-eyed sense of what matters to me most.
Reflecting on all the above, I see the beginnings of a map to the place that I’m seeking to explore in the new year. Rather than maintaining the hamster-wheel chase of conquering my perpetual To Do list, I'm instead feeling a sense of urgency to focus my time on things that matter. Rather than striving to save minutes each day to feed back into the productivity machine, I’m aspiring to think in months, years, maybe even decades. Over the arc of a lifetime, I’m hoping to look back and feel that my finite time, on the whole, was well spent doing things that felt valuable and meaningful, with people I love and cherish.
Who, or what, was a powerful teacher for you in 2025? What lessons did that teacher impart?
In 2026, what might time well spent look like for you?
I invite you to hit "reply" and send me your thoughts.
I may share some of your replies in my next newsletter. Looking forward to hearing what's on your mind!
Quick Bites
Illustration by Brian Rea
|
|
"Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss"
The New York Times' Modern Love is a weekly column featuring stories and essays on love in its many forms. In this poignant piece, writer Chris Huntington reflects on the ways that love can recast our missed opportunities and life constraints into something sweet, urging us to be the best prisoner of time that we can be.
|
Image from Library of Congress
|
|
"In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa"
The Europa Clipper, a NASA space probe with a mission to study Jupiter's moon, Europa, launched in October 2024. This poem, written by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, was dedicated to the mission and engraved on the Clipper for its voyage. Limón's words bridge literal time and space across the 1.8-billion mile journey between Earth and its destination.
|
Something Sweet
I have shared this video elsewhere in the past... The transition from one year to the next feels like a perfect time to pause, relax our shoulders, and take a deep breath. Enjoy this minute of peaceful sights and sounds from our backyard. Wishing each of you a healthy, joy-infused 2026, filled with meaningful time with people who matter to you most!
With warmth and aloha,
Joyce
Want to catch up on previous newsletters? Explore our archives here!
If someone you know might enjoy this newsletter, please feel free to share it (new readers, subscribe at this link). And if this isn't your cup of tea, just hit the "Unsubscribe" link below. Either way, thank you for reading!
Copyright © 2025 JLI Consulting, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email from JLI Consulting. If you would like to be removed from our mailing list, please click ‘unsubscribe’ below.
Unsubscribe | Update your profile
1441 Kapiolani Blvd, Suite 1115, PMB 47, Honolulu, HI 96814