Billion Second Challenge

“Billion Second Challenge” 

How would I live if I treated every second as precious? 

This is a post about time, not regenerative medicine.

A shiny crimson card was waiting in my snail mail pile when I returned from a special birthday vacation.  I actually had to Google “AARP” to confirm the acronym stood for “American Association of Retired Persons”.  Did this new piece of bloody colored plastic mean I am now “retired”?  Or, did it simply confirm I am officially old and beyond the highly desirable 18-49 demographic?

I quickly picked a number out of the air and said to myself, I’ll make it to 85 years old.  That would mean I have about 35 years left. That is 12,775 days, 306,600 hours, 18 million minutes or about 1.1 billion seconds.  It turns out the Social Security Actuarial Life Table pegs my remaining time at 29.45 more years or about 928 million seconds.  I, therefore, averaged the two numbers and came up with about one billion seconds left on the planet.

To sharpen my time focus, I have started measuring how I spend my seconds.  Each 1000 seconds equals about 17 minutes.  Each 10,000 seconds equals about 3 hours.

Simply measuring how you spend your seconds, much like calorie counting, will alter your behavior. 

How would I live if I treated every second as precious? 

Perhaps you have more or less seconds left in your life than me.  Carefully consider how you spend them.  

I call it the Billion Second Challenge. 

Post suggestions about how to best spend your next hundred, thousand, million or billion seconds and please share this post with your connections.

AM