The Long and the Short of It

Time and the good life

Dear reader, a warning: today we will venture slightly into self-helpish/productivity territory. It is not by intention, I assure you, but alas, it's where today’s stroll of curiosity ends up, with, ugh, some practical advice. But it is not an attempt to get you to crush your to-do list faster or something like that. We start from our main theme, the search for the good life.

In this quest to find a proper way to live, one encounters two seemingly opposing approaches with regard to the temporal. That's a fancy sentence that came out of my keyboard which simply means: should one focus more on the short-term, or the long-term?

Acolytes of the former will tell you should live each day like it's your last, as it indeed could be. Life fully, burn brightly, YOLO, don't postpone much, or anything. You could walk out of your house today and get smacked by a bus, or slip in your shower and break your neck, and all the life you've delayed - going on that trip, asking that girl out, partying until sunrise etc., will have been in vain. These people have a point. You really could be hit by a bus, it happens all the time, and many a life has been cut short of people who worked hard, saved, and postponed their true goals and desires to better times which never came.

But then, those who preach the long-term will tell you that the short-term approach is a great way to find yourself in midlife or later with no prospects, empty pockets, ruined health, and few relationships. One will find the latter half of their life full of hardship and empty of meaning. No, they say, the short-term is for sowing so that you can reap later, and all the best things in life, both material and otherwise, come after years of investing in them with little to show, but they compound into financial safety, a mind full of skills, and deep, tended relationships with family and friends, which enrich one's later life like no short-term pleasure could. These people, also, have a point. I don't think I need to argue hard that people who spend their excess funds investing into assets and their excess time investing into exercising, learning, and building relationships will find themselves at one point secured and fulfilled and free for many endeavors.

Yet, both warnings, on the dangers of the short-term and the long-term, are evidently true as well. So how do we approach this?

The core of the issue is this - we don't know how long we will live. For if you knew for certain that you have just a couple of more years in you, well, the long-term doesn't make much sense then, does it? If you knew for certain that you only have so much before that bus rounds a corner and introduces you to the details of its windshield, you wouldn't save your money nor postpone that surfing trip. You only have so much time, and you need to get on it to use it as best as possible! But, if you knew that you have a comfortable 50 years left, then living every day like is your last is going to ensure the last, what, 40 years of those are going to be quite miserable. No, it would make sense to have a plan of savings, investment, and postponement to make sure you spend all those 50 years in a quality way, whatever that means for you.

So, in choosing our temporal strategy, we are faced with this uncertainty. We could play it safe, and take the long-term approach anyway, but what if... Or we can throw caution to the wind and decide to burn brightly and burn out quickly. But surely there is a more intelligent approach? Now, you might be tempted to pick some kind of medium-term view of the whole thing, but in my experience, that kind of thinking is a great way to get the worst of both worlds. Why don't we try something else instead. What if we try to be a short-term and long-term thinker at the same time?

You can try it like this: First, imagine you have 100% certainty you'll drop dead in exactly one year. Doctor came back with the results, and one year from now it's curtains for you. Ask yourself how you would spend that year? And be specific. That surfing trip? When, where and for how long? Spend more time with family? What does that mean, be more at home, or take them on a nice trip for fun and bonding? Etc. etc. Go through every month of the next year and think thought what you'd do. Once you're done, ask yourself a second question: If I knew for certain I'll live to a comfortable 90 years old, how would I spend the next year? Think of all the things you'd do as your long-term investments. Start that language course, buy some stocks, read those books, renovate the house so it's more energy efficient, get your boating license, etc. etc.

Now, since you're human, there is pretty much no way you'll be able to do everything from both of these lists. But what you can do is look at both and decide to do some items from each for the next year. A couple of things for the short-term, a couple of things for the long-term. This way, you'll get some YOLO stuff in there, as well as some stuff that will go towards your future life. Because the worse thing, which often befalls us, is that we spend a year doing neither. We go through the 12 months, and we have neither done much long-term investing, nor have we particularly had a lot of fun with the short-term activities. But this way, not only do we put in the work every year that readies us for what the future will bring, but we also make sure that if that bus comes straight for us that, hey, at least I learned how fun surfing is.

The true richness of this approach isn’t really that you’ll get more stuff done, but that our anxieties of not doing enough are calmed. We get to be both ant and grasshopper. We fear not meeting the distant future unprepared, nor do we fear wasting our present. And if you ask me, the quiet satisfaction to our lives this can bring is truly part of a good life.