In a recent interview, Slajov Žižek told Big Think
“For a long time, I behaved as if I was still young, like the future was ahead of me. I was never a so-called mature normal person. All of a sudden [I went] from pretending to be young to discovering, oh my God, I’m in late 50s… I hate this. I’m now like the proverbial woman who celebrates her 39th birthday five times in a row. I realized I cannot pretend that I will have time to do the big work. If I don’t do it now, what I really want to do, I will never do it.”
This really grabbed ahold of me because, for the past several years I have been thinking of myself as still in my early to mid 50′s, and, at times, even in my 40′s. The fact is I am almost 63 … there is A LOT less life ahead of me than there is behind me. As Žižek said, I can no longer pretend that I will have the time to do the big work, unless I do it NOW.
It struck me then that one way of measuring our lives, and planning them out, is to look at “what percentage” of our lives has already gone. Of course we cannot know the exact percentage, and most of you probably haven’t even crossed the half-way mark, yet. But, it can be useful to think about it, as one possible life measure and as a possible motivator.
David Foster Wallace had an additional way of looking at percentages and life. As he once told David Lipsky: “writing Broom of the System felt like it was using 97 percent of me, whereas the philosophy thesis was using 50 percent of me.” That is, he felt that writing fiction was the best use of who he was. (Quoted from Lipsky, David (2010-03-31). Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (p. 261). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.)
That is, Dave Wallace apparently asked himself, at least subconsciously, how much of my talent (and everything else that is me) is being used by this activity, versus this activity, versus this activity … It seems to me to be a very sensible, and important question, for anyone to ask. At any age.
If you haven’t recently looked at your life in these “percentage contexts,” I submit to you that doing so will be worth your time.
A few bites a day can make the difference between weight loss and weight gain.
