⏳ Erebus Growing | 0038 - Tenet 2: You're going to die, live accordingly

Welcome to Erebus Growing, a weekly email where I share little snippets of life to help you change and grow into your highest life.

I got back earlier today from visiting my hometown for a close friend’s wedding.

It was a joy to be able to celebrate with him and his wife and to see a lot of people that I became close with a number of years ago but haven’t seen in a long time.

And it was the pure excitement from a handful of them that reminded me how much they enjoyed having me in their life and I having them in mine.

I’m wrapping up this week’s edition with a smile on my face before I put everything away and prepare for another long-ish week of work at the 9-5, the part-time, and applying for positions.

And it’s time to start hunkering down for winter—it’s a couple of months off, but the older I get, the less interest I have in dealing with the winter season. Something, to be honest, I never thought I would say. But such is life!

I hope that you have a wonderful week!

👨🏻‍💻 Meditation

You’re going to die, live accordingly.

Perhaps the hardest lesson to grasp because we live on such a small scale.

We live our lives day to day and so we constantly think in terms of minutes and hours and days and weeks.

(I mean, think about clocks and calendars—it’s all on a very small level.)

But never do we stop to think about just how short our life is.

One of the most existential moments I had was after using the 4K Weeks calculator.

In short, optimistically, a human will live 4,576 weeks.

That works out to 88 years, but years are such an abstract way to live time. To measure time, sure, no problem.

But a week…you can identify a week, and fairly concretely too.

I have lived 1,734 of my weeks, about 38% of my life.

And the first time I used this calculator, I ended up sitting for a moment.

It just hit me, in a way nothing else has, that my time is limited.

I will die.

My life will end.

Your life will end.

You will die.

The question is, what do you do about it?

It’s a hard moment, to realize that your time is coming.

So, how do you respond?

I started to have this moment of realization in 2020 when my grandmother died.

I had, unintentionally, spent most of my young adult life living to make sure that she didn’t feel lonely.

I called her nightly, I spent two and a half weeks with her every year (the week around our birthdays, Christmas/New Years week, and half of Thanksgiving week), I drove home every weekend to see her once she entered hospice care, and, as she neared the end, didn’t spend much time away from her.

She had other family members around her, but not nearly as many nor as much as she should have.

When she died, it was a moment where I had to confront myself and ask: What do I do now?

It was the following summer, in 2021, when I started walking.

And then I started listening to Rob Dial.

Then I started expanding out from there. And I started expanding in from there too.

It was then that I first had this concept teased out, I don’t remember exactly from where.

But it started to change something in me. It started to focus me in on what is it I actually want to experience in life?

What do I actually want my life to be like?

I’m going to die. So what do I want to see, build, and experience before I do?

I’ve started to answer some of these questions.

One of the key points that rose to the top for me from stoicism is this idea of a sense of urgency, but that’s a story for next week.

For now, consider, as I have been doing more and more, that your life will end. You will die.

Live your life with that knowledge at hand.

📚 Inspiration and Resources
Every week we all consume content and I share my favorites here.

Use.
Take a breath before you go to this website and enter your birthdate. It will tell you how many weeks you have left out of your 4,576 optimistic ones. And it will cause you to stop for a moment, no matter how few or many you have left. Give it a go here.

Buy.
If you’re feeling super inspired, follow my tracks and purchase a post from the same company that maps out all 4,576 of your weeks that you can fill in. I’m actually going to be ordering mine this week after saving some money over the past couple of months. Give it a look here.

📓 Journaling Prompt
Journaling is one of the most important things to do when exploring our own lives. A new prompt for you to use this week is below.

What does your highest life look like day to day?

Until next time, I wish you enough and send you off with love and a sense of urgency in your life.