Stolen from X:
In 2015 a writer named Tim Urban sat down and counted the days he had left with his parents. He was 34, healthy, both parents alive and well. The number came back around 300. Less time than he spent with them in any single year of his childhood.
The post is called The Tail End, on a blog called Wait But Why. The idea is to stop counting your life in years and start counting it in events. Reach 90 and you get about 4,680 weeks, and every one of them fits on a single sheet of paper. Maybe 60 more winters after that. If you read five books a year, that is 300 books, picked from every book ever written.
Those things at least spread out evenly. A third of the way through life means a third of the way through your pizzas. Time with the people you love does not work like that. Almost all of it sits at the very start. Then it is gone.
For your first 18 years you are around your parents nearly every day. Then you leave for college or a job in another city, and a normal adult sees their parents maybe 10 days a year. So the day you move out, you are already at 93 percent. Urban was living in the last 5 percent and had no idea until he drew the chart. He called it the tail end.
It does not stop at parents. His two sisters, after a whole childhood in the same house, had around 15 percent of their time together left. The four friends he played cards with most days in high school were down to their last 7 percent. Nobody had a fight. Nobody moved away angry. Life quietly spends the time for you while you assume there is plenty left.
You do not have to be old to be near the end with someone. If your parents are alive and you live in a different city, you have probably already used more than 90 percent of the days you will ever spend in the same room as them.
His one instruction is about that last stretch. When you are down to the final days with someone you love, treat that time like what it is, which is almost gone. The rest is the tail end, and it is much shorter than it feels.
