2026-02-04

Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays

Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays #life #finitude

We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer.

The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment where everything crystallizes into meaning. We accumulate these peaks in our imagination, and then arrange them into a montage that proves our existence mattered, and that we really lived.

Then we spend the actual substance of our lives doing laundry and feeling crappy about it...

If you work a standard career from twenty-five to sixty-five, you'll experience roughly 2,080 Mondays. That's 2,080 alarm clocks set against your biological preferences and 2,080 inbox avalanches, plus 2,080 instances of navigating traffic or public transit while still metabolically processing the weekend. Add in the Tuesdays through Fridays, and you're looking at roughly 10,400 ordinary workdays across a career. Meanwhile, if you're fortunate enough to take two weeks of vacation annually for forty years, you'll accumulate 560 vacation days. The ratio is roughly 19:1 in favor of the mundane.

So we get to a question worth sitting with:

Do you actually like your average Monday?

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo has a framework called "time perspective theory." People differ in how much mental weight they assign to past, present, and future. Future-oriented people tend to achieve more by conventional metrics, but they also exhibit a consistent pattern of sacrificing present satisfaction for hypothetical future rewards. When researchers follow these people over time, they find that the anticipated future keeps receding and the scaffolding remains permanent.

Seneca diagnosed this exact pathology in first-century Rome. He observed that people guard their property vigilantly but waste their time freely, treating it as an infinite resource. "You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire," he wrote.

The barely tolerated Monday is a down payment on a life that never arrives, a perpetual advance payment for goods that don't ship.

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