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Life is finite. You cannot buy additional years of life if you are not ready to go at the end, and you never truly know when the end will happen. So, should you quit your job immediately, fly to see the Taj Mahal tomorrow, and continue hitting bucket list items until you run out of money or find yourself in an unsafe situation due to poor planning?
Probably not. You will likely have a fun few weeks or months before realizing you are out of money and ultimately unfulfilled from seeing so much but living without purpose.
Instead, accept that life is finite, and determine what life experiences are most important to you.
Step 1: Accept that life is finite.
The first step to having a joyful life is to accept that you will not live forever! That sounds dreary, but accepting that your time is limited enables you to prioritize your time to optimize your happiness. If time is limited, we dedicate time to the most important parts of life and stop wasting time on activities that do not provide us happiness.
Truly accepting that life is finite means estimating how long you are likely to live. With an honest assessment of your current habits, estimate your life expectancy. The Society of Actuaries recommends the Actuaries Longevity Illustrator as an accessible estimator, but you can use any tool that considers your health status and health habits (including nutrition, exercise, sleep, drinking, smoking, drug use, etc.), income status*, and family health history. Life expectancy estimates do not hinge on just one factor, so be as thorough and honest as possible to improve your accuracy.
In addition to having a general idea of your life expectancy, consider your likely ability and mobility at different ages. This can be important for adventurous goals. If you want to climb Mount Everest but decide to wait until retiring at age 62 to make the climb, your probability for success will be lower than if you made time for the adventure 20 or 30 years sooner. Some adventures are better when you have youthful ability and mobility.
This can also be true for activities you take for granted in the moment. As a rugby player, I prioritize rugby while my body has the ability to play since I recognize it will not always be able to recklessly dive on a ball after running full-speed. Bill Perkins articulates this well in Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life:
“Unfortunately, in real life you rarely get an exact date for when you will no longer be able to do something–these things just seem to fade away. And until they’re gone, you don’t give their gradual demise much thought, if any. You just kind of assume that some things will last forever. But of course, they don’t. That’s sad, granted, but there’s good news: Just realizing that they don’t last forever, that everything eventually fades and dies, can make you appreciate everything more in the here and now.”
You cannot predict the precise deterioration of your mobility and ability. You cannot predict the precise age at which you will die. You may be hit by a bus tomorrow. You may receive an unpredictable but life-altering medical diagnosis. But living in fear of the bus accident is not productive either since living as if today were our last can also prevent us from putting time into relationships, adventures, and communities that will add value to our lives in their entirety. You may be unlucky and meet an early demise. You may live until 100 years old despite smoking, drinking, eating fast food, and avoiding sleep and exercise. Aberrations exist, but enough folks have experienced the natural decline in ability and death that we can make educated guesses about our own lives. Most of us end up being exceedingly average, and estimates will be close to accurate.
Step 2: Define Your Life Well-Lived
Once you know you can expect to live until a certain age, assuming no significant lifestyle or health changes, list out the most important aspects of what defines an ideal life for you. Imagine 95-year-old you reflecting on a life well-lived: What do they remember as the highlights?
These may be bucket list adventures, like hiking the Appalachian Trail, learning to surf, skydiving, or seeing the Great Pyramids of Giza. Others may be goals that affect the entire environment of your life, like having two children, establishing a community committed to working to lower their carbon footprint, or actively participating in your religious establishment. Do not worry about whether your qualities of a well-lived life match others’ preferences: sharing life with a partner, learning a new language, owning a Maserati, creating a business, going to the Stanley Cup playoffs, winning an Olympic medal, buying 50 rental properties, buying a small home with a lawn, running a 5K, and visiting all seven continents are all potential aspects of a well-lived life. However, not all of those items likely appeal to you. Define the qualities that shape your happy life.
Step 3: Time Bucket Your Priorities
Once you have a list of priorities that would make your life your best life, time bucket them. Time bucketing involves mapping out your life like a timeline with intervals that make sense for you and your priorities. For example, if you are pretty young, you may want to pick larger buckets of time, like 10-year intervals, for flexibility, but someone in their 70s may choose 5-year or even 3-year or 2-year intervals.
Buckets can be any amount of time that works for you, and the items you include in them can be as specific or vague as you feel is appropriate. This is your map to a happy life!
Timelines will vary from person to person: As I mentioned in Mini-Retirements: Choose Your Own Timeline, you may decide to become a parent in your 20s, in your 40s, or not at all. While these flexibilities exist, so do limitations: Deciding to “become a parent for the first time” is probably not ideal for your 70s. Learning to mountain bike in your 80s may not be realistic, but going on bike rides around town with some friends in your community may be a great way to stay healthy.
Most importantly, the process of time bucketing should reveal what activities must happen at certain ages. This does not mean you can only schedule fun adventures for your 20s and 30s. However, it showed me that there are experiences that absolutely cannot wait for traditional retirement age. The process also helped me realize there are some activities that I enjoy now but are worth dialing back on because I can do them later, and they may take time away from experiences that I will not be able to do when I am older and have less mobility and ability. For example, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro should happen earlier in life than the world cruise because climbing a mountain is more physically demanding than visiting the buffet and shuttling through excursion groups.
Finally, the process may encourage you to exert more effort to sustain your mobility later into life, particularly if you feel a bit cramped for time. It is possible to both accept that life is finite and shift habits to try to add a few more years of mobility to enjoy heliskiing or a few more years in general to watch your grandkids graduate from high school and college.
Whatever your plan is, life will not go according to it. Your priorities and plans will change. A curveball will cause you to miss out on something. That is okay. You will live more of the experiences you value by having a plan because most individuals do not even take the time to identify their priority experiences. Just by identifying your priorities, you are more likely to live a life that makes your future self look back and smile.
*There are huge differences in life expectancy in low-income communities compared to high-income communities. This map of Washington, DC shows how dramatically life expectancy can vary within one city. Cross a river, and life expectancy can drop by more than a decade. If the huge discrepancies between life expectancy for different neighborhoods and income levels upsets you, as it should, working to improve access to nutritious foods and health care in low income communities could be an inspiring cause to take on in your early retirement! Staying healthy individually is important, but making sure our neighbors have access to the same opportunities helps the greater community.
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