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.
We’ve learnt some bad news that Donny Strathie passed away in Boston on Sunday. He had a ticket for the Morocco game, but never got the chance to realize his World Cup dream.
It would mean a lot to his family if we could organise a minutes applause in the 76th minute of the Morocco game.
#TartanArmy #TartanArmyTribute #RIPDonny
In 1985 I made the USA World Championships Gymnastics Team. I placed 3rd at the Trials, my highest placement to date as a young gymnast.
At Worlds, on my 8th and final event I fell. It was a devastating fall. I missed a release move and tumbled to the ground. My right foot was stuck while my body spun around the knee. I knew it was bad. I screamed, or thought I did. No one came. It felt like forever on the raised platform, no coach, no trainer, no doctor while I writhed.
Eventually my coach realized I wasn't getting back up. They rushed to me. The trainer thought my knee was dislocated and he attempted to push it back in place. It wasn't dislocated though. My femur was broken - we didn't know that yet - and he was pushing bone against bone.
My dad joined me in the ambulance. I remember sobbing -- "What am I going to do now? I don't know how to do anything else. This is all I want to do."
He cried too. We assumed my career was over. He said: "You can do anything you want to do. You're smart and you can be anything you want to be. You're just getting started." He was right in so many ways.
But all I wanted then was to be a gymnast.
I was taken to the nearest hospital and rushed into surgery. It was a French speaking hospital and we didn't fully understand what anyone was telling us.
When I came out of surgery a doctor who spoke English told us "It was a broken femur. Not her knee." We cheered. We were all so happy. My coaches, my parents, me. Bones often heal better than joints.
I left Canada on crutches with a full leg cast. When I got home to Pennsylvania, my doctor changed the cast to a lighter one, with a hinge at the knee. And I went back to the gym. I started training right away.
8 months later, in June 1986, I walked into the arena in Indianapolis for USA Championships. No one thought I'd be there. Everyone thought I was done. Forever.
I knew I wasn't done. Not yet.
I won. I became the National Champion less than a year after breaking my femur on the world's stage.
Never give up. Never.
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Hypothetical: You’re the owner of an MLB team. I offer to take $0 salary and sign a minor league contract and go to Low A.
If the “he sucks now” crowd is right and I get lit up, you cut me, lose $0 and there’s no risk to the big league club.
If the “clubhouse cancer” crowd is right, you see it immediately at Low A and cut me. You lose $0 and there’s no risk to the big league club.
If there’s massive negative PR, which we already know there won’t be, you just cut me and move on. The story is dead in a couple days, you lose $0, and there’s no risk to the big league club.
But, assuming none of those things happen, which they obviously wouldn’t, if you like what you see, you can promote me to AA and re evaluate me there. Then AAA. Then the big leagues. If I earn it, which you’d be 100% in control of deciding. If you don’t think I’m good enough, you lose $0 and there’s no risk to the big league club.
You could take away my “antics”. You could take away my social media. You could ask anything of me. If I don’t comply, you cut me, lose $0, and there’s no risk to the big league club.
What logical reason is there to not do this? At worst, you cut me and there’s no risk to the big league club. At best, you get a Cy Young winner for $0 who you know can still pitch and could help the big league team if and when you see fit.
Regarding my @BenSasse RT just now, I will add: one thing that Mark Manson ("The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck") seems to have never quite figured out is that the true Christian simultaneously gives the most f*cks and the least f*cks of anyone on earth.
Absolutely. Olive branches that were ignored:
1) Not making a stink over the Ginsburg nomination despite a more damning paper trail than Bork.
2) Not making a stink over the Breyer nomination.
3) GW Bush agreeing to nominate a controversial Clinton appellate pick Republicans blocked in his first batch of nominations in 2001.
4) Bipsrtisan agreement to withdraw several Bush nominees instead of ending the filibuster (only for Dems to renege next presidency).
5) Not making a stink over the Sotomayor nomination.
6) Not making a stink over the Kagan nomination.
Let’s look at Dem escalations:
1) 1981-84: Even as Mondale was down by double digits in the polls, Dems refused to move on dozens of Reagan nominations just in case. The ABA is used as a partisan tool to smear several conservatives who become brilliant judges.
2) The unprecedented smear campaign to block Bork.
3) The unprecedented defamatory smear campaign to try to block Thomas.
4) Blocking numerous mainstream GHW Bush appellate nominees, including the moderate Roberts.
5) Trying to filibuster Alito (Obama voted for that filibuster).
6) Schumer—in 2007!—announces the Schumer Rule. GW Bush will not be allowed to fill a Supreme Court seat in the last two years of his second term when he doesn’t hold the Senate.
7) Breaking the bipartisan agreement to keep the filibuster for appellate nominees to fill seats Dems filibustered to hold open during Bush.
8) Trying to filibuster Gorsuch, and then slow-walking every nominee.
9) Defaming Kavanaugh with a blatantly false smear campaign.
10) Repeatedly threatening to pack the Court.
11) Slap on the wrist for an attempted assassination of a justice, after an unprecedented leak of a draft opinion, followed by slow-walking the dissent to increase the risk to the justices’ lives.
Basic game theory says it’s Democrats’ turn to offer an olive branch if they want to stop the tit-for-tat, but their current m.o. is more escalations.
POV: You just paid S&C, one of the three most expensive and high-powered law firms in the world, $3000 per hour to submit AI slop to the court on your behalf.
No one is safe.