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You think in years. You should be counting in visits, dinners, and phone calls. When you do, the number is a lot smaller than you think.
Do the math with me for a second.
Say your parents are in their mid-sixties. You see them a couple of times a year, which is pretty normal if you don’t live in the same city. They might live to 85, which is optimistic but not crazy.
That’s 20 years. Sounds like a lot. But you don’t experience years with people. You experience visits. And the number of visits left is around 40.
Forty times. That’s what’s left. Forty more dinners, forty more conversations in the kitchen, forty more times you’ll be in the same room. If each visit lasts a few days, you might have 120 days left with your parents. Total.
When you put it that way, you’re not at the beginning of your time with them. You’re near the end. By the time you left for college or moved out, you’d already used up roughly 90% of your in-person hours with your parents. Everything since then has been the last 10%. And you’re deep into it.
Tim Urban wrote about this years ago and called it the tail end. I read it and it sat in my chest for days. Not because the idea is complicated. Because the math is simple and nobody does it.
