I love math.  Always have.  And I’ve been blessed with some talents in math, usually smoking my classmates with good grades in the subject (not so much though in other subjects like Art and Writing, yet here we are!).   

Probably my favorite part about math is how you can use it to predict, explain, and learn about real things.  Important things that actually matter.

A forming moment happened to me during a high school physics class.  We were applying math to calculate how things like speed, height, and gravity affect objects.  That morning with some students eager to see what lesson was coming next and others buried in their hoodies and laying their head on the desk, our teacher placed a marble on a ramp and asked us to first calculate, and then place a cup, where we thought the marble would land after it went down the ramp skidded across the table, and fell to the floor.  When I heard the “plink” of the marble landing in the cup and realized that it had obeyed math (and would do so Every.Singe.Time I felt in my bones the power of math.  The math was matching!  I also knew my future career would have to include math (spoiler alert—I went on to be a mechanical engineer, although I would describe myself more as an E-mail engineer or a PowerPoint engineer nowadays!).

A way that I still use math, is to see what happens on the extreme ends of any calculation (in a way the worst or best case scenarios).  For example, in my professional career, we will look at worse case forces and which mechanism will break first when stressed to the max, or we’ll see what a manufacturing process is capable of producing when everything is operating at 100% efficiency.  A simpler example in my personal life is  a serving size of my favorite cookie dough ice cream which has 40 grams of carbs in it—here I’ll run the numbers and see how bad it would be if I ate the whole container (turns out pretty bad).  I also love to purchase cold brew coffee, but unfortunately it’s not cheap.  So I’ll run the numbers at the extreme and see how financially damaging it would be if I bought it every day, 7 days a week, for a month (turns out it’s not great, but honestly the amount doesn’t bug me as much as some of the other amounts in our various spending categories).  Or a more recent calculation—my wife is quite the runner but I am not, so what would happen if I walked the whole 10k race we just signed up for (turns out we should take separate cars to the race….).

Sticking with this concept of using math and the numbers at the extreme ends, I want to now analyze something that really matters: Eternity.  No doubt an illusive concept to wrap our heads around.  Now I’m not so concerned about figuring out how long eternity actually is, instead, I want to know what percentage of my “total life” will be lived on this earth (in the “temporal world”, the “here and now” if you will) versus the time I’ll spend in eternity.

For you fellow math lovers, grab your pencils!  For those who finished math in school and didn’t look back, feel free to just skim the next few lines and try not to throw up!  Here’s the formula:

Percentage of life lived on earth = (years lived on earth) ÷ (years lived on earth + years lived in eternity)

You math nerds already see the issue with this formula—“years lived in eternity” is not known.  At best it’s debatable.  So, like I indicated earlier, we’ll take this variable to the extremes to see if we can learn anything.

Case #1: assume eternity=0 years, essentially your life ceases to exist when you’re clinically pronounced dead (basically eternity doesn’t exist in this first case).  The equation goes as follows: years lived on this earth divided by years lived on earth plus length of eternity or p=w/(w+E).  Case one is easy to calculate, P=80/(80+0)==80/80=1 so 100% of your total life is lived on this earth.

Case #2: assume eternity=80,000 years.  As we keep assuming our lifespan here on earth is 80 years, 80,000 years would represent 1,000 different lifetimes.  1,000 different sets of parents raising you, graduating from high school a 1,000 times, meeting your new spouse 1,000 times, retiring from your job 1,000 times.  The list goes on but you get the point.  In this case the math goes P=80/(80+80,000)=80/80080=0.001 so 0.1% of your total life is lived on this earth.

In case anyone is still with me here after all that mathing (doubtful), what did we just learn?  Basically, if you think eternity doesn’t exist then you live all your life in the here and now but if you think eternity does exist, and you assume it’s a decently long time, then you really spend nothing but a tiny fraction of your total life here on earth and the rest is spent in the eternal (99.9%).

I’ll now share about two gentlemen that operated their lives quite differently based on their assumptions about how long eternity is.

The first guy is Bryan Johnson.  Bryan Johnson sold his successful company to PayPal for 800 million dollars and has since then been spending $2 million a year in order to figure out how not to die (in this temporal world that is).  He gets up at 5am, works out like Sonic the Hedgehog, and then eats dye-free rainbows and unicorns the rest of the day.  He even took transfusions of his son’s blood to try and extend his time here.  All this physical/mental/emotional energy is spent to extend life because if you assume eternity doesn’t exist then any gains in living longer makes a big difference in your “total life span”.  If Bryan figures out how to extend his life another 20 years on this planet then he just increased the total duration of his life by 25%, quite the increase!

The second guy is Jesus Christ.  Jesus seems to be more of a believer in thinking that eternity lasts forever.  Although he has more wealth than Bryan, he recklessly chose to be born in a wooden food trough, expose his body to the elements, not eat for 40 days, get badly beaten, and then willingly leave the temporal world on a wood cross at the ripe age of 33.  For Jesus, figuring out how to add 20 years of his life in the temporal world would not have moved the needle for him and he would still be at that 0.1% of life lived on earth.  Different from Bryan who took some of his son’s blood to his temporal world, Jesus tells us to drink his blood to live forever in the eternal world (the juxtaposition!).

What’s my mathematical take on all this?  Glad you asked.  If you’re in the first boat, the “Smoke ’em if you got ’em” boat, I would say go visit every wonder of the world.  If someone doesn’t make you happy, dump them.  Drive the fastest car and buy the biggest house (it’s the only house you’ll ever “live” in).  In short, comfort is king, experiences matters, and nothing is more important than your personal happiness in this temporal world.

If you’re in the second boat, thinking eternity is a huge number and the percentage of life lived on this planet is minuscule, then I I have questions for you.  Do you spend enough time thinking about the 99.9% of your life that won’t be spent on this earth?  What’s the purpose of your life now?  Do you know how to set yourself up for some good living in eternity?  Would anybody observing your daily life pick up on the fact that you know this temporal world isn’t all there is?  A quote from my favorite writer, who always makes me ponder, says it well here:

“If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.” -CS Lewis

If you want ”eternal life” you have to “get close” to it.  And that’s why we’re here, that’s why I’m writing you now after 42 years of my life.  And so that’s what you’ll get from me, writing that makes you think about the eternal.  And also writings about personal finance because I believe strongly we need to clear up headspace to think about the eternal and we all know finances seem to take up a lot of our headspace.

Apologize for the math!