What if you only had 2 years to live?

I believe 2 years is the best heuristic for asking: "If I knew I only had 2 years to live, would I make the same decisions about life I'm making now?"

It's wrong to live as if we were going to die today or tomorrow. It's too short-term.

• We may antagonize people because of a lack of consequences
• We may eat anything not caring about our health
• We may even do something illegal

It's also wrong to live as if we would live forever. It's too long-term.

• We'd wait to start saving money "later"
• We'd think there will always be time to get out of our current unfulfilling job or difficult boss
• We'd stay in our current dysfunctional relationship or with someone we don't love instead of finding the right person

While humans get a bad rep for thinking short term collectively, I think when it comes to how we live, we have the opposite problem:

We procrastinate decisions by assuming we will always have time for them later.

How I decided on what I wanted to do

I remember precisely when I realized 2 years left to live was a good heuristic for making life decisions.

I was walking with my wife in our neighborhood, a part of our evening routine back then. We chatted for 10 minutes about household chores, but now we were in silence, preoccupied by our thoughts.

I reflected on how I balanced short and long-term decisions in life. When should I change jobs? When should I learn the piano? When should I travel to Japan?

Those were all things I wanted to do at some point. The hard question to answer was when to do it.

I thought about how I'd live if I knew I only had a few months to live, say 3 months. Suddenly, my decisions would have a shorter-term bend: Maybe I'd eat less healthy or leave my job and live off my savings.

Then I thought about how I'd live if I had 1 year to live. Some decisions were longer term now. I could take on a less demanding job but not stop working entirely. I would save less than now, but I wouldn't splurge.

Finally, I thought how I'd live if I knew I had 2 years to live. I couldn't wait forever to do what I wanted, like learning the piano or traveling to Europe, but I also couldn't throw caution to the wind.

Thinking about more than 2 years didn't help much: 3 years, 5 years, 10 years just made me postpone things.

Making decisions as if I only had 2 years to live helped me strike a good balance between enjoying the journey and the destination.

We wrongly think we'll live until our 80s

We procrastinate decisions because we think we'll live into our 80s — hopefully more.

We never think we'll die in our 50s, 40s, or even 30s.

But many of us do die in our 50s, 40s and 30s.

Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks is a time management book that puts mortality front and center. With a "Time Management for Mortals" subtitle, it resonated with many people by highlighting the brevity of life.

Here are the opening quotes where Oliver highlights the brevity of living "only" 4,000 weeks, roughly until we're 77.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. [..] we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. [..] When I first made the four-thousand-weeks calculation, I felt queasy;

Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks (p. 4). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Honestly, the book 4,000 weeks never resonated with me.

Even without my 2 years heuristic, I didn't think 80 years was a short time to live. Seneca, whom he quotes later in the introduction, didn't think so either.

It's challenging for me to think about the magnitude of 80 years: a virtually endless lump of time.

And because we humans are terrible about predicting the future, we act as if we had an unlimited amount of time, and that things in the future will be just like things are now.

Daniel Gilbert talks about this in the book Stumbling on Happiness, naming "Presentism" the human tendency to erroneously think the future will be like the present.

More simply said, most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today, and we find it particularly difficult to imagine that we will ever think, want or feel differently than we do now.

Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness (p. 127). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Even if we knew we would live into our 80s, which we don't, believing it makes us complacent.

It's an inferior heuristic for making good life decisions.

Living as if you knew you would die "soon"

I like exploring whether and how people I admire changed their behaviors when faced with a death sentence.

In the book "When Breath Becomes Air," Paul Kalanithi poetically describes his life through his lung cancer diagnosis. Here's his report on his decision to go back to being a brain surgeon:

That morning, I made a decision: I would push myself to return to the OR. Why? Because I could. Because that’s who I was. Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air (p. 149). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In the book "Misbehaving," behavioral economics giant Richard Thaler pays tribute to his mentor Amos Tversky by telling us how Amos wanted to spend his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis:

Mostly Amos wanted to do the things he loved: working, spending time with his family, and watching basketball. [..] I went to see him about six weeks before he died, under the thin disguise of finishing a paper we had been working on. We spent some time on that paper and then watched a NBA playoff game.

Thaler, Richard H.. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

What's powerful about these anecdotes is that when faced with their mortality, both men boldly decided they were already living as they intended.

Change something and find meaning

Steve Jobs has a famous commencement speech for the Stanford class of 2005 in which he talks about, among other things, his heuristic for changing how he lives by thinking about his mortality:

If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech of 2005

While we'll never know what he meant by "too many days in a row," we know it's not a lot of time.

His advice: "Change something."

There's a reason we procrastinate all those big life decisions, such as leaving a bad friendship, relationship or job: they're hard.

Steve Jobs hurried to have Walter Isaacson write his biography once his cancer recurred in 2008, something he thought he'd have time for "later" – until he learned that he didn't.

In his biography, we learn that Jobs spent his last 2 years, from 2009 to 2011, not very differently from how he spent the rest of his life.

From the outside, I may think he shouldn't have wanted to spend the rest of his life calling journalists to spike stories about his ill health to protect Apple. That would tell me change is hard.

But Jobs was working to make Apple a lasting company that would signify his legacy.

So, another way to ensure you're living as you should is to find meaning and ask whether you're pursuing that meaning today.

And if you haven't found a meaning in life to pursue, or you're not on the path of making an impact in it over the next couple of years, follow Steve's advice:

Change something.