Living On Borrowed Time Taught Him Every Day Truly Counts
The other day I had dinner with a Swiss man named OT.
He was around 60, an uncle-type figure with real wit in the way he responded to things.
A Stanford graduate, he’d worked as an IT crisis management specialist at places like Swiss banks.
These days, he serves on the board of a company that brokers business between Switzerland and the US.
He’d had a serious heart condition in the past.
He survived it, but even now only half his heart function works.
He describes himself as currently living on a “lease of life.”
He’s on borrowed time.
“So right now I’m 15 years old,” he said.
What he said next stuck with me.
“I changed dramatically. I learned that life isn’t long. So I don’t want to do things that aren’t fun, and I don’t want to waste time. I don’t want to spend time with people I dislike, and I don’t want to eat bad food.”
Here’s a slightly funny concrete example of what that looks like in practice.
OT’s hobby is golf.
Normally a round is played by four people, but of course it’s fine to play with just one or two others.
In that case, though, you sometimes get paired up with another one or two people.
Golf courses do this to keep rounds moving.
It happens everywhere, nothing unusual about it.
I’ve experienced it myself, and mostly you just keep playing peacefully and cheerfully.
(One friend of mine actually ended up getting married because of this, lol.)
But sometimes you get people with genuinely bad manners,
people who won’t stop talking to you when you’re trying to play seriously,
people who just don’t read the room.
What does OT do in that case?
“I go home at the third hole.”
He can’t stand having time he came to enjoy ruined by people like that.
OT also loves wine.
I couldn’t follow even 30% of his detailed commentary, but one thing stuck with me:
“I don’t drink anything rated below 90 points on the Parker scale.”
That’s the ranking given by Robert Parker, the famous American wine critic.
The ranking has nothing to do with price, which is apparently why it’s prized as “an extremely useful reference for ordinary people.”
It’s well-known enough to have its own Japanese Wikipedia page.
For health reasons, OT has also set a limit on how much wine he drinks in a day.
Once he set that limit, he started thinking: how many more bottles of wine can I drink before I die?
And from there: it’s a waste to try something you already know is bad.
Of course, there’s room to disagree here.
Someone whose first impression was terrible might become a lifelong friend, and something you thought you could trust might, in some rare exceptional case, miss the mark.
But he’s realized that life isn’t long enough, or leisurely enough, to postpone judgment out of concern for that “just in case,” or to take needlessly large risks weighing that possibility.
He learned this through an experience where he nearly died.
I’m young enough that it feels presumptuous to nod along too forcefully in front of an uncle with so much life experience behind him, but I understand what he means all the same.
Life is short.
The first time I felt this, a fairly mundane example, was when I read the news that the common-law husband of DREAMS COME TRUE’s vocalist had died at the same age as me.
http://matome.naver.jp/odai/2133229561467353501
By the time the illness was found, he apparently had three months left to live.
Someone my age, suddenly given three months to live.
And then, on top of that, one of my close friends was forced to confront the possibility of death firsthand.
It was acute leukemia.
She fought the illness and recovered, and now lives something close to a normal life.
But nothing has gone back to how it was before she got sick.
She had to give up the path she’d been on as a career bureaucrat, a University of Tokyo graduate.
Whether that turned out to be fortunate or unfortunate for her isn’t something anyone but her can decide.
But it’s certain that the plans she’d laid out needed revising, in ways large or small.
None of this is rare, and it happened right in front of me.
Anyone who could still think “this has nothing to do with me” would have to be out of their mind.
So: I might die tomorrow.
If that’s true, what should I do?
Should I stay up late finishing the manga I haven’t gotten through yet? Should I eat whatever I want since dieting is pointless anyway? Should I quit trying to stop smoking and go back to two packs a day?
That’s not what this is about.
Death is an absolute event that comes for everyone eventually.
Facing it with a purely in-the-moment attitude isn’t something to aspire to.
Among believers in Judaism, there was apparently a period when a way of thinking called Gnosticism spread, the idea that “since heaven exists, this present life doesn’t matter.”
That’s one of the bad things religion can produce.
There’s no way it doesn’t matter. We’re alive.
This idea was quickly rejected and corrected, but I imagine it spread against a backdrop of hardship, economic, climatic, health-related, and otherwise difficult social conditions.
Faith had been turned into an escape from reality.
Now, pulling this back toward everyday life: “I might die tomorrow” should be converted into “let’s make today the best it can be.”
I’ve heard of people who took on home renovations, for instance.
They wanted to spend their final days in a comfortable house.
I’ve heard of others who took up yoga.
They wanted to engage more fully with their own irreplaceable body.
It doesn’t need to be drastic, it doesn’t need to be like something out of a manga. Ordinary is fine.
Whether “life is limited, so I need to bet more” is the right conclusion to draw is a matter of personality, not a universal principle.
The idea that “as a member of capitalist society, one ought to contribute to economic development” is likewise just one direction rooted in a particular set of values, never a universal principle.
To put it in extreme terms: who decided development was a good thing in the first place?
What matters more is this:
Waking up clear-headed, feeling grateful for the start of the day, savoring the joy of work, eating good food, and at the end of the day being grateful for everything that happened.
The stance should be to build on this foundation, and eliminate whatever gets in its way.
Without this gratitude, there’s no meaning in being alive.
If you can’t wake up clear-headed, get your physical condition in order so you can sleep well.
If you feel depressed the moment you wake up thinking about what you have to do that day, rethink that daily life.
If work brings you no joy, find work that’s more worth doing.
Finish your work properly at the office, get home early, and sit down at the table with your family, so you can eat good food.
If, at the end of the day, you find yourself thinking “nothing good happened today,” you don’t have to keep living that way.
Starting tomorrow, change whatever you need to change so you can spend a more enjoyable day.
“Live today to the fullest” is neither an empty platitude nor an impossibly high bar.
It simply means: don’t do meaningless things, don’t spend time on things that aren’t enjoyable, don’t do things you already know you’ll regret, and properly cherish the things that matter, so that you can be grateful for each day.
And then actively work to improve things, rather than letting them drift on inertia. That’s all it is.
But said out loud like this, it’s still nothing more than a platitude.
When you actually try to put it into practice, all sorts of obstacles get tangled up in the way.
At times like that, two words usually come barging in: “money” and “the future.”
If I get fired, I’ll be in trouble financially.
If I don’t endure this now, I won’t be able to get ahead later.
It’s not fun, but it pays.
My body’s exhausted, but the overtime pay covers the loan.
And so on.
But everyone already knows what makes them happy, what’s meaningless, and what actually matters.
The only thing missing is the courage to decide.
That’s the moment to pull out this line:
“Well, I might die tomorrow anyway.”
And that’s all it takes.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2014/02/93/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.