Aggregated Life

For most of us, life is long. It seems short. It always feels that yesterday we were 10 years younger. Or we reminisce when our kids were small and the memory burns in our mind as if it was a week ago instead of a decade ago.

Our memory shapes this idea that life is short. We cut out so much of the mundane and capture vivid details of those weeks of travel, or holidays, or special events. We don’t waste precious memory for the boring routines. We don’t recall how many times we followed some ingrained habit.

This leads us to have a biased perspective of life. We don’t see how much of it we lived but ignored. When I remember the four years of college, those seemed much longer than the past four years of work and raising a family. The four years of college contained so many new, exciting experiences.

When it comes to success and happiness, most people point to those life-shaking events, those defining moments. They don’t view their daily coffee break or their morning routine in the same vein. They minimize those because they are too mundane and ordinary.

We attribute our life to those events that move the needle. This is why we get stuck so often when we are discontent. We assume it is due to those events.

It leads us to set goals that result in immediate transformation. We want to wake up tomorrow with perfect health. Or we want to have all the money we need by the weekend. We want success and happiness to arrive in a flash.

To reach those ambitious goals, we assume we will use enormous effort. We will have unshakable willpower fueled by motivation. Nothing will stand in our way of reaching these near-impossible goals in the next 30 days.

But then, life gets in the way. By life, I mean the 99% of life that gets ignored. The daily habits and routines, the insignificant events and the mundane get the best of us.

It is normal. We look at life at a series of aggregated memories, those outstanding ones that stick out. We don’t think about the 200 times a year we overate at dinner. We don’t think about the 20 times we had an extra glass of wine in the past couple months. We don’t recall the 300 mornings a year that we slept longer than we wanted to and cut our workout short. We ignore the times we ate the donut at work even though we ate a normal breakfast before leaving the house.

It isn’t that those individual acts are bad by themselves. It is that they combine over and over again. They form the aggregated life we lived instead of the one we recall in memory. We don’t know how many times we actually ate an extra donut last year.

When it comes to the systems and habits approach to life, this is where we focus. We focus on the daily, mundane routines and habits that drive our life forward. It isn’t only with our health or money but with everything.

It creates a new meaning around life. We shift the norm. Instead of usually eating the donut, most of the time we skip the donut. It becomes habit. It is easier to skip it than eat it.

In Mastering Fear – A Navy SEAL’s Guide by Brandon Webb, the author looks at fear to make a change in this habitual manner. He says, “Because whether you dare to make the move, or shrink from making the move, either way, it so quickly and so easily becomes habitual. When you reach that jumping-off point, whether you knock on the door or you don’t, whether you call the number on the business card or you just let it sit in your glove compartment gathering dust, either way it has just become a part of how you operate. Over time, how you operate starts to become who you are. A habit of inaction or of nonaction, and before you know it, it adds up to a lifetime of exhilaration or disappointment, excellence or mediocrity, achievement or mere existence.”

It is the habits that direct our life, not the highlight reel. When we shift our focus on those small, aggregated aspects of life, we change the projection of our life. Life is long but feels short. That is because most of what we remember contains those outstanding events, not the daily routines. But learning to direct our attention towards those daily routines will change our life and allow us to reach those goals and dreams that we all hold so important.