In my world, one’s personal happiness experienced in life is the most important thing above all else. Our happiness is largely influenced by how much of our life we get to spend directly pursuing & fulfilling our personal desires. We have a limited amount of time in our lives to be alive. Current first world statistical averages suggest you might have 24 hours per day for around 80 years to be alive and be happy. Your time is your most basic resource to invest into your personal happiness while alive, so investing it shrewdly is key, if you want to live a very happy life.
However, the total timespan of our life does not directly translate into our time spent experiencing active personal happiness. Why is that? Well, one of the biggest reasons is that the majority of human beings do not retain the majority of their time in life as their own free time to choose what to do with it each day. It is practically very tough to be really happy if what you do with your time is no longer controlled by you. Let’s explore this notion by creating some pie charts…
Here are the primary categories we are going to use within our pie charts…
- Sleep: Duh!! Get your 8 hours, babe.
- School & Work: Time spent related to basic schooling, career education, work to earn a living, and any supporting tasks of this.
- Basic Maintenance: Time spent on tasks related to maintaining one’s physical body & basic resources in their life, such as eating, cleaning, medical, financial, etc.
- Free Time: Time unobligated to the other categories where you choose exactly what you want to do then & there.
Here is a pie chart of my general estimates of how the typical first world person lives their total life…
I don’t know about you, but all that gray is pretty depressing and makes me want to do what it takes to see more red (free time) in my own life experience. A typical life looks like Pac Man gobbling up one’s small amount of total life free time.
Now, let’s change the scenario and say you are a person who seeks enjoyment out of their school or work time. While it might not be pure free time, purposefully making choices within your school & work career can help increase the happiness you get out of them. Obviously, there is more potential for this in one’s work career, than school career, for the typical person. But, the point is that like how a dollar is a dollar, happiness is happiness. So happiness gained out of school or work is just as good as the same level of happiness gained out of pure free time. So enjoyment of one’s schooling & work to earn a living should effectively be counted the same as one’s free time. However, even if a typical person does a great job at getting some happiness out of their schooling & work, it is usually an intermittent thing that is often fundamentally hampered by the conditions & restrictions of school & work (schedules, deadlines, demands, environment, personalities, relationships, etc).
So here is the modified pie chart for the typical person, but who happens to really enjoy there school & work career…
That’s getting better, but what if a person had the potential to go beyond typical and actually live a life with notably more quality free time? How would that be feasible and how much more free time could one gain out of life to invest in their personal happiness?
The categories of sleep and basic maintenance are pretty much fixed, so we have to gain ground on this objective through the school & work category.
Why do we go to school and go to work in our lives? We largely go to primary & secondary school for basic personal development. And we largely go to postsecondary school (college/university/etc) to gain specialized knowledge & skill to apply towards our work careers. Finally, we largely go to work in order to earn money to then be able to buy goods & services to live our lives. The end goal is to earn enough money to create the life you want to experience in your free time.
That basic formula of basic education, career education, and work career isn’t going to change. So the only option is to strategically optimize it so that you end up spending less of your life to make the money you need/want in your human lifetime.
Nothing is guaranteed in life, especially high performance results, but if you did successfully optimize your school & work category of life, then here is my general estimate of what your life experience would be like…
Ahhh, that’s a much nicer pie of a life. 
A committed person has the potential to cut their school & work category in about half and convert that over to free time.
Precisely how one predictably pursues making the same amount or even more total money for their life with about half of the typical time dedicated school & work is beyond the scope of this post.
However, I’ll tell you that the answer is in the typical way that most all humans go about earning a living in their work careers. The fundamental limits of how most all people trade their hours for dollars is what creates a lifetime of work for most people, beyond school. Most people choose a trade of labor, such as being a teacher, plumber, doctor, manager, etc, and build a career of employment or self-employment at the standard range of salary level for that trade.
Upgrading your expertise & capability to more efficiently & effectively make enough money to fund a lifetime is how you strategically change the game in your favor here. To do this, you make your work about making money, compared to being a typical professional who’s career is primarily about excelling within a specific trade.
It takes real dedication to pursue this path, which is why most people will not seriously attempt it or succeed. They would rather get comfortable in a career doing something they like, compared to doing what’s effective for making money out in the marketplace of commerce.
To me, it is clearly worth the short-term sacrifice of a decade or two to excel at professional money making, compared to a lifetime of work within a standard career.
Ideally, one would enjoy the experience of professional money making, however, it’s worth it to me without the added enjoyment. But, if one is so lucky, then the most optimal experience is to excel at professional money making and enjoy a good chunk of the process.
Having this cherry on top would look like this…
Of course, the younger a person is, the more raw potential in time they’ll have to live an optimized life of these percentages, assuming a normal first world lifespan. If a person is already older in life and has not optimized their life in this way, then what’s done is already done, and the focus should just be on optimizing their actual future, instead of focusing on the lack of time used up. One can always start living more effectively and get better results than what they’re life will be otherwise.
Beyond this optimization of one’s school & work category of life, which is likely the only real concrete way to accomplish this level of free time right now, the future may likely bring the opportunity to hack human biology in the favor of our free time.
Imagine either not having to sleep at all or near as much. Imagine living healthy for several hundreds of years or more, versus less than one hundred. Imagine how you could effectively pursue so many more passions, talents, knowledge, achievements, relationships, unique experiences, and special personal desires, if you had multiple human lifetimes of today to do it with. Imagine a future life of almost 24/7 free time & pursuit of personal interests, desires, & happiness without an end in sight for a long long time.
You and I might never see this opportunity in our lifetimes, but we might. However, future technologies will likely give humanity the opportunity to make this real.
For now, enjoy & expand the amount of your free time, and purposefully convert as much of it as you can into more personal happiness for yourself.
